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So for weeks and months and years, people write to their legislators, and lobbyists make massive campaign contributions to try to swing the votes. And there are stories on the TV and editorials in the newspapers. And people talk about it, and then they ignore it. Then they talk about it some more. And then there are votes, and there are compromises and more votes. And finally, the president signs the bill into law. And when he does it, there are special pens that he uses. It's the pens that I want to talk about. He uses more than one, then he gives the pens away. And people save these pens for years. Pens. They didn't do anything. You know what I'm talking about here? The pen that Lyndon Johnson used to sign the Voting Rights Act-- that pen did not give anybody the right to vote. It took the entire political machinery of a huge country to do that. But, OK. Let's say that you end up with one of these pens. I'm guessing that, from time to time, what you do is that you take out the pen and you stare at it, and you think a thought that goes along the lines of-- this pen was right there. This pen has done something more important than I will ever do, which is, of course, a distressing thought because, after all, it is just a pen, and you are a human being. But put that aside. It's just uncanny. I think that's the word. It's uncanny when something so small, for a moment, for the length of time that it takes to sign a name, can carry the entire weight of history of a nation. Today's radio program is about something small like that that was at the epicenter of a massive social change in our country for a brief moment. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, we are devoting our entire show to this one killer story about something very small, something small that helped change something very, very large. It's a story of doctors, of science, of homosexuals, of lucky coincidence and political action, and of the sheer power of good old-fashioned face-to-face schmoozing. Alix Spiegel tells the story. This is the story of a definition, three single sentences composed of 81 words. It's the story of how this particular definition became another definition, nine sentences, composed of 237 words. Now according to some parties, this change from 81 words to 237 words liberated an entire category of humanity. According to other parties, it undermined the basic family unit, compromised the scientific authority of psychiatry, and quote, "tampered with the basic code and concept of life." Now, I should tell you that I know this story not because I read it in a book or learned it in any class, but because it's one of those stories that my family uses to explain itself. Like most family stories-- anyway, like most stories told in my family-- the version I heard growing up was an exaggeration, the relevant family member cast as a conquering hero. The actual story, the story I hope to tell you is, of course, much more complicated. But I'm getting ahead of myself. June 23rd, 1980, at the home of the seagulls in Woodstock, New York. My grandfather, John P. Spiegel, used to say that he was a fish. It's true. Most of my memories of him are memories of a body floating face down in the water, slack, communing with his brothers and sisters of the sea. He was a strange man-- a doctor of psychiatry who spent months in the desert studying exotic tribes, smoking their drugs, sleeping under the stars, living, he said, like a native. This tape, the tape that you hear running under my voice, was recorded for my cousin Zoe's 12th birthday. She'd gotten a tape recorder as a present and had asked my grandfather if she could interview him. Zoe was a smart kid, but still only a graduate of the seventh grade, and so my grandfather politely declined. He decided there was only one person present with the intelligence and experience necessary to interview Dr. John P. Siegel. That person? Dr. John P. Siegel. All right, Grandpa, would you mind telling us what you're doing here? All right, John, I'll tell you. I'm here to help celebrate Zoe's 12th birthday. True, her birthday was on Thursday, but I wasn't able to be here on Thursday, so I came on Friday. And I've been here all weekend, and we're having a marvelous time. My grandfather interrogates himself about the difficulty of travel from Boston to upstate New York and the movie the family saw the night before, Urban Cowboy, which included an actor that my grandfather refers to as John Revolta. Then he moves on to other topics of potential interest to posterity. And what are your plans from here on out, grandpa? Well, John, I'm going to go to Ireland. I've been asked to testify in a trial being conducted by a gay activist who happens to be a professor of English at Trinity College and who is bringing a suit against the state of Ireland to change the constitution, which has several extremely repressive provisions forbidding, and condemning, and devaluing homosexuality. And I've been asked to testify as an expert in mental health. My grandfather was a psychiatrist, but not in any sense an expert on what was then called sexual deviance. Still, he was asked to testify about the mental health of homosexuals and the mental health effects of discrimination against homosexuals in Ireland, in Texas, in Maine, in front of Congress, and too many places to mention. He was asked because, in 1973, he happened to be president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association when the organization decided that homosexuality was not a mental disease. Up until that time, psychiatrists had always thought of homosexuality as a pathology-- a problem so profound it affected, as one psychiatrist told me, the total personality. Now, because psychiatrists believed that homosexuals were pathological, it gave scientific sanction for the rest of the country to see it the same way. Gays were routinely fired from teaching jobs, denied security clearances and US citizenship. For that matter, they were barred from practicing psychiatry, because you don't let someone who's pathological practice medicine on other people who are pathological. Or anyway, that's what the psychiatrists thought. That's what it said in the bible of their profession, what the psychiatrists called the DSM, or the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, a book which listed in clear, clinical language every possible permutation of psychosis, every variant of paranoia, every deviant mental tick that the children of Freud had ever encountered, all nicely bound together under an industrial yellow cover with an authoritative OED staid font. There it was, diagnosis number 302.0, 3 sentences, composed of 81 words, which certified homosexuality as sick. Do you look forward, Grandpa, to this engagement that you're going to have in Ireland? Well, John, I have mixed feelings about it. It's going to be fun to spend a few days in Dublin. But it's also kind of anxiety-making because the trial is going to be held in the high court, and I'm going to be cross-examined, which I don't particularly look forward to. If you have anxiety about doing it, Grandpa, then how come you're going? Well, you see, John, it isn't so often that a person has an opportunity to help to change the constitution of an entire nation. To hear my family tell it, it was my grandfather alone who banished those 81 words from the DSM. When I was young, the family legend was that my grandfather, president of the American Psychiatric Association, single-handedly changed the DSM because he was a big hearted visionary, a man unfettered by prejudice who worked on behalf of the downtrodden. This story was wrong on two counts. A, my grandfather was not president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1973-- he was president-elect. B, he didn't single-handedly change anything. But never mind, because this version of events was discarded, anyway-- discarded after the family went on vacation to the Bahamas to celebrate my grandfather's 70th birthday. I remember it well, remember the plane, and the drive from the airport, and arriving and discovering that the hotel had a swimming pool installed about 50 feet away from the beach. I remember thinking that a pool so close to the water was both ridiculously decadent and somehow incredibly exciting. I also remember my grandfather stepping out of his beachfront bungalow on that first day, followed by a small, well-built man, a man that later, during dinner, my grandfather introduced to a shocked family as his lover, David. David was the first of a long line of very young men that my grandfather took up with after my grandmother's death. It turned out that my grandfather had had gay lovers throughout his life, had even told his wife-to-be that he was homosexual two weeks before their wedding. And so, in 1981, the story that my family told about the definition in the DSM changed dramatically. My grandfather was no longer seen as a purely enlightened visionary, but as a closeted homosexual with a very particular agenda. In actual fact, this version of the story also bears only a passing resemblance to the truth. The real story is, as I said, much more complicated. And though it ends in the same place as my family's version, with a world in which it's just a little bit easier for men like my grandfather to come out to their families and friends before they're, say, 70 years old, it's a story in which my grandfather really plays a pretty minor role. Well, Grandpa, why don't you tell us a little bit about the past? Now, John, you know that that's an extremely broad area. As an expert interviewer, you should know better than to ask me a question like that. Would you mind making it more specific? You're right, Grandpa. That was a very pertinent observation. Why don't you begin talking about your past and pick up-- Let's begin with a little background so the full meaning of what transpired can be properly understood. Throughout the '40s, '50s, and early '60s, the American Psychiatric Association was a very conservative place, an organization run by what were described to me by a former APA president as businessmen psychiatrists-- well-meaning, gray-haired, '50s-style professionals. Now, when the '60s arrived, these men weren't particularly interested in weighing in on the issues of the day-- on Kent State, or civil rights, Vietnam. Then a relatively small group of homosexual activists started making noise about their designation in the DSM. Specifically, the activists rejected the idea that they needed to be cured of their desire. They said that they only needed the stigma of insanity to be removed from homosexuality so that they could get jobs teaching children or practicing psychiatry-- basically, so that they could finally achieve equal rights. Now at the time, these protests didn't make much of an impression on the doctors at the APA. They saw themselves as scientists. And scientifically, there was near universal agreement that homosexuals were at least one donut short of a dozen. I spoke to 10 different psychiatrists who were members of the APA during the time of the redefinition, and I began each of my interviews with the same question-- what percentage of the APA believed that homosexuality was pathology in 1970 when this story begins? Oh, well over 90%. In 1970? Oh, I think so. Sure. 95. 98. 99, even the ones of us who were gay. This is John Fryer. John lives in Pennsylvania now in an aging Philadelphia mansion with two enormous dogs and rooms filled with elaborately scrolled furniture. This house is a very great distance, both psychologically and physically, from the Kentucky farm where John grew up. John graduated from his Kentucky high school when he was only 15 years old. And by 19, he'd been accepted to Vanderbilt University Medical School. He was one of the youngest students to be trained in psychiatry in the school's history. He was also a homosexual. Now, technically, it was forbidden for homosexuals to practice psychiatry, and John knew that. He had, after all, read the literature. He'd seen the research. And he had certainly sat through the lectures. So from the very beginning, I learned that it was pathology. And it was very difficult to get over that. Difficult to get over, even years later, after he became a practicing psychiatrist. Difficult to get over, even after he joined the APA and met a number of other gay psychiatrists. So many, in fact, that informally they began to meet each year during APA conventions-- a loose underground group which they jokingly titled the GAYPA. These were men who, like John, had made it through medical school without detection and continued to hide their sexual preference, except to one another. These were men who, despite their association with the GAYPA, never thought to question, even among themselves, traditional psychiatric ideas about homosexuality. No way. No way? Didn't come up, to my knowledge, because of our own internalized homophobia. Most of us probably agreed that it was OK to be a disease. The idea that homosexuality was a form of insanity began in the 19th century. And at least at the time, its designation as a mental illness was actually seen by homosexuals as a step forward. For the previous 2000 or so years, the Christian world saw being gay as a crime against the will of God. The book of Leviticus declares, "If a man lies with another man, as he would a woman, both have committed an abomination. They shall be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them." Then along came the head doctors and suddenly it wasn't the homosexual's fault. He was just another victim of faulty wiring, or possibly an overbearing mother. The shrinks weren't sure exactly what the problem was, but there was research-- a whole bunch of research-- from Freud on down. But by the late '60s when the status of homosexuals became an issue of public debate, the field was really dominated by two New York psychoanalysts. The first was a man named Charles Socarides. I'll talk about him later. The second was Dr. Irving Bieber, an analyst in New York who, at least originally, had no interest in the problem of homosexuality. Only became interested after he went to work as a psychiatrist in the Second World War. Irving Bieber is now deceased, but his wife, Dr. Toby Bieber, agreed to talk to me. They would arrest homosexuals in the army. This was in India and in Egypt where he was in the CBI theater. They would arrest them and discharge them dishonorably. And the others would be hospitalized, something like that. So he got interested in the problem because he would be the psychiatrist who would examine these people. Toby Bieber says that during the war her husband defended homosexuals-- protested whenever a gay soldier was arrested or discharged, arguing he deserved treatment, not dishonor. He got into trouble-- actually, a bit-- in the army. My husband went in as a captain, and he came out after four years-- he was in the Army for four years-- he came out as a captain. And he wasn't promoted, largely because of his defense of homosexuals in the army. So he saw himself as somebody who was helping homosexuals. No question about it. After the war, Dr. Bieber returned to the States and began research into the homosexual question in earnest. He assembled a crew of psychiatrists and undertook the single largest survey of homosexual behavior ever attempted. The project involved 77 doctors who contributed information on over 100 gay men and concluded that the cause of homosexuality was a combination of what they termed close-binding mothers, which is overprotective women who made their children weak and feminine, and detached, rejecting fathers. The work was published in 1962 and immediately attracted the attention of the psychiatric world. It received the Hofheimer Award for original work. It also attracted the attention of another very different group of people-- homosexual activists. A handful of homosexual organizations had begun in the early '50s and had grown slowly, both learning from and, in some ways, shadowing the progress of the civil rights and feminist movements. From its earliest days, one of the main goals of the gay groups, alongside civil rights, which was really number one, was removal from the DSM. So naturally, Bieber's study, which billed itself as definitive proof that homosexuality was a pathology, kind of rubbed them the wrong way. In 1970, the American Psychiatric Association made the mistake of holding its annual convention in San Francisco, which then, as now, had a large gay community. And the gay activists decided to protest. Irving Bieber was their very first target. The Washington Post, May 14th, 1970-- The gay liberation and the women allies out-shrinked the head shrinkers today and took over an American Psychiatric Association session on sex. Before the morning was over, the 500 psychiatrists who gathered to hear scientific studies on sexual problems demonstrated that they're just as prone to anti-social behavior as anyone else. "This lack of discipline is disgusting," said Dr. Leo Alexander, a psychiatrist at the meeting. Then he diagnosed the problem of one of the lesbian protesters. "She's a paranoid fool," the doctor said, "and a stupid bitch." As I recall, there were evidently closeted gay and lesbian people who were inside the APA who kind of wanted something to happen. And I think they just passed along information to us. And somebody got us press passes, I guess, so that we could get through the front door. This is Gary Allender, one of the gay activists who infiltrated the APA convention. He says that while one group of activists stormed a session on behavioral therapy, another combed the halls, looking for Bieber. They found him at a panel on transsexuals and homosexuality. Bieber, who was sitting in the front of the room, had just settled in for a nice long chat about close-binding mothers when, according to his wife, Toby, there was a loud noise from outside the auditorium. And a group came storming in, dressed rather fantastically with feathers in their hats, as though they were going to attend some costume ball, making noise and broke up the meeting. They broke it up. We were not polite. We were not quiet. We were not asking for favors. We were just trying to delegitimize their authority. And we felt that they were oppressing us. And here was finally a chance to talk back to them. The protesters yelled at the psychiatrists. They called them sadists. They called them oppressors. But the protesters had an entirely different word for Irving Bieber, a word which, in the accounts that circulated after the event, got a disproportionate amount of attention. To the protesters, Dr. Bieber was not just your run of the mill sadist oppressor. No, sir. Irving Bieber was a mother [BLEEP]. This is not how you conduct a discourse, if you want to disagree with the people. Certainly, Darwin wasn't-- not that I'm comparing my husband to Darwin. But his work wasn't accepted either, but nobody called him a mother [BLEEP]. By all accounts, this episode greatly disturbed and hurt Irving Bieber. Like most psychiatrists at the APA, he saw himself as someone who was helping, someone who had devoted his life to helping. All of us did. All of us felt the same way. Which was how? It was dismal to be accused of something that you're innocent of. This is Charles Socarides. Like Bieber, Socarides was one of the most lauded psychoanalysts in the profession-- a man who claims to have treated over 75 homosexuals in analysis and consulted with literally 1,000 more. Invariably, the goal of therapy with Socarides was to cure homosexual desire, to transform the patient into a heterosexual through analysis. At the time, this was common practice. There were all kinds of methods, from traditional talking treatment, to hormonal enhancement, to aversion therapy where patients were attached to electric shock machines, given gay pornography, and zapped if they demonstrated any kind of arousal. Needless to say, the gay activists considered this treatment, even this goal, barbaric and sadistic-- an accusation which simply didn't make sense to Socarides. We only treat people who come to us, seek our help, and beg for our help. And we treat them with dignity, and with tact, and with loyalty, the same way we'd treat any other patient. So in the first place, to say, you are harming the homosexual was untrue. They even brought up that there are more suicides of people in treatment. That's not true. But it wasn't just Socarides and Bieber who were uncomfortable with the accusations and demands of the gay activists. Most of the closeted psychiatrists of the GAYPA, like John Fryer, the gay psychiatrist you heard from earlier, were also disturbed. I frankly, at the beginning, remember the sense that I was embarrassed by it and that I wished they'd shut up. None of us were there. None of the GAYPA were? No. And I would say that all of us avoided that whole thing. It's not that they wanted to be seen as sick, it's just that they knew their colleagues-- or, anyway, they thought they knew their colleagues-- and believed that the psychiatrists of the APA would never change the definition. Most of us didn't think this would happen. Didn't think what would happen? That the nomenclature would be changed. Right. And I thought that it was just a fool's errand. What John didn't fully appreciate was that there were forces at work, forces at work deep inside the APA. They met at our house. And that's how I came to know them and to know what they were trying to achieve. This is Adam Spiegel, better known to this reporter, at least, as Dad. Adam Spiegel / Dad grew up with John P. Spiegel / Grandpa in a boxy Victorian off Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By the early 70s, Dad had moved out of this house to his own house in Baltimore, Maryland. But he still came back regularly for holidays. And often during these visits, he would find gathered around the kitchen table of his childhood home a group of men that my Aunt Mamie dubbed the "Young Turks." The Young Turks were all psychiatrists, all members of the APA, and all liberal-minded Easterners who had decided to reform the American Psychiatric Association from the inside. Specifically, they had decided to replace all the gray-haired conservatives who ran the organization with a new breed of psychiatrist, more sensitive to the social issues of the day, with liberal opinions on Kent State, Vietnam, feminism. They figured that once they got this new breed into office, they could fundamentally transform American psychiatry. And one of the things this group was keen to transform was American psychiatry's approach to homosexuality. And so they gathered around my grandfather's kitchen table, over the delicate graven flowers of my grandmother's china, they'd discuss offenses and defenses-- map strategy. The meetings, I thought, were all in great, good spirits. They all sat around rollicking with laughter about what they were planning to do. And they were serious, but they were also able to take a look at themselves. And it was just a small kind of cohort group that seized the moment to put across a huge-- what? Something on the 18,000 American shrinks of the APA. As active members in an APA subcommittee, called the Committee for Concerned Psychiatry, the Young Turks proposed candidates for office, politicked for internal change. Now, I should point out that the group that gathered around my grandfather's kitchen table, and really around kitchen tables all over the East Coast, was not by any stretch of the imagination a homosexual cabal. But several of the key players were gay-- people like Dr. Larry Hartmann, who was a founding member of the Committee for Concerned Psychiatry, and later, like my grandfather, became president of the APA. Of course, none of these men were out at the time. They weren't even members of the GAYPA. They were too buried-- buried even to friends and family. Adam Spiegel. It was not clear to me. In fact, when I learned that Larry was gay, I almost fell out of my chair because he was so not gay in his affect-- impossible to discern. Although the gay activists who were protesting the APA from the outside didn't know it, it was this group of men, these Young Turks and their allies, who laid the groundwork for the change in the DSM. Without moving liberal-minded psychiatrists into positions of power in the APA, without changing the organization's internal infrastructure, there would have been an immediate veto of any attempt to change those extremely troublesome 81 words. Coming up, the scientific evidence that homosexuals might not be sick and how a party in a Hawaiian bar can change everything. Alix Spiegel's story continues in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, we're devoting our whole program to the story of how and why the American Psychiatric Association decided, in 1973, that homosexuality is not a disease. This weekend in December is the 45th anniversary of that milestone. Today's program was first broadcast back when way more of the people involved in this story were still alive, back in 2002. Alix Spiegel continues her story. While the Young Turks worked from the inside, the gay activists continued their assault from the outside. They showed up at the American Psychiatric Association convention again in 1971, broke into the auditorium through a stage door during the opening ceremony, and stormed the podium. But it wasn't until the next year, at the '72 convention, that the gay activists hit upon a piece of political theater so outlandish that it actually managed to shake the dinosaurs at the APA. The spectacle was organized by Barbara Gittings, a librarian turned lesbian activist, who decided that it was time for the psychiatrists to hear from one of their own-- to hear from someone like John Fryer. I got a call from Barbara Gittings about November of '71. She said, John, I'm looking for a psychiatrist to come and testify, a gay psychiatrist, to testify what it is like to be a good psychiatrist. The call from Barbara Gittings came at a particularly awkward moment in the life of John Fryer. He had recently been dismissed from his position as a resident in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania because his boss suspected he was gay. He was fired from another hospital in Philadelphia for the same reason. John had applied for other positions and professorships at a variety of universities, but the rumors of his sexual preference followed him, and so he was turned away. More than anything, John wanted to teach. And he definitely didn't want to do anything that might jeopardize his ability to get a faculty position. My first reaction was, no way. But she planted in my mind the possibility that I could do something and that I could do something that would be helpful, without ruining my career. John told Barbara to find someone else. But four months later, Barbara called back. She had tried, she said, to find another gay psychiatrist, but no one would take the chance. And so, Barbara Gittings offered John Fryer a compromise. They-- she and John-- would create an alternate personality, a disguise so fantastical that John's own mother wouldn't know him if he sat in her lap. They would call this creation Dr. Anonymous. And as Dr. Anonymous, John would address the members of the APA at the '72 convention in Dallas. He would be given a hotel room to change in and a microphone to disguise his voice. All his expenses would be paid for. John told Barbara he would do it, then he called a friend. My friend, who was in drama, and I talked about what would be the most effective disguise. And you may or may not know this, but if you wear clothes that are much too large for you, you look much smaller than you are. So we made arrangements to rent a large and very flamboyant tuxedo. We then decided that the best way to do my head was an over the head rubber mask. It was a Nixon mask that we distorted, so that you couldn't even see it was Nixon. And so, in May of 1972, standing on stage in front of an audience of his peers in a wig, a Nixon mask, and a multicolored tuxedo three times his size, John Fryer made his case against 81 words. He explained to his fellow psychiatrists how these words had harmed him and others like him. As he did this, he glanced occasionally at a man sitting just a few feet away from him in the front row. It was the man who had fired John from his hospital position several years before. I received a standing ovation. And I felt-- I felt very empowered at that moment. It was around this time, fall of 1972, that the Young Turks saw the first fruits of their labor. One of their candidates for office, a man named Alfred Freedman, was elected president of the APA. My grandfather, John Spiegel, was installed on the board of trustees. And another man, Judd Marmor, one of my grandfather's best friends and an outspoken critic of the idea that homosexuality should be categorized as a disease, was selected as vice president. This turn of events was naturally distressing to the opponents of the change, Irving Bieber and his friend, Dr. Charles Socarides. I know. I talked to the outgoing president at the time. He shook his head. He said, I don't know what's going to happen now. They've got gays galore. They're running for office. One of them may be president. Suddenly, Bieber and Socarides found themselves in a position that, just two years before, they could not have conjured in their most outlandish nightmares. They were becoming professional renegades. And the work that established their reputations was under fire. Again, Charles Socarides. Papers that we wanted to give at various places, it was suddenly said, well, we don't think that would be a good thing to do right now in the current environment and the atmosphere. It wasn't just professional rejection. Personally, Bieber and Socarides had become targets. Angry gay activists followed them around, protesting every paper. There were threatening phone calls late at night and obscene messages scratched into the paint of department bathroom stalls. All kinds of things-- that you're killing the gay men, that you're persecuting us, you ought to be dead. I mean, things like that-- all kinds of death threats. I went to Kansas City one day, Topeka. And one of my friends said I have a gift for you. And so he gave me a package. It was a gun. He says, Charles-- he says, you're really going to have to defend yourself. Of course, I never used it, but you felt like carrying it around as people followed you to a meeting and raising terrible threat calls. Socarides never took the professional criticism of his work seriously. A true believer in the psychoanalytic method, Socarides felt his research was sound and that he was, as he told me, doing God's work. My views were the most solid clinical and theoretical studies on homosexuality, describing its origin, its course, its therapy, its symptoms. Most of the guys had never seen a homosexual. They'd never dealt with his unconscious material, or his dream material, or his transference. They don't know what goes on in the mind of a homosexual. All they see is the homosexual, who appears quite normal. But underneath, they don't know the dynamics and the meaning of his inability to approach a woman-- the pathology behind it. Now, we need to take a moment to talk about the science. As I've said, for most of its history, psychiatry took for granted the idea that homosexuality was a pathology-- a grave distortion of normal development which demanded some kind of explanation. The question that concerned the psychiatrists then was what exactly had gone wrong with these people? Was it the mother? Was it the father? Was it frustration in the Oedipal phase? Or simply an excessive preoccupation with one's own genitalia? A lot of very intelligent men with years of university education and walls full of calligraphy certificates spent countless hours trying to pin down exactly who or what was to blame, which was pretty much the state of affairs until Evelyn Hooker met Sam Fromm. Evelyn was a psychologist at UCLA, and Sam was her student. He's also a homosexual. They started spending time together in the mid-40s. And Sam introduced everyone to his group of friends, most of whom, like Sam, are gay. Now, as I said, everyone in this particular group was homosexual, but curiously, none in the group was in therapy. They were all very well-adjusted young men who utterly failed to conform to the traditional psychiatric image of the tortured, disturbed homosexual. This naturally got Evelyn thinking. Now, prior to Evelyn Hooker, all of the research in homosexuality-- all of it-- was done on people who were already under serious psychiatric treatment. Let me repeat that. In the history of psychiatric research, no one had ever conducted a study on a homosexual population that wasn't either in therapy, or prison, a mental hospital, or the disciplinary barracks of the armed services. Evelyn thought about this and decided that this kind of research was distorting psychiatry's conclusions about homosexual populations. To test her theory, Evelyn came up with an experiment. Through her former student, she located 30 homosexuals who had never sought therapy in their lives and matched those homosexuals with a group of heterosexuals of comparable age, IQ, and education. Evelyn then put both groups through a battery of psychological tests, including a Rorschach test-- the famous inkblot test. After disguising her subjects, Evelyn gave the results to three experienced psychiatrists and asked them to identify the homosexuals. She figured that if homosexuals were inherently pathological, the psychiatrists would be able to pick them out easily. But the judges were completely unable to distinguish the homos from the hets. Equally important was the fact that the judges categorized 2/3 of both the homosexuals and the heterosexuals as perfectly well-adjusted, normally functioning human beings. Hooker's study challenged the idea that homosexuality was a pathology in the first place. And in doing this, it not only called into question an entire generation of research on homosexuality, it also challenged psychiatry's basic concept of disease. If you believed Hooker's data, then the only conclusion you could come to was that psychiatry was declaring certain behaviors were diseases not out of any sort of scientific proof, but based on their own prejudices. This was something that psychiatrists had been accused of before, most famously by a psychoanalyst named Thomas Szasz, who argued in the 1950s and '60s that certain dangerous psychiatric treatments, like electroshock therapy, were prescribed with no scientific basis and that psychiatrists were essentially in the business of enforcing social norms. But Szasz didn't provide the gay activists any hard data to use in their fight with the psychiatrists. Aside from Hooker, the most useful scientific studies supporting their side was Alfred Kinsey's famous 1948 sex survey, which found that a whopping 37% of all men had had physical contact to the point of orgasm with other men, a finding which, besides shocking the hell out of 63% of the American public, seemed to suggest that homosexual acts were too common to be considered a disease. In spite of all this work, psychiatry continued to maintain that the homos were sick and steadfastly refused to re-evaluate the DSM. And then luck, or maybe fate, intervened, intervened in the form of a chance meeting between a gay activist on the outside and an open-minded insider. That open-minded insider? Dr. Robert L. Spitzer. My view was no different, I think, from the standard view. I totally accepted it. Totally accepted what? The idea that homosexuality was an illness. In the fall of 1972, Robert Spitzer was only loosely aware of the controversy. He knew about the protests, he knew about Dr. Anonymous, of course, Socarides and Bieber, but he hadn't really taken a professional interest in the issue. At the time, Robert Spitzer was a relatively young, but very ambitious man, and most importantly, at least to this story, a junior member of the APA's Committee on Nomenclature. For those of you who didn't spend four years in medical school, the Committee on Nomenclature is the group which decides which mental disorders will appear in the DSM. In other words, these were the people who actually decided what was and what was not a mental illness-- the people with the most direct, unmediated control over those extremely troublesome 81 words. If Robert Spitzer chose to get involved, he would have been in a great position to help the activists. But like I said, he hadn't really taken an interest, not until one day in the fall of '72, when he showed up at a behavioral therapy conference in New York City. Now, it just so happened that this particular behavioral therapy conference had been infiltrated by a group called the Gay Activists Alliance. Among them was a man named Ronald Gold. We went to this meeting, and we're all sitting there like everybody else. And at a particular time, the idea was for somebody to get up and say, sorry, we're taking you over. And he didn't show up. And so they all sort of looked at me and said, you've got to do it. At the time, Ronald Gold, like Robert Spitzer, was a minor figure in this battle. He had recently quit his job as a reporter for Variety to become media director of the Gay Activists Alliance, but he almost never made speeches. He was strictly a backstage kind of guy. But at this conference, when the usual speech maker didn't show, Ron got up and railed against the psychiatrist himself. Apparently made enough of a spectacle to tick off Robert Spitzer who, after the meeting, decided to tell Ron off. Ronald Gold. When it was all over, this woman, who was a friend of mine, came by to say hi, and good job, or words to that effect. And she introduced me to this man, who happened to be with her, who was Dr. Robert Spitzer. I complained to him, you know? You've broken up a meeting. You're not letting-- you know, it's one thing to talk, but it's another thing to break up a meeting. And we started to have a discussion. And at some point in that discussion, well, he learned that I was on this committee. And I said to him, do two things for us. Set up a meeting for us with the Nomenclature Committee, and set up some kind of a panel discussion at the next convention and allow us to participate. Ron asked formally for permission to speak to our committee. He was interested. I think he was intrigued by the-- you'd have to talk to him exactly about what his feelings at the time were. I started off by feeling they're wrong, but they're interesting. And something I wanted to understand-- their viewpoint. That's how it started. Robert Spitzer arranged for an appearance in front of the Nomenclature Committee, as promised. Several months later, three gay activists presented their case to the Nomenclature doctors, who listened, and nodded, and, after their presentation was done and the room was cleared, had absolutely no idea what to do about it. Even Robert Spitzer wasn't sure where he stood on the issue, and so he came up with a plan. Spitzer decided that the two sides, who had been shouting at one another for over two years, but incredibly, hadn't officially met face to face, should have an organized debate-- a final meeting between the two sides. And so, for the 1973 APA convention in Honolulu, Spitzer organized a forum where both sides could directly argue the merits of the case with each other. The old guard, Charles Socarides and Irving Bieber, publicly met the new school, Ronald Gold, Judd Marmor, and several other psychiatrists, in front of a room filled to capacity. Ronald Gold. The title of my speech was "Stop It, You're Making Me Sick." And essentially, I said that the diagnosis of the illness of homosexuality is the greatest tool of oppression imaginable. And that they've got to take us out of the nomenclature and in order to prevent this from being the kind of sick that you get when people are repressing you. Gold says you're all rats, and you're all inhuman, and you're a disgrace to the profession. Socarides did his "they're betraying their mammalian heritage" number during the thing. They all just hooted. I mean, they just thought that was ridiculous. I presented those findings at the national meeting in Hawaii. A lot of people booed. Some people clapped. One of the things he said in that panel was that there are no homosexuals in kibbutzes in Israel. And I had just come back from Israel, and had had a thing with somebody who was raised in a kibbutz. And I said so in their panel, and they all laughed hysterically. But it made him seem to be a perfect jackass, which, of course, he was. But an equally important performance that day-- the performance which, at least according to Ronald Gold, finally convinced Robert Spitzer to sit down and redraft the 81 words in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual-- was not the exchange between Ron and Charles Socarides in front of the psychiatrists of the APA. It didn't even take place in the upscale, beachfront hotel in which the conference was stationed. No. It took place in a bar later that night, in one of those campy Hawaiian lounges with bamboo furniture, grass skirted waitresses, and a three-page menu of exotically-colored drinks. This is where the GAYPA had decided to hold its annual party. Naturally, after his speech at the conference, Ron Gold got an invitation. I got invited to this party, but I was told keep it all very quiet and don't say anything. And just come to this bar, and we'll all be there. So I decided to invite Spitzer to come to this because he had told me, essentially, that he didn't know any gay psychiatrists and wasn't quite sure there were any. And I said, you just come along. Ron warned Spitzer not to say anything. He was instructed not to speak, or stare, or indicate in any way that he was anything other than a closeted gay man. But once he got there and saw that the head of the Transactional Analysis Association and the guy who handed out all the training money in the United States, and the heads of various prestigious psychiatry departments at various universities were all there, he couldn't believe it. And he started asking all these absolutely dim-witted questions. Like what? Oh, I can't even remember, but questions that no gay person would ask. At the time, the members of the GAYPA were still completely hidden. They hadn't been active in the struggle to change the DSM. They were too fearful of losing their jobs to identify themselves publicly. So when Robert Spitzer, an obviously straight man in a position of power at the APA, appeared at the bar, the men of the GAYPA were completely unnerved. So the Grand Dragon of the GAYPA, whoever he was, I can't remember now-- came up to me and said, get rid of him. Get him out of here. You got to get rid of him. And I said, I'm doing nothing of the kind. He's here to help us, and you are not doing anything. And that's when it happened. There, in front of Robert Spitzer and the Grand Dragon of the GAYPA, there in the midst of neon-colored drinks and grass-skirted waitresses, a young man in full Army uniform walked into the bar. He looked at Robert Spitzer. He looked at Ronald Gold. He looked at the Grand Dragon of the GAYPA. And then the young man in uniform burst into tears. He threw himself into Ron's arms and remained there, sobbing. Well, I had no idea who he was. It turned out he was a psychiatrist, an Army psychiatrist based in Hawaii, who was so moved by my speech, he told me, that he decided that he had to go to a gay bar for the first time in his life. And somehow or other, he got directed to this particular bar and saw me and all these gay psychiatrists. And it was too much for him. He just cracked up. And it was a very moving event. I mean, this man was awash in tears. And I believe that that was what decided Spitzer right then and there, let's go. And of course, it was right after that that he said, let's go write the resolution. And so we went back to Spitzer's hotel room and wrote the resolution. Right then? That night? Right, that night. Robert Spitzer's resolution didn't call for a flat-out elimination of homosexuality from the APA nomenclature. He didn't think that the psychiatrists of the APA would approve an outright deletion. Instead, it argued that in order for a behavior to be categorized as pathological, the behavior must cause, quote, "subjective distress." In other words, if you were gay and it didn't bother you, you weren't sick. For those homosexuals who were troubled by their orientation, Spitzer created a new category-- ego dystonic homosexuality. And it was the 237 words which followed this heading, which were eventually submitted to the reference committee, which was then headed by the president-elect of the APA-- my grandfather, Dr. John P Spiegel. Once the reference committee endorsed the change, it was sent to the board of trustees and the president of the APA, Dr. Alfred Freedman, one of the newly elected APA officials whose candidacy for office had been contrived and supported by the Committee for Concerned Psychiatry and the Young Turks, who sat around my grandfather's kitchen table. On December 15, 1973, this president and this board called a press conference where they announced to the world that they had approved the deletion of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistics Manual. Charles Socarides, naturally, was appalled. I said, holy [BLEEP]. They're changing the rules. If there's anything you couldn't change in this world would be the relationship between a male and a female. They go together. They go together through all of evolution, right up the animal kingdom, right to man. And now they're saying it's just as natural to mate with the same sex as it is with the opposite sex. What will psychiatry think? What will medicine think? What will pediatric think? They think we've gone insane. The headline in our newsletter at the National Gay Task Force was, "The Earth is round." And that's what it was to us. They finally got around to having a grain of sanity. So that's the story of how 81 words became 237 words. That's the story of a definition. Today, there's no entry in the DSM on homosexuality, no entry at all. In 1987, the 237 words that Robert Spitzer wrote about ego dystonic homosexuality were quietly removed. Meanwhile, the APA turned itself upside down. In 1970, 90% of the American Psychiatric Association believed that homosexuality was a pathology. Today, 90% believe that it's a normal variant of sexual behavior, no more pathological than something like left-handedness. In fact, it's now considered unethical to treat homosexuality. And any psychiatrist who attempts to change the sexual orientation of his patient can face professional censure. If a gay person finds his sexual preference disturbing, if he's interested in becoming heterosexual-- and there are many people who fit this description-- the APA guidelines suggest that the therapist counsel his patient that change is impossible. My family always told me that my grandfather single-handedly changed the DSM. But what's striking is all the different forces that had to be in place in order to make this happen. It took both Evelyn Hooker and Dr. Anonymous, John P. Spiegel and Ronald Gold-- people on the outside, people on the inside, and people at every point in between. The change happened partly through scientific debate and partly simply because psychiatrists got to know gay men. There are a couple of interesting postscripts to this story. Dr. Irving Bieber died in 1991, and the New York Times published an obituary which focused on his work and homosexuality in a way that his wife, Toby, found hostile and insulting. Most of the quotes were from people who never agreed with him. Worse, the newspaper mistakenly printed a picture of Robert Spitzer, Dr. Bieber's longtime opponent, in Dr. Bieber's place. This misprint so infuriated his wife, Toby, that she canceled her subscription to the New York Times and never bought the newspaper again. When she wants to find out what's going on in the world, she says she watches television. And then there's Charles Socarides. Dr. Socarides continues to teach and practice psychiatry, but his views on homosexuality have damaged his position in his profession. He's been violently criticized by his peers. And his book on homosexuality, called A Freedom Too Far, was refused by over 40 publishers. In the end, he had to print the book himself. But Socarides remains convinced that he has chosen the right path and claims that, far from destroying his career, his views on homosexuality have actually helped his practice. Oh, it's made it boom. It made it boom? Boom, sure. Sure. I'm known both as the devil of the radical gay movement, and I'm also known as the savior of many homosexual's lives. Last week, I saw somebody with his son of 16 who said they've taken the boy to six psychiatrists in New Jersey, and everyone of them said, get out of here, or told him that he can't be helped. And that's happened over and over again. I've heard a lot of terrible words against me, but my patients would tell you differently-- any one of them. One of the homosexuals who does not speak against Socarides is his eldest son, Richard Socarides, a lawyer who served as an advisor to the Clinton administration on lesbian and gay issues, and who helped to organize, among other things, a White House Conference on HIV and AIDS. Dr. Charles Socarides has told reporters that he wonders if he failed his son, Richard. That's the word he used, "failed." Dr. Socarides believes his own theories, and therefore believes that he is in some way responsible for his son's sexual orientation. A few years ago, his son, Richard, told the press, quote, "Our relationship is quite strained, but is a relationship, nonetheless." Finally, there's my grandfather, Dr. John P. Siegel, whose postscript was written that day in the Bahamas in 1981 when he stepped out of his beachfront bungalow into the Caribbean sun, his new lover, David, on his arm. Thank you very much, Grandpa. That was very interesting. I hope it's as interesting to listen to as it was to conduct the interview with you. End of interview. Bye-bye. Alix Siegel, who put that story together, these days is the co-host of the NPR show, Invisabilia, which is about the things that shape our ideas, and beliefs, and assumptions, very much along the lines of the story you just heard. It's available wherever you get your podcasts. And I know we say that all the time. If you don't actually have a place that you get podcasts, just type Invisabilia into Google search, and you will find it. As I said earlier, we first aired today's program in 2002. In the years since then, so many people in the story have died-- Charles Socarides, John Fryer, Toby Bieber, who's Irving Bieber's wife, Gary Allender, who was one of the gay activists who infiltrated the APA convention, and Robert Spitzer and Ronald Gold, the unlikely pair who drafted the resolution after that fateful night in the Hawaiian tiki bar. Special thanks to [INAUDIBLE] Martin Duberman, whose memoir Cures details what it was like to be a gay man undergoing therapy for homosexuality for a decade. Coincidentally, Radiolab just did a spectacularly good series of shows on this same period of history where psychiatry was rethinking homosexuality. I cannot recommend this enough. They've just been killing it lately. It's a few episodes that they call "Un-erased." Again, that's Radiolab, wherever you get your-- oh I'm not even going to say all that again. Thanks to WYPR in Baltimore. Alix Spiegel's story was funded with money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who was allowed to visit our program this week. If he would just follow some simple rules-- Not to speak, or stare, or indicate, in any way, that he was anything other than a closeted gay man. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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There's a short story by the fiction writer Ron Carlson in which a guy loses his job after 10 years at the job. His boss tells him, OK, go to Plan B. And the guy says, this was Plan B. Which is, I think, how it goes for most of us. We head off cheerfully toward Plan A, but Plan A turns out to be completely different from what we thought it was going to be. And so we switch to a backup. And then the backup plan becomes our life. A while back, I was giving a talk to about 100 people. And knowing I was going to be talking about this on the radio, I asked them to remember back to when they first hit adulthood. What is it that they thought their lives would be like? What was their Plan A back then? And I asked them, OK, how many of you are still on Plan A? Out of 100 people, only one person raised her hand. Just one. The youngest person in the room-- just 23 years old. Everybody else in the room was like, Plan B? What about Plan C, and D, and F? Today on our program, stories of the backup plan and people living the backup plan, which is most of us. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in five acts, including the story of how you decide, as your backup plan, to kidnap the child of the most famous entertainer in the world. And Jonathan Goldstein's story of how he took a telemarketing job just to tide things over for a while, and then kept it for 10 years-- finding, to his disappointment, that he was better at telemarketing than at anything else in his life. Stay with us. Act One, It's Another Tequila Sunrise. John Hodgman tells this fable of giving up one dream for another much more ridiculous dream. A few years ago, the company that owns Jose Cuervo Tequila purchased Marina Key, a small eight-acre speck of an island in the Caribbean. And they renamed it Cuervo Nation. They applied to the UN for independent statehood. They encouraged US citizens to defect by a simple ritual of drinking a shot. They even tried to field an Olympic volleyball team. The whole thing was a bold experiment in advertising via nation building. But since those heady early days of independence, the nation's patriotic fervor has calmed somewhat. It's now used as a place to send contest winners and a promotional lure for members of the World Press, which is how I found myself headed to Cuervo Nation last June for a series of very educational tequila tastings and how I met the nation's most prominent citizen and ambassador to the world. He stood at the dock waiting for us as our ferry chugged over from Tortola. Shaven-headed, goateed, he sort of looked like Anton LaVey-- were it not for the Speedos, mirror shades, and red superhero cape. A satanist at spring break. Through a megaphone, he alerted us that we are now entering a party zone. As we disembarked, he began scooting maniacally around us with a tequila shot balanced on his bald head, daring us to suck it down without using our hands. This was Cuervo Man. The other Cuervo representatives were there to teach us about tequila. Cuervo Man, I was told, was there to party with us. His job was to party. And just as I began to grasp the frightening yet thrilling ramifications of this fact, Cuervo Man spotted me. He pointed to his shot-crowned head, opened his arms wide, and chased me down the dock. Cuervo Man's real name is Ryan McDonough. I learned this from the Cuervo reps, who I think were a little annoyed that I was asking so few questions about their tequila, and so many questions about the man who seemed to be their trained tequila monkey. Actually, I was told, the term is party catalyst. And when he wasn't on the island, Ryan was going from bar to bar all over the Northeast, embodying the untamed spirit of Jose Cuervo. Meaning what? I asked them. Meaning he does interactive promotions designed to introduce consumers to the responsible enjoyment of the various brands of Jose Cuervo Tequila. Meaning what? I asked them. And that's when Ryan ran up to the table with a toilet seat around his neck and a plunger stuck to the top of his head. Dude, he said. Check it out. Plunger on my head. And then he ran down to the beach and shoved sand down his pants. And then he sang a dirty song and made us do shots in teams. And then he collapsed in the surf and barked like a seal. It's sort of hard to explain what he does, they told me. And that's exactly why he fascinated me. I mean, consider the plunger. Were it me, I might have come up with putting a toilet seat around my neck, sure. That's a natural. But then to extend the metaphor, to take the imaginative leap to the plunger on the head? Well, that's genius. By the last night I was there, the Cuervo reps realized I was a lost cause. They left me with a bottle of Cuervo Especial and went to bed. And Ryan and I got to talking. It turned out Cuervo Man and I have a lot in common. We both live in New York. Like me, Ryan is 30 years old, originally from the Boston area. Like me, he went to an Ivy League school and spent most of his time there drinking and feeling out of place. Yes, the man barking like a seal-- that's a Princeton man. And that's when I realized that apart from some small matters of fate and several thousand sit-ups on Ryan's part, we were the same. We both came out of college with an English degree, a thirst for booze, and the absurd faith that someone would pay us simply for being drunk and charming. And in a strange but undeniable way, for Ryan, that turned out to be true. And that's when I realized I was jealous of him. How does one get to be a party catalyst? I asked. Dude, he said. That's what everyone wants to know. Oh, that's my bag of stuff, my bag of tricks, what kind of props a guy in my field needs. Got my helmet. The stuffed monkeys I got at LaGuardia Airport. I've got three of them. It's six months later, and I'm in Ryan's apartment in Brooklyn. He's agreed to take me with him to a couple of bars out on Long Island, where he's doing whatever it is he does. And he's showing me a few of the things he'll bring with him. The Speedo I have I throw that on because it's just shocking. It's shock value. Rubber chicken, plunger. [PLUNGER SUCTION] Right on the bald head, that just-- [PLUNGER SUCTION] It was never Ryan's dream to have a job wearing a plunger. He wanted to act. It's a cliche, I know, and so did Ryan. But he had done some singing and musical theater in college, and this was his dream. Specifically, this was his dream. (SINGING) There is nothing like a dame, nothing in the world. There is nothing you can name that is anything like a dame. Ryan did South Pacific in summer stock and some dinner theater, but it really wasn't coming together the way he wanted it to. From the beginning, he knew he needed a backup plan, so he started looking for a job in finance. After all, what's a Princeton degree good for if not making money? (SINGING) --dame! He interviewed at six companies, but he only got a call back at one. I think everyone else who applied there from Princeton, they all got offered jobs. So I called and they were not going to offer me a job. I'm like, why? Why not? And I was really, really upset. And I thought I could change his mind or something. He's like, well, it just seems-- you know, people seem to think that you'd really rather be acting. And I'm like, why don't you leave that up to me? I need money. To act, he needed a day job. But the day job wanted him to act. So he was stuck in New York, working part-time at a mail order Bible company and part-time at an Upper East Side bar. Now, Ryan enjoyed a delicious beverage from time to time. And when he drank, either after his shift or sometimes during, everyone paid attention to him. He'd make jokes and balance shot glasses on his head. He owned the room. I mean, I've always been the type of guy that people would invite to parties, to weddings. Like, people would offer-- when I had no money and I was hanging out with my buddies from Princeton who all were making bank, and they're like, come on, we're going out to the bar. I'm like, I don't have any money. They're like, I'll pay for your drinks. I want you to come out. And it wasn't even so much like I was such a great friend to these people. I was just a funny-ass drunk. People wanted the funny-ass drunk around. And I was just bar backing, and I would always goof around. And I would occasionally get a little drunk and dance with people. Anyway, the DJ there has his own DJ company. And he would do weddings, and parties, and stuff like that, so he took me on. And so Ryan joined a shadow industry of party professionals-- the kind you might meet on resorts or on yachts, leading surfside limbo competitions, or at reunions encouraging people to dance. People whose job it is to force us to interact, to touch one another, to have fun. Because apparently, this is something we've forgotten how to do. Ryan paid his dues working bar mitzvahs, organizing group games, dressing up as Woody from Toy Story, complete with a big plastic head over his own head. And then he got the call from Jose Cuervo. They were running a tugboat called the Untamed Spirit II for short booze cruises out of San Diego, and they wanted him on it. His job would be to entertain winners of various Jose Cuervo promotional contests. And it turned out they pretty much enjoyed the same things that 13-year-olds did, minus the big plastic head and plus tequila. And Ryan could drink, too. I was the envy of all my peers. Really, you know? And eventually, the opportunity came to do it full-time. And the tough part about it was that I was going to have to give up acting. Any pretense I had of being an actor was gone, because it was like, you know, I'm not doing it. So I was like, let's make some money doing something that's close to acting. And so I went with it. Ryan had entered the party zone. It's your lucky night here at Monterey's. We got Jose Cuervo in the house tonight. And I think the fire department might like that from Uniondale. You guys doing good? You want some complementary Cuervo samples? In other words, shots you don't have to pay for? Yeah! Yeah! Monterey Sports Bar is on route 24 in Uniondale, Long Island. Hofstra University is nearby. But this part of Uniondale is not so much a college town as it is a college strip, a blacktop spoke of suburban sprawl with Monterey's on the corner, next to a guns and ammo shop, next to a Starbucks. Inside, its dank and cavernous, with banners advertising $0.15 wings and $5 pitchers. I'll learn many important things tonight. But perhaps the most surprising is this-- people in bars apparently need Cuervo t-shirts and mini shot glasses in order to live. And to get them, they will do unimaginable things. Right now, I've got a t-shirt in my Speedos. Can you see that? Yes. Oh, you want-- hold on, I'm going to come to you. You've got to bite it nice and slow. Who's getting it? Let me set the scene. Ryan is standing at the back of a crowded bar. He's torn off his black breakaway sweatpants to reveal a very tight Speedo stuffed with t-shirts. And then-- how shall I put this?-- young women crouch down in front of him, take hold of a shirt with their teeth, and pull. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Bite it like you mean it, like cave woman. Yes! That's what I'm talking about. I hadn't bargained for this. That was almost pornographic. If Ryan's not giving girls t-shirts out of his pants, he's serving them shots off his head eye level with their bras, or asking them to lick his scalp, or just rubbing up against them. Maybe it's because he seems more mischievous than predatory, or maybe it's because he comes with the sanction and strange demi-celebrity of a well-known liquor brand. But Ryan is able to do and say things in the name of Cuervo that would get you arrested under most circumstances. And his antics aren't just tolerated, they're adored. All right. Pay no attention to my head, right in your candy canes. No hands. On Cuervo Nation, I would have described him as a kind of corporate jester. But as I watched women gleefully French him and then wander casually back to their boyfriends, a better word comes to mind. He's a satyr, the half-man, half-beast concert of Dionysus, god of drunken revelry. And not just because he's got a hairy back. Why don't you trim me like Sasquatch? Trim me. Trim me like Sasquatch. Take me home and domesticate me. Who's Sasquatch? Sasquatch? He's a hairy guy. No, I know. You have a plunger on your head. And if you haven't guessed already, this is the other reason I'm fascinated by Ryan's job. While the rest of the bar grind dances and flirts and watches sports on the 30 odd TVs at Monterey's, I've somehow managed to plant myself next to the single screen that's inexplicably tuned to PBS-- specifically, Ric Burns's documentary of New York. Ryan, on the other hand, is out there, moving in a world in which commerce and pleasure and liquor and sex are all intimately and uncritically entwined. And everyone is having a wicked good time. It's a world in which I normally don't travel, and Ryan is my ticket in. When he runs out to his car for a last minute t-shirt resupply, I realize that this is my chance to try my hand at satyrdom. I get a tray of shots from the woman who's been helping Ryan, and I start making the rounds. Hey, do you want a free tequila shot? Do you want a-- Try one of these. It's tequila from Cuervo. Follow me. We'll go to my friends, and we'll all have shots. Oh, yeah? OK, let's go. And I do follow her. But when we find her friends, they all just stare at me. Maybe it's not clear, so I say, do you want free tequila? And they just say, no thanks. Designated driver. I'll throw up. Is it something I did? I can do something wacky. If there's one thing that should not be hard to give away in a bar, it's free drinks. And yet as I go from corner to corner, no one is drinking off my head. No one is pulling anything out of my pants. And part of the problem is, I'm not Ryan. And maybe I should shave my head and loosen up a little. But beyond that, what I don't realize until I'm out there doing it is, as much as I love to drink, and as much as I love Jose Cuervo Tequila, and as much as I'd love another free trip to Cuervo Nation, I feel weird pushing some big company's message that slamming down shots is a great game, that drinking always equals fun. Which even Ryan knows isn't exactly true. Because one thing I haven't mentioned yet, and probably should have, is that Ryan doesn't drink, at least not anymore. (SINGING) I would swallow a shot, chill it so it's not hot. Then I'll have some more, not a little, a lot. Suck on a lime. No, it's not a crime. Sometimes we all need a chaser. Want to put my tender gold in a blender. Watch it spin around to a tasty margarita. Jose Cuervo Tequila. Part of Ryan's act is writing new lyrics to existing rock songs that describe the pleasures of drinking Cuervo or give very precise directions on how to do a body shot. Here's an example. Quote, "Shots with or without training wheels. Cuervo doesn't hurt. You know it heals." It's a little unnerving to hear, knowing that the person who wrote these lyrics is the same person who quit drinking more than a year ago, in part because he was afraid that it might kill him. He was kicked out of a hotel in Florida for throwing a table of the balcony. In St. Louis, he blacked out in the middle of a promotion. And at Cuervo Nation, he got so loaded he cursed out an elderly guest he was supposed to be entertaining. It was an older guy, probably in his 60s, and they were, like, professional contest winners. And he's talking at dinner about, like, all these other contests he won and how, like, this one was nicer than this one and blah blah blah. And it sounded like he was complaining a little bit about something, and I was like, why don't you shut up? It's a free frickin' trip, old man, OK? Why don't you take your professional contest winning attitude and shove it up your [BLEEP]. And the next day, I woke up, like, I know I said something awful. The problem for Ryan was that in most cases, it is very bad to be caught drinking on the job. But in Ryan's case, it only made him more successful. The wilder and drunker he got, the more bars wanted him back, the more Cuervo wanted him back. And what amazes me is that at the time Ryan was deciding to get sober, Cuervo asked him to sign on for another 100 promotional gigs over the course of the coming year. And Ryan said, how about 150? That's every weekend, almost half the year spent in bars, tequila on his head, tequila spilling down his face. It must be like Eve working in the apple factory that's owned by snakes. How does it feel, as someone who doesn't drink anymore, to be confronted on a nightly basis with people who might be a drunk and hurting former you? I just don't think about it all that much because there's nothing I can do about it either way. And I just don't know. I think that's it. I mean, I can't make any judgment. I mean, there's nobody that I could tell you, like, that guy needs to stop drinking, and know it for sure. I could certainly say, like, oh, that guy reminds me of me. You know, that happens a lot. But when it comes down to it, I just-- it's up to them. It's just, it's not my call. Ryan's 150-day bar hop for Cuervo is almost over. His current contract is coming to a close, and he's now working on a new, very different project. I am Sonic Man. And I'm out to prove what a smooth, clean shave you'll get with the Panasonic Sonic Shaving-- This is a television ad for the Panasonic Sonic Shaver Max electric shaver, in which Ryan plays a character called Sonic Man. He got the gig from someone who saw him doing a Cuervo promotion, and a lot of it's the same. He jumps around in public, accosting people, yelling at them, convincing them of the superiority of this particular brand of shaver by hopping into fountains and getting sprayed with a hose. Dry or wet. Or wet. Or wet. But if it sounds as if there's no difference, think of this. First, people do not generally drink while they're shaving. And second, Ryan's an actor now-- an actual actor, with national exposure, a good agent, making decent money. So the backup plan has brought him back to his original plan, and I'm happy for him, but also kind of sad. Put it this way. I still kind of want to be Cuervo Man, but I don't think I'd ever want to be Sonic Man. The fact is Ryan's leaving something behind-- the booze, obviously. And that's a good thing. But also the Bacchanalian power of the booze, its danger, the contradictions that made Cuervo Man more than a day job, but a kind of inspired extension of Ryan himself-- which is, to say, a kind of art. Shots coming out. Come on, do some on the head. And I wonder, now that he's the actor he always wanted to be, if we'll ever get a role as good as the one he's already played. Hey, throw this! Come here, throw this. Throw it onto my plunger. Throw the Frisbee onto the plunger. Pop it on. You got it. You got it. That story and this week's entire program were first broadcast back in 2002. Since then, Cuervo Nation has closed down. Ryan now lives in Long Beach, California with his wife and five-year-old son. He says he's been sober for 18 years now, and he has gotten some work as an actor. Yes, Plan A kicked in kind of late. He's just wrapping up work on an indie film that he wrote and acted in called Last Night in Rozzie. John Hodgman has a new book coming out in a few weeks called Medallion Status. Act Two, Why Talk? Here's a situation that many of us have been in and found ourselves confused about what to do. You start to become friends with somebody from work, and then you run up against this problem, which requires action of some sort and a new plan. It happened to one of our producers, Starlee Kline, at her last job, with a woman named Robin. We had just met, and we'd go out for drinks and stuff after work. We really liked each other, and we wanted to, like-- we kind of decided we were going to be, like, new really good friends, you know? But we didn't know anything about each other. So we'd start to tell each other things. But the problem was we were just so busy, and there was never enough time to tell each other the big stories in our life. And at that point, your friend Robin came up with a Plan B. She did. She got to the point where she-- 'cause she would start to tell me stories and she'd get really frustrated by how much she had to tell. And then she was, like, I'm just going to make you a tape. And so at one point, I was going home to LA. I'm from LA. And then right before I left for LA, she just was like, here you go. Here's your tape. And I started listening to it, and it was true. She started by saying, OK, so now I'm going to do my ex-boyfriend montage. All right. I'm not going to start when I was a kid. But I am going to just give you a little background history with the guy thing. I'm going to try to stay as close to the truth as possible. That was a drag off of a cigarette. That's what I was doing right there. All right. The whole first side A is all her ex-boyfriends, all the ways they affected her, and how it changed her, and just with all the little details thrown in. And it's very thorough, and it's very complete. And I definitely get a sense of the boyfriend. His name was Ken, and Ken was a hockey player. He was not the smartest guy in the world. And he could only describe our relationship in hockey metaphors. Like, Robin, it's like when you're skating towards a goal and you think you've got it, but you don't. And it's like a puck that hits you once, but you recover-- I mean the whole goal of it is so nice and touching, that she wanted me to know this about her. And then she put his time into making this, like, catalog of her life so that I could know her better. But Tony and I would go to all these sort of like prestigious art openings, and he would always get drunk and start raving. Like, this is [BLEEP]. I could do this better. This is [BLEEP]. And he would walk around and just, he just couldn't understand contemporary artwork. And I really can't either, so I could kind of understand. And we'd go to these installations, where the whole room would just be like one big dung ball, and he would scream, this is really [BLEEP] because it was. And-- And then on side B, she has a list of the other things that she wanted me to know. And they're really, really, really small things, and they're just like, I had this dream once, and I feel you should know this. I get afraid when people are choking in restaurants. Just like tiny couple sentences, and she's got a list. And she's kind of checking it off as she goes along. But anyway the one pet that I didn't have, which I wasn't allowed to have, was a dog. So I would steal the neighbor's dog Muffin, and I had this ritual. I think I told you about the dream where a woman had 82 household objects lodged within her body. And I'm still trying to figure that one out. Throw up story, don't feel like talking about it. The teeth story-- And then, after all that, she takes around the tape recorder and then she gets other people to talk on your tape? Yes. She walks around and has people say hello to me. And she says, will you say happy birthday to my 75-year-old grandmother, Starlee? Complete strangers. Total complete strangers. They're just random people on the street. I'm making a tape for my grandmother, Starlee, for her 75th birthday. Could you just say, hi, Starlee? Hi, Starlee. Thank you. I know you're in a rush. I can see you're running. Could you just say, hi, Starlee? Hi. Hi. OK, thank you. I'm making a tape for my grandmother's 75th birthday. Standby, Kevin. And her name's Starlee. Could you just say, hi, Starlee? Hi, Starlee. How are you? Thank you. So did this do what she wanted it to do? Oh, I think so. For sure, yeah. It totally felt like the perfect solution to the problem of making friends as you get older. Because it's really, as you get older-- I'm not that old, but the thing I miss most as an adult is time, is time is so valuable now. And you don't get to have the same conversations that you did when you were in high school where you'd be on the phone with someone for, like, eight hours a night. Or you'd just stay up all night long and tell every single thing that's ever happened to you, and it was even less that had happened to you because you were, like, 15 years old. And there was just so much talking, so much bonding. Bonding, bonding, bonding. And as an adult, you just don't have the chance to do that very much. And now we're really good friends. Since then, I understand all of her references. Like, I feel like I've known her much longer than I have. But isn't kind of the point of being friends with somebody that when they tell you this information, that it happens in a conversation? That that's not the background for the friendship, but that actually is the friendship. Yeah, I mean, some can say that. Sure. But as far as the past stuff, I feel like it's not that big a difference sometimes. Because it gets to a point where you just have all these kind of bottled stories. Like, I got this boyfriend, he did this. And I have this boyfriend, he did this. And it meant this, and it meant that. And it's like why not just put those stories on a cassette tape to have someone listen to it all at once? Starlee Kline. Coming up, sock puppets dialing for steak and kidnapping as Plan B, in a minute from 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 some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Plan B, stories of people ditching their expectations and living inside a backup plan, as most of us do. We have arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, When Kidnapping is Plan B. Even now, I think Barry Keenan has a hard time thinking of himself as a kidnapper. He grew up in Southern California in Malibu, went to high school with the children of movie stars and other super rich people. And if you could say that he had a plan for his life, he achieved a lot of it by the age of 22. It was the early 1960s. He was the youngest member of the Los Angeles Stock Exchange. He had successfully put together some real estate deals. He was making a lot of money. But he had also started drinking heavily and became addicted to Percodan and other painkillers. Of course, if you're drinking and taking strong painkillers, you get very numbed out. And on a good day, you might have an hour of rational thinking-- quote unquote, "rational thinking." And then also the market had a big downturn in late '62, early '63. And my real estate deals went sour. In a period of six months, I went from earning about in the neighborhood of $10,000 a month in 1963 dollars, to trying to sell transparent window shades door to door to stores in the middle of the desert. And it's 1963. You're how old at that point? 23. So you've gone broke. You're 23. And then you come up with this Plan B. Well, one day I decided, well, I have to do something radical. And in my demented state, suddenly it came to me that the way to solve my problems was to get some money somehow, and it would have to be illegally because I was obviously incapable of raising money from my real estate projects and securities projects. So I came across-- kidnapping seemed like a good idea. And I put a business plan together and went to my-- Wait, wait, wait. Kidnapping seemed like a good idea, and you put a business plan together? Yes, I was very business-oriented. I never referred to it as a kidnapping. It was going to be-- it was the plan of operation. It was kind of like an underwriting, a securities underwriting. But I had to go take somebody's kid in order to raise the money to invest in business propositions. And then of course, being a good Catholic, the only way I could get rid of the sin was to pay the money back ultimately. You say that kidnapping seemed like a reasonable option. Wasn't there any part of it that kind of horrified you? No, because in my drug-induced state, you might say, I knew I wasn't going to hurt anybody, and therefore it wasn't going to be a crime, as far as my moral character was concerned. And as long as I was willing to pay the money back and was absolutely not going to hurt anybody, then it seemed like it was OK. So explain to me who you decided to kidnap. Well, I went down the list of all the wealthy people I knew and who had kids that I knew. There was Vicky Douglas, whose father was CEO of Douglas Aircraft. That was eliminated because she was a girl. Jim Mitchum knew me too well, and his father, Robert Mitchum, he was rich one month and then broke the next. And then Arthur Lake, whose father was Johnny Weissmuller-- all these people that had famous parents. And I went down the list, and finally I thought of Nancy. And of course-- Nancy? Nancy Sinatra, the oldest daughter of Frank Sinatra. And so then I said, of course, Junior. And of course, I say Junior and I'm referring to Frank Sinatra, Junior, Frank Senior's son. And had you met him before? I had seen him. I mean, I knew Nancy in high school and junior high, and had been to her home several times, and knew that the son, who was away at boarding school, was sort of distant from the girls. The girls were doted upon. But Junior was always sort of like out of the picture. How much ransom money were you going to ask for? $240,000. I had made a list of all the money we needed both for investments and to help my parents, and it came out to $240,000. Since I was going to have to pay it back, I didn't want to raise more money than I could easily pay back. And you decided you were going to take the money and then you were going to do what to make it back? I was going to invest in real estate projects in West Los Angeles. And the specific stocks that I was going to invest in was Chrysler at the time, which was in the toilet, and of course made a spectacular comeback, and various-- several different stocks and some real estate, which ultimately became Marina Del Rey, the world's largest marina. And in fact, if I had, by some miracle, had ever gotten the money and, in fact, invested it, it would have turned out the way that I had it outlined in my business plan. So the investments were actually fairly prudent. It just was the concept was a little off. And so you were going to take this capital, you were going to invest in this stuff, and then you were going to make a profit over, I guess, a couple years, right? Yeah, it would be about-- it was a five-year-plan. And then at the end of five years, you were going to give the money back to Sinatra? Yes, send the money back to Frank Sinatra, and just imagining the reaction that he and the FBI would have when the ransom money starts coming back to him. And just explain how the plan of operation was going to go, how the whole thing would come off, where everybody would be at the end. How was that done? OK. It was indexed in a three-ring binder with indexes, and one of the sections was the benefit to the Sinatra family. And it would bring father and son closer together. And at the time, Sinatra was being investigated for his connections with the mob and money laundering through the Cal-Neva Lodge and Sands Casino in Las Vegas. And I thought, well, this might even help him there. You mean help his image. Yes, help his because I felt that if the public would perceive him as a worried parent, rather than a famous singer hanging out with the mafia, that would cast him in a more favorable image. And that was one of the things that I listed in the benefits to the Sinatra family. You know the thing about that plan, Barry, is that in a way, it's utterly logical. It just proceeds from a premise that's so crazy. Sane people don't wake up one day and decide they're going to go kidnap the most famous entertainer in the world, who has known mafia connections, and so you're going to have the FBI and the mafia after you. Sane people don't do that, and particularly thinking that they're going to benefit the victims as well as their own family. When I asked Barry Keenan to tell me what happened when he tried to put his Plan B into effect and do the kidnapping, he's at such pains to get the truth of it across to me-- and to prove especially that the blame for the crime falls entirely on him, and not on two pals that he enlisted to help with the kidnapping. Now this story is filled with far too many details and takes far longer than we can spend here. Suffice it to say that it was a comedy of errors. In December of 1963, the 23-year-old Keenan and a friend nabbed the 19-year-old Frank Sinatra, Junior, who was performing at Lake Tahoe. Keenan accidentally left his gun in Sinatra's hotel room. He didn't have any cash to buy gas for the getaway car. During the getaway, his buddy Joe climbed out of the car into a snowstorm and knocked himself out by running into a tree branch. When they called Frank Sinatra, Senior, and demanded a ransom, Sinatra offered them a million dollars, and they tried to talk him down to $240,000 because that's what it said in the plan. We sent Frank to a gas station payphone to get the next instructions about how to get his son back. So Frank Sinatra, Senior, and the FBI go racing down to Carson City 30 minutes away, and in about 15 minutes, John started calling for Frank Sinatra to the gas station. And the mechanic at the gas station, who was busy and by himself, kept answering the phone. And this caller was asking for Frank Sinatra, the most famous entertainer in the world at the time. And the guy got very angry when this caller was calling back time and again for Frank Sinatra. He thinks it's a funny phone call. Yeah, he thinks it's a prank of some sort. And so as soon as he hung up from the third time after letting John have it with four letter words, before he even gets back to his car, in screeches two FBI cars. And Frank Sinatra, Senior, jumps out of the car and says, my name is Frank Sinatra. Have I had any calls? And you can imagine the reaction that that poor mechanic had. So finally, one more time, John called back, and this time, Frank answered the phone. And John's told him what the next step was going to be. Barry, did it did it occur to you that the person who you were kidnapping and their family would be traumatized and frightened? No, because the way that the plan of operation was designed and the way I wrote it out in the script, it was always supposed to be just between Frank Sinatra, Senior, Frank Sinatra, Junior, my group of people, and the FBI. The mother and sisters were not to be involved in the kidnapping. And based upon what I knew about Frank Sinatra, Senior, and the family, and so forth, I did not think that he would let his wife know if he thought the kidnapping was going to be resolved in a matter of a few hours. I wonder if the fact that you constructed such an elaborate web of logic with your business plan, that made the kidnapping seem so reasonable and even good for the Sinatra's, I wonder if that prevented you at the time from comprehending what you were putting them through. Oh, absolutely. I had it so rationalized and justified. I had God's approval. This thing was being divinely blessed. What was the sign that it had God's approval? Like, God talked to me, particularly when I'd go to church, and light a candle, and be still. And I would hear God talking to me and telling me what I had to do. And he was very definite about nobody can be hurt. And I had to pay the money back. As you've gotten older and sobered up and gotten wiser, does God still talk to you? Oh, no. No, that went away when I got sober, and I also got psychiatric help. So when I hear voices nowadays, I don't pay any attention to them. After successfully getting $240,000 in ransom money and returning Frank Sinatra, Junior, safely home, Barry Keenan and his accomplices were caught. Keenan was sentenced to life plus 75 years, but was released after just 4 years because the psychiatric evaluation found that he was legally insane at the time of his crime. He returned to the real estate business where he was wildly successful-- became a millionaire. A few years ago, he sold his kidnapping story to the movie studios for several times more than the original ransom amount. He showed his papers indicating that all of his profits from the sale would go to charity and says that he agreed to a movie deal only to set the record straight about a lie that he told during his trial back in the 1960s. Back then, he says he spread a rumor that the kidnapping was only a publicity stunt staged by the Sinatras and not a real kidnapping. Under the Son of Sam law, which says that convicted felons cannot make a profit from selling their own stories, Frank Sinatra, Junior, challenged Keenan's contract with the movie studios. In February 2002, the California Supreme Court ruled in Keenan's favor, clearing the way for the movie to be made. But it never was. The studio, Columbia Pictures, put the project on hold. And then in 2003, Showtime made the story into a film with William H. Macy and David Arquette. Barry Keenan got no money from the deal. Act Four, A Fate Most of Us Fear. Years ago, living in Canada, Jonathan Goldstein had a job selling the Montreal Gazette newspaper over the telephone. It was the normal kind of Plan B that most of us have had at one point or another. And when he took the job, he did not realize that it would become a 10-year chapter in his life. When you're a little kid, you never decide that one day you're going to be a telemarketer. It's not something that you plan. It just happens, like the way going bald just happens, or the way falling down a flight of stairs just happens. One minute you're at the top of the landing, and the next you're at the bottom. And you'll be damned if you can remember each one of the individual steps that led you between the two. All during the time I was working at the Gazette, I found it nearly impossible to bring myself to tell anyone I was a telemarketer. When people asked what it was I did for a living, I'd simply say that I was a salesman. And when they asked what it was that I sold, I would say dreams. And then I would look at them for a moment, quizzically. Then I would say that I was only joking, and then they would say, oh. And I would be uncomfortable, and then they would become uncomfortable. Then they would stop asking me anything. As you might expect, the hard thing about working at the Gazette was that there was just so much rejection. Even though you were calling almost 200 people a day, 98% of whom wanted to see you dead, you still had to bring a certain hopefulness to each call, a feeling that this one, the call you were making right now could be the one. It was almost like trying to hypnotize yourself into believing that something as certain as, say, gravity didn't exist. And the next time you dropped the apple, it won't fall to the ground, but it will float up into the sky like a helium balloon. I would often pretend the people on the other end of the line were sock puppets to soften the sting of their hang up. I once shared this thought with a girl who had just started working there. Pretend there's a little sock puppet on the other end, I encouraged. All cute with coat button eyes, holding the phone in his mouth. She considered the logic of this for a moment. How does he talk with a phone in his mouth? She asked. And for this, I really didn't have an answer. In the pitching room, we all wore these headsets that were connected to computers. As soon as we hung up, the computer automatically dialed the next number so that we were always speaking to someone without respite. Our boss was a man named Ray, and if you made two or three sales a day, then you were doing OK, and Ray wouldn't scream at you. Generally, I found the repetitiousness of the job comforting. You're never at a loss for words. You always know what you're going to say. Because what you were going to say is, hi, my name is Jonathan, and I wanted to know if you're interested in reading the Gazette newspaper. One time, a woman who answered the phone would not believe I wasn't a friend of hers named Christopher. Stop playing around Christopher, she said. But I'm not Christopher, I responded. Will you cut it out, Christopher? After several minutes of this, I had to hang up on her. I knew that Christopher was going to get it for that. From my very first week at the Gazette, I was surprised to discover that I had a natural gift for sales. Whatever I was and whatever aspirations I had before I started working there, I became an instant Gazette legend, sometimes selling up to 10 subscriptions in the course of a shift. I got on the phone with people, and I made them want to listen. I joked with the men and flirted with the women. I gently cajoled them, bundling them up in my good strong telemarketing arms and tossed them up into the air where they screamed delightedly, only to land back down with a brand new Gazette subscription. I would look around me at the other sad sacks in the pitching room and wonder how they could go on just scraping by with their two or three sales a day. Telemarketing had been my backup plan, but now I found myself faced with the uncomfortable fact that it was what I was truly good at. I got myself a lucky ballpoint pen and spent half a day's pay on a fancy attache case to put my leads in. I even had a special way of filling out the order forms that involved clear capital letters and X's, never checks, in the boxes marked Visa or MasterCard. There was a bell on Ray's desk for when you made a sale. And when I made a sale, I had a special way of hitting it with the balls of my fingers that made it sound as crisp and clean as a glockenspiel. I always kept to the one tap per sale rule. I respected the bill, not like some of the other guys who rang the crap out of it like they were five-year-olds riding their first two-wheeler. The office manager was a man named Billy. Billy was a fat loudmouthed Greek man in a skintight Hawaiian shirt. One of Billy's jobs was to keep us inspired with pep talks. Billy would explain to us when he first started working at the Gazette, he was sitting right where we were, and that now, he makes as much money as a plumber. And that in fact, we all had the opportunity to make as much as a plumber. I'm going out and eating a big fat steak tonight, he would say, just like the way at the end of a day, a plumber does. Eventually, as happens to all the mighty, I fell. Even now, I can't explain it. Hubris, my diet. Perhaps I started taking myself too seriously and lost my sense of fun. Who knows? But whatever the case, I suddenly found myself so desperate for sales that at the end of a shift, still with nothing, I would order the paper to my own address and then cancel it the following week. It's a very real thing, the stink of desperation. It's an actual odor, and people can smell it over the phone line. Your jokes become a little more hurried and forced, your confidence a little more false, your pauses more awkward. I soon found myself gazing longingly at the filled-out order sheets clutched in the fist of the new office superstar, a 17-year-old whose phone name was Candy, who'd stroll past my desk humming "Taking Care of Business." Now, when I came back from the bathroom during my shift, Ray would ask me what the hell took so long. The toilet was for closers. A few weeks ago, I got home and found this on my answering machine. Hello? When the telemarketer realized that there was no one there to pitch to, he stopped himself. But I want you to listen again and notice the long pause before he actually puts the phone down. Hello? He says hello, he inhales, and before he puts the phone down, he pauses. As someone who's sold over the telephone for close to 10 years, I can tell you that the pause between the hello and the hang up is a moment of reprieve. You start to talk, you realize you've gotten an answering machine, and then before you actually hang up, you steal a moment. You take shelter in those few seconds before you hit the hang up button and the onslaught of automatically dialed phone numbers begins anew, delivering the voices of people who will very soon hate you directly into the earphones of your headset and straight into your brain. I played the message over and over, listening to it, not to better hear the chaos of the pitching room, but to try and imagine what was going through his head. And at the same time, I tried to remember what went through my own head during those pauses. It was always sort of like that moment in a horror film with the guy who's having his head held down in a bathtub of water pops up one last time and goes, [INHALES] before he is pushed back down and is drowned forever. Since the numbers were automatically dialed, you never knew who was going to pop up in your headset. One time I got my friend Mark Zelnicker on the phone, a guy who I hadn't seen in years. Mark was in my junior high phys ed class. He used to get so excited while playing hog ball that he'd clutch the ball to his chest and roll around the floor drooling. I tried to keep him on the phone as long as possible, never saying who I was, gleaning whatever I could about his life. I could hear his kids playing around, trying to steal the phone from him. And all throughout, I was shocked by how unfailingly decent he was with me. I felt like the anonymous stranger who shows up on Christmas Day to test a family's kindness. Mark didn't buy the paper, but he didn't rush me off either. It felt good to know that Mark Zelnicker had grown up to be a really nice man. There was also one time I got my grandmother. After several minutes of talking about how weird it was that I had gotten her number out of all the numbers in the city, she told me that she had just learned that morning that my grandfather's cancer had come back. I looked across the room where Billy the manager was eating French fries, and someone else was ringing the bell on Ray's desk. After I hung up the phone with her, not a second later, another call popped into headset. Hi, I'm calling from the Gazette, I said. My grandfather would be dead within the year. And then one day, I got my own number. I can't explain it better than to say that having that happen is sort of like rounding the corner and running into yourself. At first, you don't quite recognize that it's you. You look a little shorter and less handsome. But then all of a sudden, in one naked instant, you're face to face with yourself. I was the telemarketing dog that had caught its own telemarketing tail. The message that I left myself, because you just can't resist leaving yourself a message, was something like, yep, here I am. God, this is awful. This is horrible. This has to mean something. But of course, it didn't mean anything. And then for the next several seconds, I listened to the silence on the other end of the line, my own line, as I worried about the rapid fire calls that would start again the moment I hung up. When I got back home, I had exactly two messages on my machine. One was the message from myself. I was surprised by how loud the background noise was behind me and how much smaller I sounded than I'd imagined all these years. The other message was from my mother. She was imploring me to go back to school and become a speech therapist. Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the podcast, Heavyweight, whose new season starts September 26. Act Five, The Accursed Items. It's not just human beings who fail to achieve the fate that they thought that fate had in store for them. Most everything does. Most everything eventually ends up somewhere that it was not designed to go, serving a purpose that it was not meant for, even if that purpose is just landfill. We end our program today with this brief inventory from J. Robert Lennon of inanimate objects who have left their Plan A far behind and now inhabit a permanent Plan B. A bottle of pain reliever brought on a business trip that proves, at the moment it is most needed, to be filled not with pain reliever, but with buttons. An accomplished forgery of a famous painting that was thought to have been lost in a 1965 mansion fire, which now hangs in the largest gallery of a major American art museum. Sneakers hanging from the power line, with one-half of a boy's broken glasses stuffed into each toe. A Minnie Mouse doll you found by the roadside and brought home, intending to run it through the washer and give it to your infant son, but which looked no less forlorn after washing and was abandoned on a basement shelf, only to be found by your son eight years later and mistaken for a once loved toy that he had himself forsaken, leading to his first real experience of guilt and shame. Love letters seized by federal agents in an unsuccessful drug raid, tested in a lab for traces of cocaine, exhaustively read for references to drug contacts, sealed in a labeled plastic bag and packed along with a plush bear holding a plastic heart, into an unlabeled cardboard box, itself loaded into a truck with hundreds of similar boxes when the police headquarters was moved and forever lost. Nude Polaroids of a 13-year-old female cousin. An icicle preserved in the freezer by a child, which, when discovered months later, is thought to be evidence of a problem with the appliance, leading to a costly and inconclusive diagnostic exam by a repairman. A gay porno magazine thrown onto a ball field from a car window and perused with great interest by the adolescent members of both teams, two of whom meet in the woods some weeks later to reproduce the tableaus they have seen, leading to a gradual understanding that they are, in fact, gay, an incident, the memory of which causes one of the two, when he is well into a life that is disappointing emotionally, professionally, and sexually, to fling a gay porno magazine out his car window as he passes an occupied ball field on his way to what will be an unsuccessful job interview. A biscuit crushed into the slush of a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot, the orange toboggan whisking her to her death. A resume that betrays its author as utterly unqualified for the position for which she has applied, but which, because it smells good, leads its reader, a desperate experientially undernourished middle manager at an internet based retail corporation, to invite her into the office for an interview that, although it further betrays the applicant's complete unsuitability for the job, provides the middle manager with a physical impression to complement the good smell, which impression is intensely exciting, forcing him to hire her as a supplemental secretary, much to the bafflement, chagrin, and eventual disgust of his extant secretary, who, during her employer's lunch hour, removes the resume in question from his files and personally delivers it to the CEO, and who is with the CEO when he barges into the middle manager's office and finds the unsuitable supplemental secretary standing beside him, crying silently with her dress half off, while he sits in his reclining office chair sweating profusely and holding a plastic letter opener in a threatening manner. The house plant that will not die. 50 pairs of old blue jeans found at secondhand clothing stores and brought, at great expense, on a trip to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics, where, rumor had it, old blue jeans could be sold for a lot of money, but where this was no longer true, as so many previous visitors had heard the same rumor and done the same thing, creating a glut of old blue jeans, which were not even all that stylish there anymore, and causing the entire trip to be ruined by the necessity of hauling around these huge suitcases full of other people's jeans, which smelled kind of bad, as if those other people were currently wearing them. The urine sample produced for the canceled doctor's appointment and forgotten in the back of the fridge. My eyeglasses, covered with a thickening layer of dust that I never seem to notice, that I simply adjust to, until at last, I clean them out of habit, and discover a new world sharp and filled with detail, whose novelty and clarity I forget about completely within 15 minutes. Your signature, rendered illegible by disease. J. Robert Lennon reading a story, The Accursed Items, which is in a collection of stories called See You in Paradise. His latest novel is Broken River. Today's program was produced by Starlee Kline, Lisa Pollak, and myself with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, Jonathan Goldstein, and Diane Cook. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Additional production on the rerun of the show from Jessica Lussenhop, Catherine Raimondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. The Ron Carson story that I mentioned at the beginning of today's show is called "Plan B for the Middle Class" from the book of the same name. 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, who drops by the office now and then to remind the staff of the secret to his success-- to anybody's success, he feels. His personal motto-- Bite it like you mean it. Like cave woman. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Today's radio show was first recorded back in January 2002. It was still very early after September 11, and US forces at the time were fighting in Afghanistan. Today, of course, there are many more Americans fighting in the region than there were back then, and so the show about what daily life is like for some men and women in the war on terror still seems relevant. Our enemies are in hiding. Some live in caves. Some cross borders in disguise. Some slip from one safe house to the next. Sometimes they must go hungry. They pray. Meanwhile, on the largest warship ever built, stocked with the most advanced weapons in the world and a crew of over 5,000, an American sailor was doing her job in the war against terror. My name is Crevon Scott. I'm just filling up the vending machines. Is that your full-time job? Yes. It's your full-time job? Yeah, filling up vending machines all day for 12 hours. A few weeks ago, This American Life producers Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and I flew halfway around the world to spend some time on the USS John C. Stennis. The Stennis is one of two aircraft carriers that are launching jet fighters to support the ground troops in Afghanistan. Alex is the one who talked to Crevon Scott. What are the big sellers? Right now, it's Snickers and Starburst. Snickers goes real fast. What's the least favorite candy on board? Bonkers, the fruit chews. We got boxes of those, and still have them. Sometimes if we don't have anything else, we'll just put all rows of Bonkers, and they'll still stay in here. So people hate Bonkers? Yeah. Nobody likes them. We've still got them. But we've been ordering a whole lot of new stuff, so I've been trying to keep a whole variety of things in here, like Crunch 'n Munch. We just got the Crunch 'n Munch, and the Cheez-Its we normally didn't have in here. Cheez-Its? Yeah, the Cheeze-Its. The different kind of Cheez-Its. Our enemies, needless to say, are not supplied with Crunch 'n Munch. Yes, we're at war, and yes, that means thousands of Americans are in Kandahar and Kabul and other very dangerous places, doing very dangerous things. But for every person on the front lines, there are dozens backing them up with equipment, logistical support, and Cheez-Its. This aircraft carrier has only 50 or 60 pilots on board who actually drop bombs, who actually take part in combat. Everyone else is here, over 5,000 people, to get them in the air. Back home, over the last few months, we've heard about the pilots. We've heard about the people doing more heroic work. But everybody else on this ship is also at war, is also far from home, is also sacrificing something to be here, and we wanted to hear their stories too. It's one thing to turn your life upside down to go shoot bullets at bad guys. It's another to give up everything to go fill candy machines 12 hours a day. In the months since the USS Stennis embarked for the Arabian Sea, Crevon has only gone outside twice. If you picture for a moment what an aircraft carrier looks like, the deck of the ship, that big, flat deck, is where jets take off and land, so you can't just walk around up there. She sees daylight maybe once a day. She's 20 years old. It's her first time away from home. You know, the hardest part is just missing home, the home thing. If I can get over that, then I'll be all right. When I first got here, I was really bad. I cried every day, and stuff like that. My parents are really helpful. They email me every day and stuff. Today on our program, everyday life aboard a ship at war, what it's really like. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Alex and Wendy and I went to the Stennis together, and throughout this hour you'll hear from all three of us. We got to the Stennis about six weeks after the ship arrived in the North Arabian Sea. The other aircraft carrier on duty there, the Theodore Roosevelt, sends planes during the day, and the Stennis sends them at night. This means that reveille is called over the ship's PA system to wake everybody up for work at 7:00 PM. We expected a bugle, or at least a recording of a bugle, but it turns out to be sort of no frills. Reveille, reveille, all hands heave out. From the time we get up, we're led everywhere by a group of public affairs officers, who are, contrary to what you think they might be-- well, contrary to what we suspected they'd be anyway-- good-humored and quite helpful. Our first day they lead us down a long passageway. Every 15 feet or so there's a junction, and other hallways go off to the left or right, and ladders go up and down. It's like walking through a big Habitrail. Make a left there. Keep going. Remember, the boat is huge. It's four and 1/2 acres. But most of the life of the ship takes place here, in the eight stories of rooms and passageways below the flight deck. There are no windows on these decks, and the boat is so big that in good weather, it doesn't really even sway. And so most of the time, the sensation is less being at sea than being underground in some sort of huge subterranean warren. Can I cut through? You're constantly squeezing by people coming from the other direction. Hey you. Are you still awake? I'm still awake. After five minutes of winding our way through these narrow corridors, we come to a big, rounded steel door. It's maybe five feet tall, airtight. It's got a big lever in the middle. Someone turns it, and we climb through into one of the largest rooms we've ever seen. This is the hangar deck. It's two football fields long, three stories tall. Entering it is like walking through a closet door and finding yourself at the pitcher's mound in the Astrodome. We walk past parked fighter planes and hundreds of people, all scurrying around, pushing hand trucks, talking into walkie-talkies. And then we arrive at the hangar bay door, which is basically a three-story hole in the side of the ship. It's nighttime. Peering out, we can make out the shadowy outline and red running lights of another huge boat traveling at the same speed we are, maybe 100 yards away. A half dozen steel cables stretch between the two ships. Helicopters dip and swerve back and forth. And then, out of the darkness, two pallets with hundreds of pounds of food come swinging in on a cable. We just took on two pallets. Lieutenant Commander Mark [? Semmler ?] explains that they're bringing on enough food for 5,000 people for 30 days, plus machine parts, bundles of food. People pass boxes of fresh pears and strawberries and avocados fired brigade-style. The entire operation takes over 250 people. I know everyone knows they're at war. In most jobs it doesn't feel like a war. Not at all. We do our job. I know everything that's going on, but I'm still like, OK, we're living on the boat for six months. I feel like I'm doing my job the same way, and this is pretty much normal. It's not like being on the front lines with an M16 in my hand. Do you wish you had a job which put you more in the front lines? No, man, no. Not with my wife and stuff. No, I'm very happy with what I am. Do you feel in danger here? No. I mean, the most those guys got is rifles and missiles. They couldn't fire this far out into the ocean. No, actually I feel like this is one of the most secure places you can be. We've got 70-plus aircraft looking for the enemy. When I'm not on a ship, I feel like it could happen anywhere. Any time you drive over a bridge, or go to a public place, it could happen. And I definitely feel safer out here. The average age on board the ship is 21 years old, and when you ask people how they ended up here, the most common answer is, I don't know. They just shrug, and say they were failing out of school, or they wanted to see the world, or they wanted money for college. Almost all the enlistment stories can be summarized as either, I joined the Navy to straighten out my life, or, I joined the Navy because I wanted something more. I'm Jessica Phillips. I got here six days ago. I'm going through training right now. So everything's still a blur. I don't even know what day it is. Wednesday? Thursday? When I asked Jessica Phillips my question about how she ended up on this ship, she looked up at me and said, do you really want to hear this story? It all began, she said, two and half years ago, working at the mall in a Barnes & Noble, and living in the same small town where she'd grown up in Ocala, Florida. Before I'd never even pay attention to military people. It was so what, you're in the Navy. You're a drunken sailor or marine. People call you bullet sponge. Why would you do that? I didn't understand why people-- personally for me, I never thought I'd be in the military. It was a split-second decision. The place where I live is considered the black hole. Nobody gets out of there. Most people live and die there, and that's just the way it goes. You grow up with the same people. Everything stays the same. I couldn't take it anymore. So I told my-- I had two girl roommates at the time. And I looked at them. I said, you can have all my stuff. I packed up a suitcase, and I was like, I'm leaving, and I left that night. And I left them money for that month's rent and everything. Look, you need to find a new roommate. I get in my car, which was an '89 Mustang, and just putter away. Jessica had no idea where she was headed. There were vague thoughts of finding someplace cool and applying to college. She made her way up the coast to Raleigh, North Carolina. Jessica ended up stopping in Raleigh, moving in with friends. But without a job, she had to find other ways to make ends meet. I used to go gas station to gas station, and ask people for money pretty much. I would be like listen, I'm on a road trip. Most people hand me money, $5 or something. But you can only do that for so long. So I was just sitting there, and I was trying to figure out what I did this for, first of all. I gave up all my stuff. I'm almost broke. I was just like, I need to figure out what I need to do. I need to do something with myself. We were having a party, and everybody was partying, and I'm sitting outside. And some guy comes up to talk to me, and he said something about what are you doing tomorrow? And I said, I'm going to go home and join the Navy. And he was like, what? He was just like, what are you talking about? I was like, I think I'm going to pack up, and go home and join the Navy. I was like, this is what I need to do. Why did the Navy pop into your head? Why Navy? I have no idea. I think my manager at Barnes & Noble was in the Navy for two years. She was a yeoman, but that was like 20 years ago. And that kind of like came back to me. And I think-- this sounds so cheesy though, but it was like a Navy commercial came on in between television or something. It's the one where they say that the sea is our classroom. They use the intro to some hard core rock song. I think it's a Limp Bizkit song. Maybe not. Maybe it's a Godsmack. I don't know, but there's the carrier, and it's racing across, and they've got the jets flying over, and they got the people all smiling in their nice uniforms, and sitting in class doing their schoolwork, and the people who are sitting in front of the radar and looking at the picture. And then they're like, most people go to school, but this is our classroom. And then it says gonavy.com. So then I was like, hey, maybe I will. From the time you told that guy at the party you were going to join the Navy to the time you were in the Navy, how many days passed? Six. Five. That was a Friday, and that Wednesday I was in boot camp. When I got back, I actually got a copy of the commercial from the Navy. The entire thing takes 15 seconds, and Jessica's memory of it is pretty much perfect. Why should you consider getting an education in the Navy? This is one of your classrooms. Navy, accelerate your life. And how is it for you? Once you were in boot camp, did you have second thoughts? Did I ever have second thoughts. When you first get on the bus, it's a whole nice trip. Everybody's polite to you, everything else. Then you get on the bus, and you're sitting there. Some guy gets on the bus, and tells you you're not home anymore and starts yelling. It's the basic boot camp thing. I'm not your mama or your papa. Stop talking. I don't want to hear it. So I was just like, OK, they're just trying to scare me. Whatever. I'm sitting there laughing. I'm like, God, this is such a movie. I was like, how stereotypical is this? So they bus us to the Navy boot camp in Great Lakes. And we get off the bus, and it's the middle of the night. It's cold, and they're yelling at you to stand against the wall, and why can't you stand still, and everything else. And when I call your name, yell out your social. And they yell out my name, and I'm standing there yelling my social security number. They're telling me I'm not doing it loud enough. And I'm thinking, what did I do? What am I doing here? It's 5:00. Gosh, this day is so clear. It's 5:00 in the morning. And you're looking at a stranger, and you understand everything they're feeling. That was one of the few moments where you look at somebody, and you're like, I know exactly what you're thinking. And I know what you're feeling, because I do too. It got better, of course, and Jessica was satisfied with the Navy. At 22, she says, she's been to countries and seen things she never would have otherwise. But her feelings about the Navy became even stronger after September 11. As far as September 11, a personal reflection of what it does: you become a little bit more patriotic. Before it was kind of like, maybe, ah, I'm in it. It's a job. I do my eight hours a day, and then I'm done. I'll be able to get my college money. If you had asked me before as a civilian, I'd have been like, oh, war. Make love, not war. Let's go for the hippie side of it. But now it's just kind of like, I want to cry. I'm tired, so I'm going to start crying. But I look at my family, and it's just like, I'm willing to die for these people on the street, the people you're walking by. I'm willing to give, sacrifice myself for what has happened. I don't even know how to correctly say it, but when you realize that you're really fighting for something and for somebody, it kind of gets more personal. Almost everyone we talked to said some version of this, even people who happened to be doing jobs they hated. They all felt proud to be out there defending their country. And sometimes while they would talk about it, an almost startled tone would creep into their voices, as if they were as surprised as anyone that this crappy job felt so different than all the other ones they'd ever done. They felt they were doing something that mattered. To give you a sense of the variety of things going on at any given moment on board the Stennis, here's what we passed walking down just one hallway. On O3 deck was Senior Chief Barbara Mendoza, an electronics repair shop, a room in charge of anti-submarine warfare, an air traffic control center, a conference room that they actually call the war room, the office of the admiral who's in charge of this ship and the six other ships and two nuclear-powered subs which travel with it at all times, protecting it. This is CVIC. CVIC means? Intelligence. They're not really that intelligent. No, they are. And this is the air wing commander's office. Toward the back of the boat, some corridors have red lights on instead of white, indicating people are asleep. We pass a guy playing Nintendo. Video games of all sorts are huge on the Stennis in off-hours. A guy runs past us with a bloody nose. We never find out the story behind that. There's a workout room, and next to it a locked door that music's blaring out of. Barbara raps on the door. [KNOCKING] They're not going to be able to hear me. On the door is a sign-up sheet for bands who can use the room as a rehearsal space. There are lots of bands on board. This one's called Recoil. You feel the door is just echoing. It's just vibrating. [KNOCKING] The guys in Recoil work on planes or on the flight deck. It can be hard to work out their schedule so they're all free to rehearse at the same time. So where do you draw your inspiration from? A lot of stuff. That song comes from my ex-wife. I recently got divorced, and it came out of nowhere. I got blindsided. So I draw on my personal experiences. And then where do you perform? We've performed at the Steel Beach Picnic a couple days ago. Where's that? Up on the flight deck. Every holiday, like Christmas, they have bands performing in the mess decks, or in the hangar bay. They're going to have a Super Bowl halftime show. We're going to play in the hangar bay. The Super Bowl is sort of tricky for an aircraft carrier. They scheduled a day off from flying, but the quality of the ship's satellite TV reception depends on which direction they're heading, so the plan was this: at the start of the game they would set course in the most TV-friendly direction at the slowest possible speed. When they got to halftime, they would turn a 97,000-ton ship around, and then chug back as fast as possible to where they began, while Recoil and other bands played. And then, when the game started again, they would set out again in that first TV-friendly heading at the slowest possible speed. It's now just a few hours since we saw the resupply operation. We're in the ship's library. It's 11:30 at night. Summer Anderson is on a schedule where her work shift just ended. But before she goes to sleep, she comes here and waits in line for a half hour to go into one of the computers, where she can do email. While she waits, I ask her about her job, which involves moving airplanes around from one spot to another, but she cuts us off. You want to talk about something interesting? Sure, let's talk about something interesting. My job's not interesting. No, it's tedious. What are you liking about being on board? I actually love the Navy. I don't like my job per se, but I love the whole military. I like the lifestyle. Which part of the lifestyle? It becomes kind of like a big family. You all live together. You all dress, and talk, and eat the same exact things. We shower in the same exact showers. It becomes like a culture. Summer's friend Melissa walks into the library. She's older than Summer, 25-- Summer's just 19-- and is here to write email back home. Well, I'm a single mom. For my son's kindergarten class he has to email me, so that's why I stay up for that extra hour after work to read them. I'd assumed that Summer would also be writing to people back home. She tells me no. She's writing to friends on the ship. It's the only way to keep up with people, she says. Everybody works different hours, and there's a lot to keep up with. That's the other thing about the ship. Rumors just fly. It's amazing. I found out the other day that I liked somebody I never even met. Rumors are amazing on a ship, because people get bored. I don't gossip. And it just goes way out of proportion. It's really actually kind of funny. Most of the rumors on board have to do when they're going to get to go to shore. These circulate constantly. The second biggest subject? You know, other people. It's kind of like high school sometimes. Yeah, it's like a small town in the outskirts of nowhere. You know, how everybody knows everything about everybody. You can walk up to someone, look at their name tag, and be like, oh, that's who they were talking about. OK. This conversation about rumors ends up getting Alex and Wendy and I in a little bit of trouble, mostly because of me. I find the entire subject so interesting that I bring it up the next place we visit, the ship's laundry. I'm having what I think is a perfectly innocent conversation with an airman named Jason [? Bess. ?] His regular job is to work on high-tech aviation electronics, but the way the Navy works is that when you first report to a ship, you do 90 days at one of the jobs that nobody signs up for when they join the Navy, that the Navy has to have someone do, or you can't actually run a navy-- cleaning, serving food, and doing laundry, thousands of pounds a day of laundry, stacked in bags to the ceiling. Right now I'm opening the dryer. This dryer holds about 100 pounds of laundry. Jason, it turns out, actually doesn't mind his 90 days doing wash. I don't know. I really like laundry, actually. Oh yeah? Yeah. I feel good. It's just washing laundry. My regular job is really complicated, and sometimes I have a hard time comprehending all the electronical systems, and memorizing all the different systems, and the start-ups and all that. And laundry was a good break, because it's really simple. Here all you do is you just throw it in the washer, take it out of the wash, put it in the dryer. And there's not too much complication. And then, at the end of this perfectly nice conversation, I bring up the new thing that I'd learned just minutes before in the library. I've heard there's a lot of rumors on board a ship, like there's always rumors. What are some of the rumors that you've heard? Oh, you always hear rumors about when we're going to pull in, when we're not going to pull in, when we're going to see a port. And a lot of rumors about when we're going home, because some people say we're going to stay longer. Some people say we may leave earlier. Rumors about like what ports that we're going to hit on the way back, because everybody wants to go to Australia. And of course you hear rumors about different girls and different guys sleeping together, and people getting in trouble and getting caught for that. What happens if they caught for that? You get in a lot of trouble. You're not allowed to have any fraternization on the ship. That's another thing that's kind of rough. I haven't had much physical contact in a long time. Even just a hug every now and then, you're not really supposed to do that in uniform, and you're always in uniform. I miss affection a lot. I do. I grew up in a very affectionate home, and I'd like to just get a hug every now and then. Jason tells me another rumor or two he's heard, we say goodbye, and Wendy and Alex and I go down to get some food. Perhaps 15 minutes later, one of the public affairs officers informs me that Jason and I had been overheard talking about rumors on the Stennis, rumors about men and women sleeping together on board, and that within minutes this had been reported up the ranks, all the way to the ship's executive officer, the person who oversees the day to day operations of the Stennis. People were upset. What sort of story were we putting together anyway? I won't bore you with the details of several rather tense conversations. Let's just say that we had inadvertently hit a nerve. It's been just eight years since women were first deployed on to combat ships and aircraft carriers, and just 10 years since the Navy was forced to rethink how women were treated in the service in the wake of the Tailhook scandal. This is all still enormously sensitive, sensitive enough that this conversation in the laundry was enough to raise red flags up and down the chain of command. At some point, we're brought in without our tape recorders to meet the ship's executive officer, a friendly but tightly-wound man named Jeff Miller. And he explains that when new crew members arrive for duty on the Stennis, he personally gives the speech reiterating Navy policy on male-female relationships, a policy he sums up for them as no dating. A date, he tells them, is as simple as two people walking side by side closely, heads leaning together and talking. A date is when you sit too near each other. You should be a minimum, he tells them, of two butt-widths apart. When he spots crew members sitting closer than that, he'll ask them if it's a date, and when of course they say no, he'll tell them, well then make sure it doesn't look like a date. Which all seems sensible enough. This is a workplace, like any other, and you can't sleep with people you work with. But consider what the Navy is up against in trying to make this policy work. 12% of the crew on the Stennis is female. The average age on board, as we said, is 21 years old. That is thousands of young people cooped up together in a close space for months at a time far from home. Trying to keep people from having sex with each other in that situation is in a sense fighting nature itself. In any case, after that incident the public affairs officers felt that it was necessary to monitor our interviews a little more closely. Lieutenant Jeff Gorell, one of these very smart, very capable people saddled with the thankless job of escorting us around the ship, a job which the lieutenant compared to herding cats, was with me on the mess deck not long after all this came to pass. We had some time to kill, and I saw a group of talkative young sailors who looked like they might be talkative interviewees. I asked Lieutenant Gorell if it will be OK to talk with them, but worried about their big mouths, he steered me instead to a serious-looking sailor named Kevin [? Wrenn. ?] This turned out to be a mistake for poor Lieutenant Gorell. I'm just ready to go home. I don't know what it's about. How come you chose the service? A court order. Really, court-ordered? Yeah, that's how they do it in Texas. Instead of you going to jail, they send you to the armed service. So that's how-- They gave you the choice of jail or the Navy? Yeah, or the armed service, any armed service. You don't have to tell me the answer to this, but what kind of trouble were you in? Drugs. Drugs? Yeah. How much jail would you have had to do? Seven years. So how do you like it? It sucks. It's like a prison on water. That's what it is. I don't really like it. This was not, of course, what Lieutenant Gorell was hoping for from young Kevin. I asked, hoping to turn things to a more positive area, if Kevin is changing. If people grow when the courts send them out here. No, because people get flown off the ship almost every month for doing drugs and all kinds of stuff. So no, it's whatever you got inside of you. That's what's going to change you. If you don't want to be changed, you ain't going to be changed. I could practically hear the acid eating away at Lieutenant Gorell's stomach at this answer. I wracked my brain for the most completely neutral question I can ask. So what do you do on your job? Like what is there to do? You just walk around all day. For eight hours you walk around and check spaces. And what are you looking for? Just people having sex, fights, anybody drinking, doing stuff they ain't supposed to do on the boat. Hopefully we'll get to see, but I haven't seen anything yet. You haven't seen anything yet? No. I've been looking, though. I glance over and catch the expression on the lieutenant's face. It's actually like people are pretty well behaved on this boat. No, that's not true. That's not true. I don't know who told you that, but this boat is like a love boat right now. All right, you're done. If anyone ever asks you to do an interview again, say no. This is what Lieutenant Gorell has to deal with all day long in the service of his country. As for the love boat aspect of living on the Stennis, a number of men and women both pointed out, with the incredibly long work hours, who has the energy? By this point, perhaps you've noticed that everyone you've heard so far this hour sounds very, very young. One of the most amazing things about the Navy, and the military in general, is that it takes people who are so young, and then gets them to operate something as huge and complicated as the Stennis. When I get a chance to visit the bridge and interview the captain of the Stennis, James McDonell, he makes clear that he is intensely aware of the youth of his crew. When he walks through the decks, they tend to chat him up, but on a very narrow range of "are we there yet" questions. When are we going home? When is the end of cruise? What are we going to do after we get back from cruise? How often are you asked this question? Oh, several hundred times a day. So, literally, I walk around this ship, and I see the sailors, and I have to come up with a little shtick to make sure that I portray it correctly. It's not very satisfying to just say, we don't know. Although that's the truth, we don't know. Another thing Captain McDonell is very aware of is the need to keep everybody in touch with how they are contributing to the overall war effort. Every single day, he gets on the ship's PA system and reviews any international news that might have consequences for the Stennis. Just to kind of keep the crew connected, I just like to make sure that they keep focused on why we're out here. It's very easy, as I'm sure you've probably seen, to start letting your mind drift about other things other than the task at hand. When I have young folks up here-- I have the sailors of the day up here every day, one from the air wing and one from the ship. The interesting thing is that I will ask them just kind of, hey, do you know who the Secretary of State is? And that's about a one in three get it right. Do you know who the Secretary of Defense is? And maybe a little higher percentage, but not much more, because they're so focused on their world that it really kind of is our job to help them break out of that a little bit, and put their very hard work in the context of the big mosaic that's going on. A few hours later, we stood in a passageway and listened to the captain's daily message. Aboard USS John C. Stennis, good day, this is the captain. Day 35 of combat operations over Afghanistan. This is an incredibly uncertain time for all of us aboard. The war on global terrorism, tensions between India and Pakistan, separate warnings from the President of the United States to Iran and Iraq-- But it's the PA announcements which give you an even deeper sense of who the crew is, and what it means to supervise a shipload of young people, announcements like this one from the ship's executive officer, Jeff Miller. The real topic I need to talk about right now is fresh water. For some reasons we're not completely sure of, we've gotten ourselves in a little bit of a bind with the amount of fresh water we have on board. I'm going-- He's upbeat. He thanks them for their hard work on the problem. He urges them on to more. The tone is like a great high school football coach. So here's what I need you to do, and I need all 5,000 of us to work on this one today. We need to make sure that we're taking short Navy showers. That's a little redundant. Every Navy shower is supposed to be short. We expect the water to run for no more than two minutes. So the trick is, turn the water on, get wet, turn the water off, soap up, turn the water on, rinse off, turn the water back off again. If you're taking a Hollywood shower right now, you're going to hurt the ship. Right now, for the next 10 to 12 hours, if we can turn this around and start to build up our water reserves, we can avoid-- Coming up, what it's like to drop a bomb on Afghanistan. In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. This week, with tens of thousands of Marines and sailors, infantry divisions, and fighter wings, and National Guardsmen deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the war on terror, we're re-broadcasting our program from early 2002, when This American Life producers Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and I visited the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier that at the time was cruising somewhere in the Arabian Sea, flying bombing missions over Afghanistan, and monitoring the region for Al Qaeda nautical traffic. We visited the briefing room at one of the air squadrons on the Stennis, a squadron that calls itself the World Famous Screwbirds. On a desk there's a big jar of red licorice and some homemade blondies that someone's girlfriend sent everybody. On the wall, there's this underground newspaper the aviators print, which is in the style of the Onion. Stories and headlines all consist of these inside jokes like, "New Billet Added to Air Wing Watch," which, um, we don't understand at all, but everybody else seems to find hilarious. On the backs of the leather chairs the pilots sit on are their call signs, the official nicknames they use over the radio on their missions. There's Frenchie, Tank, Chewie, Fish, Rain Man, Mr. Burns, that last one for a pilot who supposedly looks like the character on the Simpsons. This is Pom-Pom. Oh yeah? Pom-Pom. Interesting. Yeah, fascinating. Well yeah, there's a story behind it, though. I think I know it. Hmm, what was it? Oh, one of us sitting here, call sign Pom-Pom, was a cheerleader in college. Good friend. We're very close here. One of them shows us the official drawing of the squadron mascot, and quietly points out that it's a bird whose wing has a middle feather extended like a middle finger. At 4:00 AM, nine of these guys sit down in their flight suits to watch an intelligence briefing that comes in over closed circuit TV. Then a young guy named Steve [? Coppler ?] stands up in front. All right. Good morning. Briefing here for our [? XAR ?] mission. 702, 705, and we've got Gonzo in 706. I'd like you to act as a fill. Watching him, it occurs to me how rare it is as an adult to hear somebody speak in your own language for 10 minutes, and not understand a word he's saying. Divert field, we're working blue water ops. If we need to divert and we're feet dry, you know where we're going. And if we're feet wet, we'll go to Masirah there. Then they suit up. It's a crazy amount of survival gear, 20 to 25 pounds worth, including the parachute, survival knife, radios, flares, and something called a blood chit. Screwbirds' commanding officer, Ross Myers, a trim man with the call sign Monkey Butt stitched on to his Navy coveralls in neat block letters, pulls one out to show us. It's a piece of paper with an American flag and a serial number, with the same message in several languages. Oh, Arabic, English, Dari, Pashto, Uzbek-- which would have to be for Uzbekistan-- Persian, Farsi. And then in English it gives a translation. Yes. It says-- I'm an American, and do not speak your language. I will not harm you. I bear no malice towards your people. My friend, please provide me food, water, shelter, and necessary medical attention. Also please provide safe passage to the nearest friendly forces of any country supporting the Americans and their allies. You will be rewarded for assisting me when you present this number to American authorities. Everybody maintain their [UNINTELLIGIBLE] station. We'll be taking the next aircraft out now, 20 minutes. The Screwbirds head out to their planes. An aircraft carrier's main mission is to fly planes, but when you see what it takes to launch or land a jet on a boat, what you realize is that human beings should not be doing this at all. The runway is just too short. For the planes to get enough lift under their wings, the crew actually has to drive the boat at top speed into the wind. Then the front wheel of the plane is attached to machinery under the deck, the catapult, which literally flings it off the edge of the deck like a pebble from a slingshot. Landing the plane on the deck is much harder than taking off, and it's very, very dangerous. The head of the Screwbirds, Ross Myers, aka Monkey Butt, says that in his 16 years of service, he's personally seen six of his friends crash into the back of the boat while trying to land. None of them survived. Basically what you're trying to do is latch a hook that hangs from the back of your plane on to one of four cables that are stretched across the deck. An airman named Dave Cruz explains how it works. The pilot looks at something called the ball, which indicates if he's coming in on target, and talks to guys called LSOs-- they're fellow pilots actually, who stand right on deck. And it's up to the LSOs to guide him in. They're talking to him over the radio? Right now they're talking to that next guy who are coming in, which is a Tomcat, which is 3/4 of a mile. He's calling the ball, and stating the fuel state. 115 on course, on glide path, 3/4 of a mile. Call the ball. 115, Tomcat ball 8.0. Roger ball, 28 knots down the angle. Right now it's about a quarter of a mile. Right now he's just telling him you're on ball, and it should be good to go. He's right over the edge of the deck? Yes. That is too short. That is too short, which is the one wire. That is too short. The one wire is the wire closest to the rear of the boat, and if you catch it, that means that you were dangerously close to going too low and slamming into the back of the carrier. Sometimes a pilot can't straighten out his approach enough, and the LSOs have to wave him off. It can get a little tense. Here comes another one. Just describe how he's doing. All right, he's turning. He's turning into the 3/4 mile now. Roger ball, 28 knots down the angle. And right now he's a little too low. All right, now the pilot should be telling him, kind of give it a little throttle. Don't settle. Power. Power. Wave off, wave off. One deck below, in the Blue Diamond Squadron briefing room, I talked to a pilot named Jeremy Markin about what it's like when things don't go well during a landing. Who knows what happens? Maybe you lose an important instrument inside, and it's nighttime, and maybe there's weather. And so you're in the goo, we call it, inside the clouds. It's dark. So you tell yourself you've got to fly the best pass ever, and you come down, and just one thing leads to another. And the next thing you know, you're looking at the back of the boat, and you're close to it, and you've got guys screaming at you. You put in the afterburners, and your hook touches down a couple feet past the back of the boat. And you go taxi into the one wire there, high speeds, and realize they caught you. Your legs are shaking. You're still on blower. Your lights are still on, and the air boss says, we got you, you can relax now. And it's kind of hard to relax right away. You kind of got to unwind for a little bit. You said you're hooking it to the back of the boat by a couple inches. What does that mean? Well, obviously the hook hit the back of the boat. That means your plane hit the back of the boat. It wouldn't be good. The Blue Diamonds' briefing room is just like the Screwbirds' room, only a little more spartan and a little more macho, including the nicknames, which make Monkey Butt sound almost dignified by comparison. Balls, Scrote, Itchy. I got Itchy for a while because my last name is Balsitis. Looks like Balls-itis, sort of like some kind of disease. Both Alex and I hung out with the Blue Diamonds for about an hour. I interviewed Dave Balsitis on one side of the room, while Alex interviewed another pilot, Jeremy Markin, on the other side. And what struck us when we got home is how closely they agree on some things, and how far apart they are on others. How long does it take to get to Afghanistan? Anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours. It depends on where you're going. And what's it like over in Afghanistan? What does it look like? Actually it looks pretty in the mountainous areas. Snow on the mountains, looks like real nice mountain peaks. What does it look like when you fly over Afghanistan, and you fly over these targets? I can't cuss, can I? You can, but we'll have to beep it out. OK. It's a [BLEEP] hole. It really is. There is absolutely nothing down there. I don't see anything worth fighting for down there. It's all sand, rocks. I don't know how they live down there. Yeah, it's probably not much different from out near Glamis in southern California or something. There's dunes, mountains. It looks like a beautiful country. There's no color. There's no irrigation, no lakes, no streams, no farms. Just brown, and some snow. So it's pretty ugly. When you're actually doing what you're doing, you're kind of so busy that you don't really have a lot of time to sit back and go hey, look at the scenery. But in those moments, those positive moments you have, and you look around, the world's a beautiful place. It's kind of weird to imagine up that high and you're looking down. It looks so beautiful, and then you get snapped back in to what's going on down there, and you got to refocus. This might be sort of a bonehead civilian question, but is it hard to drop a bomb? Oh, you mean like in almost a moral sense? Emotional or-- Emotional, it's a double-edged emotion. It's what you train for your whole life. The fact of you doing it, doing it correctly, and you drop your bomb on the target, it's emotional from a hey, I did my job. And just that I was trained, and I did it well. While you're up there, I don't really think about the other side of the sword. It's my job to go up there and drop bombs, and so I do it. I feel no remorse about dropping a bomb on them down below. It's not sadistic. It's just I think it's the right thing. Someone came into our house and trampled on our land, and to go on their land and absolutely pulverize them makes me feel very warm inside. I think that's great. I'm just glad I could be part of the team that's out here doing it, and dropping bombs on the bad people. I sleep at night. It's 7:30 in the morning, and it's over 12 hours since reveille first called everyone to work. For most people it's the end of the work day. In the mess hall on the second deck, Cynthia and David have just finished their dinner, and they're waiting for the 8 o'clock movie, Exit Wounds, to begin. Every now and then we get to watch a chick movie. Yeah, we got to watch Stepmom the other day. Yes. Yeah, I like Stepmom, Steel Magnolias. They've been showing that one lately. They've got it on board. Oh yeah, I haven't seen that one. There are TVs just about everywhere people are not working on the ship, with two channels of movies and network shows 24 hours a day. Every Tuesday night we have a movie night where we'll pick a movie through email. We vote on what we want to see. I voted for Miss Congeniality. I'm so going to watch that tonight. As did I. Sitting there side by side in their matching navy blue jumpsuits, they look like they're best friends, if there was such a thing for a man and a woman to be on a Navy ship. They're both reading the Left Behind series. He's on book two. She's on book four. They love playing The Game of Life on Cynthia's PlayStation, and they both enjoy a good chick movie. David joined the Navy so he could get out of his small town in Iowa, and Cynthia joined so she could get her and her three kids off of welfare, and it worked. They're are all doing great now, she says. And I've said this before. People laugh at me, but when I come out to sea, it's like a break for me, because at home I've got kids to take care of, a house to take care of. And I get out here, and all I've got to do is take care of myself, go to work, and go to sleep, kill time in between. So it's kind of a break being out here for me. Even though she has 11 years of service and he has 13, both with decent rank, this is how they live. David sleeps in a room called a berthing with 196 other guys, and he's one of the oldest at 34. Each sailor gets a bunk bed with a locker underneath it, and their entire personal space is six feet long, a foot and a half tall, and about two feet wide. And it's set up in the berthing, it's set up kind of in areas. You'll have this one little neighborhood that's listening to this music, and I'm over in the old folks place. Most of us listen to country music or something slow. See, I live in a 26-person berthing, so it's not quite as bad as 197. A lot of us have brought stuff to make it kind of homey. Mine's Tweety Bird. I have a Tweety Bird comforter, a Tweety Bird pillows, Tweety Bird wallpaper around my rack. You don't see that stuff down in the male berthing at all. It's now very late, meaning 9:00 in the morning, and Senior Chief Barbara Mendoza invites us to the chief's mess, a special dining room for the ship's chiefs. There are maybe 30 tables, with chairs stacked on top, and the floors are shiny and clean. The room is quiet, aside from the pleasant electric hum of refrigerators and drink machines, and the far-off purring of the ship's engines. In the center of the room, five middle-aged men are sitting around one of the tables. It's their nightly card game. They're playing Hearts, and they're passing around a picture of someone jumping into the ocean during a recent break, when they were allowed to swim. This is a perfect shot. You have Randy there jumping off the elevator, and they have a picture of a shark trying to swallow him up. Nobody can decide, though, whether he's going in or being spit back out. It's up to your interpretation. The person who made this picture, this fake picture on the computer, is the person you just heard, Bobby, Bobby [? Boucher, ?] which is not his real name. Joel, which is not his real name, explains. Well, his real name's Mike. We call him Bobby. You want to know why? Yes. Tell him the story of Bobby [? Boucher. Bobby goes over here to a bar with one of our other friends, Brent. They go out, and Brent offers to buy him something. Well-- It was a free beer. No, no, you're getting it all wrong. We went to the-- They do this over and over. Tell a tip story. Tell him about the girl in Singapore. And then they all start laughing. And then they finally tell the stories, barely getting through them because someone is always interrupting to say they're not telling the story right. Tell him about the tip, Bobby. No. Tell him the tip. You've got to. You got to tell him the tip, Bobby. Yeah. If you picture how the Navy works, there are the enlisted men, and then are the officers. The enlisted, and you've met lots of them on today's show, usually come into the Navy at 18 or 19 years old, straight out of high school. Officers come into the Navy as officers, with higher rank and privileges. The chiefs are the highest-ranking enlisted people, and anyone in the Navy will tell you they run the Navy. They're the buffer between the bosses and the people who actually do the work. We have to keep the high-echelon people from bothering these guys. Let them do their job, at the same time getting the job done so that these guys up here are happy. You become like everybody's, your whole division's, father and mother all rolled into one. They need to cry on your shoulder, you let them cry on your shoulder. You need to kick them in the butt, you kick them in the butt. You listen to their problems. You talk to them. You try to help them, and that's probably what most of us spend most our time doing. Every day, The Don says, somebody comes to him with a problem back home they need to solve, and The Don-- his real name is Brent-- helps them out. Often this means getting on the phone and contacting another chief out there somewhere. There's a whole chief-to-chief network. The chief that I need to talk to knows somebody at the command, and they can talk to that chief, who can get this whole thing going. It's a fraternity. We work together, and that's one of the biggest things about being a chief. We are one. The goal-- once you start out in the Navy, if you have a good chief from the beginning, your goal is to be a chief. I mean, your goal is to be that chief. And for me that was the goal. Who was your chief? It was a guy named Chief Womack. He was my first chief in the Navy, and he was there anytime I needed anything. He was always there. Late one night, Lieutenant Gorell and a TV crew from San Diego and I are on our way back to the staterooms, when Gorell invites us into the officer's mess for a bowl of cereal before bed. Inside there's a group of officers talking at another table, and one enlisted man breaking down the serving line. It's late, and most of the people in the ship are in bed. So we're eating cereal and talking when the enlisted man appears with a huge tray of food. We all look at each other. No one asked him to fix us anything. Just thought you all might like a snack, sir, the enlisted man says to Gorell, and puts the tray on our table. The tray contains 12 chicken breast sandwiches, each with lettuce and a slice of American cheese on hamburger buns. There are four of us, and we already have our cereal. Apparently, the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force applies to food service as well. Later in our cabin, Wendy, Ira, and I talk it over. Being on an aircraft carrier, we're surrounded on all sides by the lopsidedness of American military superiority. Just the very fact of the carrier itself-- no other country even has one like the Stennis. The US has 12. But it's the chicken sandwiches which somehow make that fact real. Such is the size and strength of the attention to detail, which fully conveys the sheer uncontested might of the American military. Not only does the Navy give each pilot one of the fastest, most expensive fighter planes in the world to fly, not only does it provide him with the most accurate bombs in the history of warfare to drop, it also feeds him at any hour of the day more chicken sandwiches than you can possibly eat. It gives him a room to hang out in, with his own official nickname on the chair, and a practice space for his band. Someone, somewhere, stitches Monkey Butt into his flight suit. The other countries don't have a chance. You've never slept in bunk beds with your boss until you've slept in bunk beds with your boss on an aircraft carrier. By Navy standards, the room Ira and I shared was luxurious, only two of us, not 200 or 600. But the problem with the room, everybody warned us, was that it was right below the flight deck, and it could get kind of loud. And sure enough, we were woken up several times that first night by the thumps and the clanks of the planes landing and taking off. Still, we figured, we could manage. Then, the second night, a bus ran full speed into the wall by my head. That's what it sounded like. Like the steel wall six inches from the top of my head had just suffered a collision with a very fast-moving bus. It was the loudest sound I'd ever heard. And here's what it's like to be in a bunk bed with your boss on an aircraft carrier when you've just heard the loudest sound you've ever heard, if your boss is my boss. What happened next was this: the loudest sound I'd ever heard happened again. And I have to stress, this is not a normal loud sound, like a rock band or a car horn or even a stick of dynamite exploding. This is a sound that's only made when things that shouldn't happen happen. It's the sound of disaster, of destruction. It is the sound of catastrophe. I lay there stunned for a second, and then I heard Ira jerk into action, saw his feet swing down from the top bunk. I actually said the words, "You're right man," as I threw off my blanket and started to run. And then I looked behind me, and I saw Ira digging through his equipment. And I realized I was running for the door, and Ira was running for his tape recorder. One two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. [INAUDIBLE] While we waited for the loud sound to happen again, Ira and I handed the microphone back and forth between our bunks and recorded our conversation. If there was a problem, though, there would be alarms going off and stuff, right? I mean, it just wouldn't just be like a horrible accident and then nothing-- and then no sound, right? They'd be saying, all hands to your stations, that sort of thing, right? I'm sure if it really gets bad around here, there's bells of some sort. The loud sound never happened again, and eventually we fell sleep, though Ira left the tape recorder running just in case. We were out for maybe half an hour when we were woken up again. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] control. Loss of feed in number two reactor plant. Reactor mechanical casualty assistance team, layer number two, reactor room. "Loss of feed in number two reactor plant. Reactor mechanical and casualty assistance teams, report to number two reactor room." Casualty assistance teams? That can't be good, right? After half an hour in which I tried to convince myself that my stomach ache was not radiation sickness, and Ira tried to figure out how he could get down to the ship's nuclear reactors to report on the accident, another PA announcement came on, just like the first, but with one additional sentence. Reactor mechanical casualty assistance team, layer number two, reactor room. This is a drill. At breakfast, we learned what had happened. The loud sound? That was a routine test for one of the catapults, and the PA announcement had been a routine drill. The two things were totally unrelated. Both things, they said, happened almost every day. Thank you very much, Alex, for that report. There's one more thing that happened on the Stennis that I keep thinking about in the weeks since we returned. It was at the end of our very last day there, which meant 10:40 in the morning. And Barbara Mendoza, the chief who had been kind enough to invite us to the chief's mess, took Alex and Wendy and I outside to the very back of the ship, the fantail, looking at the water and the sky. It's one of her favorite places on the Stennis. I come out here every day before I go to bed. It's very peaceful. I do a lot of thinking out here. I relax a lot, and I really like it. I mean, look at it. It's beautiful. There's no other place to be. We look out at the north Arabian Sea, the waters that military vessels have sailed for thousands of years. Persians were here 500 years before the birth of Christ. Alexander the Great sent ships here, the Ottomans, the Chinese, the Romans, the Portuguese, all of them great naval powers in their day. Hey chief, do you ever think about the fact that you're serving over here in this particular ocean, this particular body of water, how long people have been traveling by sea across this? You know, I always wonder-- when I look at big bodies of water like this-- I always wonder how many ships are on the bottom of this floor. So that's one of the things that I like to think about when I'm out here. I wonder how many ships are out here on the bottom that never made it home. Hundreds? Over hundreds of them? From all the wars that we've been through. Here you are working for the mightiest navy in the history of the world. Isn't that cool? How cool is that? Off to the starboard side of the ship, we can see the USS Port Royal protecting our back. We Americans are here for now, while it lasts. Original music for this hour by John Kimbrough. You know, you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, best-selling 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 his personal life these days this way: It's like a love boat right now. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Edward was just a little boy when he was switched from regular classes to special ed. It was kindergarten, and he viewed the move as a big step up. I thought it was cool because when you think of the word special meaning special, you know, like good, a good thing? Yeah. And, with my name being Edward, I thought it was kind of built for me. Oh. Like, Ed meant you? Yeah. He was Ed. Of course he was going to special ed. And he didn't really figure out what special ed classes really meant for years, until one day in junior high school riding the school bus. And one of my friends, who was younger than me, on the bus, asked me to help him with his homework. And I noticed he had harder homework than we did. Why? What do you remember about his homework? Because he was doing like, I think it was, timetables and division-type things. And ours was addition and subtraction, still, and we were a couple of grades higher than he was. And the spelling words was like, they looked like high-schoolers would have a spelling word, kind of thing like, forbidden and probably some more words harder than that, kinda. Like the word forbidden. And what were you guys doing? Cow, sheep, sleep. It kind of got me mad. And I just kind of thought we were all regular. And then, that day, I saw kind of like a divider kind of thing. I would think that, that would be very hard. Well, yeah, because you kind of think of yourself as regular until these teachers and people of high authority are telling you you're not the same as everybody else. So you have to figure out OK, so why am I different? A lot of kids in junior high school and high school feel different. But to be told no, it's not your imagination, you are different? This moment is something a lot of kids in special ed get to at some point or another: a shocking moment of understanding that they are not the same as other kids and that everybody else knew that long ago. They knew it when they didn't. We were doing a project in first grade. Putting a snowman-- actually, we had to put cut-out objects, like cut-out circles, and put it on there, and put stuff on it. Holly is a high school student in Chicago. She's 18. And I was doing that. And I didn't cut one. And I accidentally unscrewed the top of the glue, and it spilled all over. So I had to clean it up. And then she put me in the corner and yelled at me. It was really embarrassing. Everybody was laughing. It was kind of hard. So that's the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] I really remember. I guess she thought I was stupid in some way. I felt bad about myself at that point because I realized that I really was different from everybody else. I was about, maybe, 14 when I was placed into a special ed class because my reading skills were real low. David is also a high school student here in Chicago. He's also 18. When I was placed into the special ed program, you know, I felt sad and lonely. For me, a man, like I was a slow person that had problems learning, like a mentally problems. Today on our program, stories of people who were told that they're different: some who were comfortable with that, some who did not understand it, some who understood it and did not like it. We bring you stories of the developmentally disabled. It is a very different kind of show for us with voices and stories that usually do not make it to the radio. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today in three acts. Act One, Get On The Mic. In which we hear the story of what happens when you hand microphones to developmentally disabled people of various sorts and then send them out with camera crews to interview anyone they want on the streets of America. One thing that turns out to be on the minds of the disabled, same thing that's on your mind and mine, TV. Act Two, Black Hole Son. In that story we hear from a mother and her son who, at three, became mesmerized with black holes and Stephen Hawking, an obsession which gave way to bunnies and flowers. Act Three, Walkout. Veronica Chater tells the story of her own brother, Vincent, who one day quit his job at an assisted learning center, and then quit everything else, mystifying everybody in his life. Stay with us. Act One, Get On The Mic. Here's a typical moment from the film, How's Your News? The film is a documentary in which five developmentally disabled people travel across America in an RV interviewing people they meet along the way. When they get to Texas, one of the reporters, Sue Harrington, is at a cattle auction talking to an auctioneer, an older guy wearing a cowboy hat. There's all sorts of talk about prices and cows. And then Sue, apropos of absolutely nothing, comes out with this question. Sir, have you lately read any good books or seen any good movies that you could recommend to us? No, I ain't read any good books lately. I can't remember the name of the movie I saw the other day. I saw Message in a Bottle, and that was a dad gum good movie, I thought, kind of a tear-jerker. Oh, really? Really? It's a good one? You know, that's the first good review I've heard for that one. Well, I'm kind of sentimental. I cried in Old Yeller too. Now, How's Your News? team has an uncanny knack for bringing the sentimental out of people they meet. Arthur Bradford, who led the How's Your News? team across the country, he first got to know them in 1993 at a camp for disabled adults called Camp Jabberwocky. He was a counselor there teaching a video class. And as part of the class, he would take the campers out to do man-on-the-street interviews. They did that for a few summers, and then decided that it might be exciting and fun to try to do their interviews on a two-week, cross-country trip, which became this movie. Arthur says that, from the start, it's been interesting to see how people react to the disabled reporters. What I've noticed is that, when someone with a disability approaches someone on the street, this is without a camera or anything, that person sort of settles into OK, I need to, I guess basically, talk down to this person. It's sort of like they're talking to a child, I would say. But what I like about when you give them a microphone and a camera is that, suddenly, the people take them a little more seriously. And I would say they, maybe, give them a little more respect. Hello. My name is Ronnie. I'm from How's Your News?. What's your name, sir? Curtis. Curtie, who? Tuldgrave. What do you do, Curtie? I work for the post office. Yeah? Tell us about the post office. The post office is a good place to work. Yeah? Yeah, I get my mail there at the post office. I love getting mail. Have you met any famous people? No. This reporter, Ron Simonsen, asks nearly everybody who he interviews if they've met any famous people, especially if they've met Chad Everett who used to star in Medical Center. Ron is a big Chad Everett fan and wears a homemade Chad Everett sweatshirt through parts of the film. Here's Ron interviewing a woman in Las Vegas. I'm Ronnie Simonsen reporting from Las Vegas. Today, I'm with a fabulous singer, Jennifer Holloway. Tell me, Jennifer, how's it feel to be a singer? Fabulous. I enjoy it. Have you met any famous people? H I have: Tanya Tucker. I've met-- Have you met Chad Everett? No, I have not. You know who he is? Yes. Yes, I do. I do an impersonation of Chad Everett. Well, let's see it. All right. This is Chad Everett. You've got class, lady. My name is Chad Everett. You know, I was the star of Medical Center. There are moments during How's Your News? when things happen that, in another movie, might seem like they're mocking the people on camera. But, in this context, they don't, partially because it's clear how well the filmmakers know the reporters and love them. They were counselors and campers together in the RV. They've known each other for years, taking a road trip. Two of the reporters, Sean and Bobby, have Down's Syndrome. Larry has a condition called Spastic Cerebral Palsy. The two most talkative reporters, Ron, who has Cerebral Palsy, and Sue, who has a mental disability, came into a studio to talk about the film. They brought along a guitarist, Chad Urmston, one of their counselors, to play some of the songs from the film. I began by asking Ron what his thing for Chad Everett is all about. It turns out Ron has been a fan ever since he was a kid, back when he was spending a lot of time in and out of hospitals, and Chad Everett was playing a doctor on TV. My mother and I wrote a letter to Chad Everett. My mother wrote a letter to him, and I dictated. And I named everything he'd been in, not just Medical Center, but everything: The Rousters, Hagen, every show that he was on. And he wrote me a note. He says life's not meant to be on reruns. He said, "God bless your life. Watch The New Love Boat, Chad." Watch The New Love Boat? Is Chad Everett on The New Love Boat? Well, he was a guest on there. He was a guest star? Yeah. Yeah. You know, like I'm a guest star on your show? He was a guest star on that show. I see. Oh, yeah. I want to tell them how we went to the set of General Hospital. Can I tell them that? I went to the set of General Hospital. What was that like? Oh, that was exciting. Wasn't it, Arthur? Want to get in here? Yeah. That was very exciting. We went to the set of General Hospital when we were in Los Angeles. And I walked in that studio there, and the guy said, "What the hell are you doing here?" And I said I was a colleague of Monica Quartermaine's, I was a cardiac surgeon. Not really, but it's pretend I was a colleague of hers. Right. Did he laugh? He laughed. He laughed. He thought that was funny. He thought that was really funny, hilarious, though. Yeah. There's something about, the whole way across the country and then going to General Hospital, when you travel with someone like Ron, who is so excited about certain things, something about his enthusiasm rubs off on everybody else. So, for instance, going to General Hospital, the set of General Hospital by myself, I'm not sure I would be so excited. But, with Ron, the whole way there, as we got closer and closer to General Hospital, he started clapping his hands and rocking back and forth. And you were just so excited about going to General Hospital. I was because I wanted to see Leslie Charleson. And we're going to go back there again, in California. Maybe I'll see her again, then. Well, let's let Chad come in, and let's have you sing. All right. Are we ready, Chad? OK, guys. All right. Let's do it. Ron, and why don't you introduce this session? This is, today, we're singing my favorite state, California, and where we went to the set of-- to California-- all my celebrity friends. And I'm going to sing it now, for you, Ira. All right. Ready? One, two, three. [SINGING] You'll never, never know. You'll never, never know. You'll never, never know what you have found. You'll never, never know. You'll never, never know. You'll never, never know what you have found. [SINGING] California. Oh, California. Oh, California, oh, here I come. I went to the set of General Hospital. I met Leslie, met Leslie Charleson. I got to hold her, her Daytime Emmy, her Daytime Emmy at General Hospital. [SINGING] California, California. Oh, California, oh, here I go. California, California, oh, California oh, here I go. Hi. My name-- oh. Hi. My-- oh. Hi. My name is Susan Harrington. Hi. Hi, would you like to be interviewed? Hi, can I interview you for How's Your News? Hey, Sue? Yes? I've often been in the situation where I have to walk up to a stranger on the street with a microphone and a tape recorder, and I always get a little nervous. Do you get nervous? Well, you can't do something like this and not have a little bit of nerves and butterflies in the stomach. Come on! Do you find that it's hard, sometimes, getting people to talk to you? Yes. Sometimes it is hard because there are people who just will not talk to us. They're like, no way. When we were at the camp, I think we chose the reporters for How's Your News especially because they seemed to be especially undaunted about going up to strangers and talking to them. In fact, if you were to see Sue in a crowd without a microphone, she just likes to go up to strangers and talk to them. Like, a perfect example is, in the film, the [? assembly ?], and I'm interviewing this Mr. John B. Porterfield. And he was very difficult to talk to. I should say, that interview happens in an alley in, what looks like, the kind of sketchy part of town, and Sue is visibly a little nervous. Sir, good evening. Susan Harrington from How's Your News? And we'd just like to ask you a few questions tonight. Sir, what is your name? John B. Porterfield. I am a combat war hero, and I'm living on the streets like a dog. Are there times, Arthur, where you're looking through the camera at a moment like that, where you feel scared for them? Yeah. There were a lot of times when I'm sitting there watching and I'm thinking that I don't want anything to go wrong. I feel very protective. I was always worried about the explosion where someone would just be like, "What the hell are you doing here? I don't want to talk to this person." And so, in that particular interview, I was a little nervous. What I'm asking you is, I'm from out of state, so is there anything you-- I mean, do you think there's anything we should see here that you've seen and you've liked? I don't like this town. I'm going to tell you that right now. I've been beat up. I've been-- ah, I just want to forget it. Arthur, there are a lot of moments in the film where it seems like the reporters are standing there, and they're not exactly sure what to say next or what to ask next. Why not give them questions? Well, we tried that. We tried making lists of questions for them to ask, and it just didn't work. It was so clear that they were just asking questions that had been given to them that there wasn't really anything very interesting about it. In fact, it came off as a little bit wrong, you know? I think everyone always asks about are you worried about this coming across as exploitation? And, of course. Of course I am. And we all were, so we had to figure out what was and what wasn't appropriate. And, ultimately, I really felt strongly that the questions needed to be coming from them. My name is Ronnie Simonsen. I'm from How Is Your News. This is a guy, he's sitting on a truck. It's about halfway across the country. Who's your favorite singer? I like Boston. What does it say? Please Come to Boston? Is that the name of the song? Yeah, I believe that one of them is it. Yeah, you want me to sing it with you? Huh? Want me to sing it with you? No. I don't-- [SINGING] Please come to Boston in the springtime. La, la-- So, Ron, you do such a nice job with this guy. You know, it doesn't seem like he's all that interested in talking, and then you find stuff to talk to him about where it seems like he actually cares about it. Well, yeah, I had to do something to make him happy and to make me happy. I couldn't just sit there and say, "Hey, sorry pal." Can you sing? No, I can't sing. Can you act? No. Oh. What can you do? What do you like to do? You must have some hobby you like to do. Yeah. I like to ride a motorcycle. Yeah? What does it make you feel like when you ride a motorcycle? Does it make you feel like The Fonz? Yeah, sort of. Do you like The Fonz? Yeah, do you? Yeah. Want me to do an impersonation with The Fonz? I could act it out with you, pretend we're driving a motorcycle. Not really, but just role-play. I am The Fonz. I'm riding a motorcycle. Want to ride a motorcycle with me? Yeah, might as well. Come on. Come. Vroom! Vroom! Vroom! Vroom! Vroom! You all bring out a really nice side of people. Well, yeah. Yeah. It all depends on the people. Where are you from? New Hampshire. New Hampshire? Yeah. We're traveling across country. We're going to California. Oh. You like doing that? Sure. It's my biggest dream. What's your biggest dream? I don't know. You must have something. You can't have anything if you don't have anything, right? Yeah. I ain't never thought too much about it. One of the facts of life for many disabled adults is that they don't get around that much. Many live in group homes. Most of their contact is with other disabled people. They don't go around talking to able-bodied strangers. For most of the How's Your News? team, this was going to be the first time traveling across the country. This was their first time traveling without their families so far from home for so long. And in the months since the film was finished and shown on television, the whole How's Your News? team has flown to Europe, and Canada, and around the United States when the film has been screened at film festivals. At those screenings, they bring a band. They perform their songs live, on stage, and it pretty much brings the house down. People love them. In interviews with Sue and Ron, I kept asking them what all of this was like, how their lives had changed. I have to say, every time that I asked those, they were pretty nonchalant about it all, very low-key. Here's Ron, for instance. Well, it's good. It's very good, and I felt really honored and blessed. In a separate interview with Arthur, I asked him about their reactions to these kinds of questions. Yeah. It's funny because Ron, who is so celebrity obsessed, often gets asked how does it feel to be a celebrity now? And he just brushes that question off. You know, they've lived their lives. They're all 35, 40. I don't think that this process is going to actually radically change them. For some reason it seems like they just always expected that this would happen, that someone would pick them up and drive them across the country to make a movie. Wow. I don't know. That sounds weird. But if you ask them, they're all kind of like, yeah, this is the way it was supposed to be. And they took it all in stride. I think, as filmmakers and American TV viewers, we want there to be this big Olympic moment where they're just like, ta da! I feel so great and my life is so changed. And I do think that they had a wonderful time on this trip but, they didn't-- and I actually like it-- they didn't freak out and start weeping on camera or anything like that. What you're making me realize is that my instinct in asking you, even this particular set of questions about this, is suddenly seeming very wrong. Well, I just didn't want this to be one of those disability documentaries where the music starts soaring, and everybody without a disability feels so good because they have helped these people. By understanding them. Right. The final scene in the movie is we all go swimming at the beach in the Pacific Ocean, in Venice Beach in California. And I do think there's a certain beauty to that. And they were just kind of whooping it up. And, honestly, when we were swimming in that beach, we were all there. We had made it across the country. We were exhausted, but there was a real feeling of accomplishment. The sun was setting, and I really felt this feeling of yes, we have done something here. We set out to do it. We made it across the country. I have to say I have to stop you there because I feel like we're getting to that big moment that you tried to avoid in the film. Yeah, I know. I guess that's true. Arthur Bradford, with Sue Harrington and Ron Simonsen from How's Your News? The movie aired on Cinemax and at film festivals. You can order your own DVD of the film at howsyournews.com. Chad, here we go. One, two, three. [SINGING] The Grand Canyon was carved by the Colorado River. I learned this in history class. This is really an amazing thing because we are about to dig some history of our own as we have arrived at one of the seven wonders of the world. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Take me there. How grand is this canyon? So deep and so wide. How grand is this canyon? So deep and so wide. How grand is this canyon? Coming up, yet another three-year-old fan of physicist, Stephen Hawking. And Vinny drops out: assembly line not required. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. With 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 topic. Today's program, Special Ed, stories of developmentally disabled people. We have arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two: Black Hole Son. Because of a very rare genetic disease, Sam was born with holes in several vital organs, including his heart and his brain. For his first five years, if one wasn't making his life hell, the other was. He's seven now. And recently his mom and he sat down together to talk about how things used to be and how they got much, much better. OK. So let me start interviewing you. All right. Can you describe yourself? What kind of a person are you? I'm nice and kindful person. You're kindful? Yes, and playful. What do you do that's nice? Hug you. When I was pregnant with Sam, the first ultrasound came back that there was something wrong. I was thinking just please, let it be something with his body not with his brain. I can handle his body, but I'll be a bad mom to a retarded child. Everybody has their thing they can't take, and that's it for me. So when Sam was born, when he was five days old, he had heart failure. So then we learned about the deletion in the chromosome, velo-cardio-facial syndrome. So we didn't know if he was going to make it. And we had a talk with the geneticist. And he said if you give him the operations, it's not sure he'll pull through. But if he does, he's going to be retarded, probably. And I said OK. I don't care anymore. I want him, and I need him. What were you like when you were three years old? I was walking, but I was crying too. Do you want to talk about what you used to be like? No way. He started torturing animals when he was three, and talking all the time about wanting to die. And he stabbed his stepfather with a plastic knife and drew blood, and poured boiling water on me, wiped things on the bus that should not be wiped. He was kicked out of school when he was four because they said he was a danger to himself and others. And so we took him to a psych unit, and he was studied for a few days. And that's when they told us about the bipolar, rapid-cycling bipolar, which is common in velo-cardio-facial syndrome. It has early-onset, and it hits you hard a lot of the time. And sometimes it doesn't, but it did in him. But nobody told me that. I want to show you a drawing that you did. That's me with heart faces and heart eyes. There's about 100 hearts in your face in this drawing. Yeah. Green hearts, how come? What were you feeling when you drew this? I was feeling like hugging you and kissing you and giving you cards. All your drawings now have a lot of hearts and flowers and birds, and people are smiling. Do you remember, when you were about four years old, do you remember what you drew all the time? What? Black holes? Yeah. Do you know what you were feeling when you were drawing black holes every day? Like, the black hole was going to suck the whole world up and make everybody die and end of the world. Yeah. Did you feel like that a lot, like everybody was going to die? Yeah. I think the first time Sam heard of a black hole, he was almost four. And we were watching Stephen Hawking, a show. At that time, he couldn't sit down for anything. He couldn't sit down for a 15-minute cartoon. But he was really into space. And this was the only time he sat down and he watched the boring show from start to finish. They had, I think it was like a '50s cartoon of a black hole on just for a second, you know, one of those swirly things. That just captivated him. He started drawing it all the time. In every family portrait, it'd be us and the black hole. At school, they had this rainbow bear notebook and it would have all the kids' drawings in there. And there would be, like, 19 drawings of kids going sledding, kids going to McDonald's, kids playing with their siblings or something. And then, on Sam's page, it would be a black hole destroying the universe or a black hole coming down the railroad tracks sucking up humans. I was kind of proud of his differentness and his imagination, but, at the same time, I knew that it was like this horror to him. What are some nightmares you've had? The moon, blowing moon. The moon blows on you? Yeah. How come? I think of bad thoughts that time. I mean, bad thoughts. You had bad thoughts and that's why the moon blew on you? Yeah. Did the moon know you had bad thoughts? Yeah. What would happen when the moon blew on you? I was scared and frightening. And you had that nightmare a lot, I think. Two times. No. Like a whole year you had that nightmare. Before he discovered black holes, it was any swirling thing that sucks you in. Like, even when he was months old, if he saw a ceiling fan, it was the only time he would quiet. He would just stare at that ceiling fan. I know a lot of babies do, but he just was obsessed. And then, when he was three, he had an imaginary friend, but it wasn't a boy, it was a fan. But this one was called bad, bad fan. And its blades were teeth. And then it had these little, tiny eyes and these little, tiny feet at the bottom, and it would kill people. It would just blow on people and that would kill them because his breath was filled with teeth. And then, sometimes when he broke things, he said bad, bad fan did it. And it was kind of creepy, you know? It was just me and him living in the house. And you start thinking-- oh. He had to destroy all day long. He had to. He couldn't not. He destroyed his favorite toys. He destroyed my favorite furniture, anything that meant anything, especially. And I used to watch The Sally Jessy Raphael Shows, or whoever it was that had all those shows about the out-of-control-- I think it was Montel-- had all the shows about the out-of-control, really young children. And the parents had to lock the door against them at night. And they lived in fear. And, supposedly, nobody could help. And I would always think well, you must be really bad parents. I would never have a problem with controlling my kid. I would teach them how to act. And if I had your kid for a week, he'd shape up. And so, of course, once I became afraid of my child, I didn't tell anyone because I thought they would think the same thing about me. And I kind of thought the same thing about me. You know, he'd be nice and normal, and then just do something so horrible and senseless. And it seemed like that to Sam too. He could never understand. He'd do something like try to break the cat's leg, something like that. And then, immediately afterwards, he'd be crying and saying, "I don't know why I did that." And he would be just as angry and sad as I was. And he'd say, "I don't understand." And he'd start punching himself and biting himself and putting bruises all over his body. Ugh! Oh, that was a horrible life. Do you know why you take the pills every day? Because my brain is all, like that. What is that? Nobody can see on the recorder. Describe it. It's so wild. And has to-- it's pumping blood all wild. Pumping blood all wild? Yeah. He started on a drug called Zyprexa. And within 24 hours we noticed a change. And then, after about 56 hours, it was like night and day. This was not the same kid at all. It's hard to believe that we were all living like we were. I mean, I can't believe it. When I sit here and talk about it, I can't believe that that existed and I didn't try to get a diagnosis earlier. I just kept on thinking I could not be such a bad parent and it would get cured. Or, I don't know what I thought. But, within two days after starting on the Zyprexa, we would go out. We could go to do three errands in one day. He could wait in line. He was doing well in school. I mean, it didn't happen overnight because he still at some bad memories, but he started to get some nice memories to put on top of the bad ones. And he just got nicer and nicer, and happier and sweeter. He stopped having nightmares. At first, he would ask me when his brain was going to be messed up again, but now he feels like it's his brain, you know? He feels like he's in control of his own brain. Do you have any girlfriends? Yeah, only one. Who is it? Rose. Aw. Tell me about Rose. She's kind and cute. What does she look like? I forget. She looks kind of like her mom, maybe. Would you like to be married? Yeah! I would like to be. What is marrying like? You have a bride. And you are giving them flowers and heart and Valentines stuff. When I was doing these interviews with him, I realized something about him that I hadn't seen before, which is all those hearts and bunnies and rainbows that he talks about all the time, it's not because he's silly. It's because he's been through more pain and powerlessness than most people ever will in their whole life. And I think he took all that information about life, about what it is, what it means for him to be alive, and he made an informed decision that he's going to be happy with the good parts of life and he's going to spread them around. And I think he knows something about hearts and bunnies and rainbows. He's not like Forrest Gump, you know? It's not like-- you know, he came out of something very hard, and he has a very strong will. Let's make up a story about a bad boy. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] boy? Sure. No. That'd scare people out. That would scare people listening? Yeah. Let's make up a story about a human boy. What would he do in the day? He would just have fits. And then he would [UNINTELLIGIBLE] his bowl, and then he would spill it, like that. Push his bowl of food away and spill it? Yeah. What else? Break the bowl. And his mom will say, "You have to clean it up. And, after that, you will have to go right up to your room." What would the boy be thinking? That he wants to be a nice boy. Then when he came back downstairs, he hugged everyone in the world. The end. Wow. That bad boy turned out to be a good boy. Do you know anyone like that? No. It's fake. The mother who put that story together asked that we not broadcast her and her son's name. Act Three, Walkout. Sun Kim has taught severely autistic children for the past five years. She says autistic kids, in general, tend to not understand social cues, and that her students, because of the severity of their autism, can't tell her their basic needs or thoughts. And so she finds she spends a lot of her work day trying to figure out what it is that they're thinking. And often, she's stumped. Sometimes you'll just see them looking off in the distance and laughing. You think what are they laughing about? What's so funny? Or when we ask them to do certain things, like pass out the place mats or pass out the cups, what's going through their head process? Like, OK, I'm supposed to do this and I don't-- or are they hearing just, murmur, murmur, verbiage, and not really understanding? Or just listening to the tonalities of what we're saying? Believe me, I've wanted to be inside their head just to know what they're thinking or feeling so many times. This question, of course, was part of our story in Act Two. And it's at the heart of this next story. It's at the center of what it means to deal with certain kinds of people with developmental disabilities. Veronica Chater's younger brother, Vincent, can't do math, even the simplest addition. He doesn't speak well. He has a version of what used to be called mental retardation. But, when he was a baby and doctors tried to diagnose him, they couldn't find anyone else with his particular combination of symptoms, and so they named his own syndrome after him: the Vincent syndrome. He's an adult now. And for a while seemed to be doing just fine, until a point a few years ago when he surprised everybody in the family by quitting his job, and then quitting everything else in his life. And it was not clear to them why he did it and what it meant and what it would mean for his future. Veronica Chater put together this story. Ever since Vincent quit his job, he spent more and more time alone in his room. At Christmas, at our parent's house in northern California, my brothers and sisters and I weave in and out of the kitchen, talking about work, telling jokes, and taking orders from Mom. There are 11 of us. I'm the second oldest. Vinnie's the fifth. As usual, he's nowhere to be seen. When I go down the hall, I find him in his bedroom with the door closed, drinking an orange soda from the can and watching an old movie. His face is close to the TV screen, about 10 inches away. And he has a serious expression, the kind you catch on a detective who's trying to crack a case. He could be 18 and he could be 50, you can't quite tell. He has a short little boy haircut. And, every day, he wears a sweatshirt with the words carpe diem on it. The truth is, he's 34. Did Santa come and fill your stocking? Indeed. What did you get in your stocking? [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Jamaroonie. Some jamaroonies? Vinnie still lives in his childhood bedroom, which he calls his apartment. Ever since he retired, bit by bit, he's been withdrawing into his own little world, a world that doesn't include me or anyone else. OK, here we go. Cleaning up. My mom and dad still take care of Vinnie, but it's mainly my mom's job. Clean it, clean you. Well, we'll shave you, shave you. My parents, who are devout Roman Catholics, were undaunted by the idea of having a, so-called, special needs child. They figured it was part of God's plan. He was an angel in our midst, as my dad always said. They refused to think of him as a burden, even though he would depend on them for the rest of their lives. Every morning, my mom readies him for the day: combing and gelling his hair, brushing his teeth, and shaving him. [SINGING] I like my clean-shaven man. She tilts his chin this way and that, handling him like a barber with an overbooked schedule. Done. All spiffed up for the day. OK, here. Here we go. Put your shaver away, OK? There are all sorts of little games that Vinnie and my mom play together all day long. Most of them are impenetrable to outsiders. He'll say, "Repeat. Repeat." And she'll reply, "Redeep in the redeep." And they'll both giggle. OK, so I'm going to test you. I want to see if you know any movies because you're always the one that knows movies. OK. Who said this? Who's the one that sucked his thumb and said, "Mommy"? The cartoon Robin Hood. Right. You got that one. I didn't know if you were going to get that. Despite his disability, Vinnie has a really good memory for all sorts of trivia. Quizzing him about movies is the impromptu game my mom and dad play with him throughout the day, from morning till night. OK, I've got one for you, Vincent. See if you can get this one. [SINGING] It was a Monday. Ain't gonna soldier no more. The bond between them is more than a bond, it's a union for life. As Vinnie passed through his teenage years and became an adult, Mom saw to it that he was kept busy. She signed him up for bowling, for Special Olympics, and for pretty much every seasonal sport from basketball to badminton. But as he got older, Vinnie's personality grew darker and more mysterious. I didn't notice it right away. I don't think any of us did. Mom was so good at keeping Vinnie distracted from himself that it didn't seem like a problem. But two years ago, it grew too large to ignore. Let's play games. I'm not playing games right now. Go get my sour cream. Come on. I want the sour cream. I can't make those chantilly potatoes without it. Every time I go home, it hits me a little bit more that, even though Vincent and I are about the same age, my mom talks to him like he's a precocious four-year-old. And, more and more, I've noticed that he's aware of it too. When he returned without the sour cream and noticed that Mom and I were talking about him, he got upset. It is a wonderful reaction to talk about somebody? When you talk about me, I wonder. I talked right in front of you. I wasn't telling any secrets. I'm going to say what I'm going to say because it's true. There's nothing wrong with having the truth, is there? I'll put this away here-- You know, where it goes. Top shelf. The little slot, slide it in there. Thank you, very much. No. He can go from one minute to-- oh, yeah. Dad's so afraid he's going to get him angry, he won't give him any orders. I have to give all the orders. Yeah. If he wants to get smart with me, and I say, "God said you have to obey your parents I'm your mother. You do what I say, when I say. Da, da, da, da, da. Da, da, da, da." And he'll do something, sometimes I say, "You go in and you tell God you're sorry for that." He'll go in his room. And he comes out, "Sorry for talking like that." And I said, "That's fine, Vin. OK. We just don't do that." Then he gets in a really good mood after that. It might seem like my mom is rough on Vinnie, but I have to say that her way of dealing with him has pretty much worked out for the best, until the day Vinnie decided to retire. When he quit his job, Vinnie dropped everything including bowling, basketball, and the Special Olympics. Where once he was busy from dawn till dusk, now he had nothing to do, so he began sleeping to pass the time, up to 18 hours a day. It worried all of us, especially Mom. He was sleeping his life away, and we didn't understand why. It felt like we were losing him, like he was giving up, so I set out to figure out why. If you ask Vinnie about why he quit his job, you don't get much of an answer. In general, it's hard to get a direct response out of him on any subject. "Could be," he'll say, or, "Maybe." It's not clear he even knows what his own feelings are sometimes. Often, when any of us asks him about his job, he'll just change the subject, like he did when I asked him about it, sitting in Mom's kitchen. How come you don't just tell me why you quit? But seriously, it might be empty, blank there, after you were saying something. You mean you're leaving that section blank because you don't want to fill it in with words? Blank is there before I finish words. Are you playing word games with me now? No. We've all asked Vinnie dozens of times in dozens of different ways why he quit his job and everything else. And every time his answer is just as cryptic, and so we're all forced to guess what the real reasons are. My mom's best guess is that Vinnie put himself into early retirement and started all these dark moods because of a chemical change in his brain. The psychologist said he thinks there was a chemical imbalance that took place, suddenly, in his brain. And he prescribed Prozac for him. Well, it's all chemical. I don't know. It's really a mystery to me what happened there. Vinnie had worked for 12 years at a place called Concord Support Services, a company that hires mentally retarded adults and vocationally trains them. Vinnie always told me that he liked his job. He'd sit in a big warehouse with about 70 other disabled adults doing light assembly or stuffing envelopes. He made up to $60 a month, which, to him, was an infinite amount of money. We all assumed he'd found his place in the world. Then, gradually, he started to become impatient and angry at work, threatening to break people's fingers if they touched him. He started disappearing into the work bathroom for up to an hour at a time just to get away from people. It was pretty clear that he was in a crisis. On his last day, he was wandering around looking for a bead he'd dropped. His supervisor asked him what he was doing. One thing led to another. Vinnie lost his temper. My parents were called in for a meeting. And Vinnie quit, just up and walked out. A few months ago, I asked Vinnie if he'd like to go back to his old job for a visit hoping it might spark something. I wasn't sure how he'd react, but he didn't even hesitate. He told me that he'd love to go. So the next morning, after my mom spiffed him up, we drove the route he'd taken for 12 years. When we arrived at the front doors, he's all smiles. He seems genuinely glad to be there. Hi. I remember you. You do? Nice to see you. But, as we approach the warehouse floor where Vinnie used to work, his pace slows. At the warehouse door, he hesitates and purses his lips together. Hi. How are you? Wonderful. Hi. Nice to see you [? Jane. Nice seeing you. He becomes shy and looks confused as one person after another comes up to him. Some touch him fondly, one man blows in his face, and everyone stares. Vinnie tries to appear cool, but I can tell he's tense. We miss you, Vinnie. We miss the Vinnie Arnold we knew. We missed you, Vinnie. We missed you. Would you like to begin basketball practice Saturday? I don't know. I'm not into-- I'm back into bowling and running again. We hang out. And Vinnie looks uncomfortable, except when he decides, on his own, to busy himself cleaning and straightening. After 15 minutes, he disappears into the bathroom, his old hiding place. After a while, he comes out for a few minutes, then goes back in, and then comes back out again. When he heads back into the bathroom for the third time, I know it's time to leave. Later, I talked to my brother, Danny, about it. Of all my siblings, Danny spends the most time with Vinnie. They go to movies, take walks, go to bookstores. Danny thinks Vinnie might have quit his job for all the normal reasons any of us quit a job. Maybe it had nothing to do with his disability. I think he was probably extremely bored working in this place, doing the same thing over and over again: stuffing envelopes, putting paper clips in bags. There was no challenge to it, and I think it really frustrated him. Vinnie might have simply had enough, enough of other people controlling his life. All the adults in his life were doing the sensible things you do for disabled people: giving structure to his days, coaxing his moods, all with the best intentions. It's possible that, in the end, that wasn't enough of a life. And so, one day, he changed the one thing in his life that he could. He said no to the one thing he could say no to and quit his job, and then quit everything else. Being told what to do constantly, day in, and day out. And then he watches his other brothers and sisters running around and traveling and having their freedom, and here he is, stuck at home in his room. I can just imagine how frustrating that would be. It would make me angry if I was in that situation. After Vinnie retired, my mom and dad were determined to get him back into some kind of routine. After meeting with all sorts of social workers and suggesting dozens of ideas to Vinnie, they finally came up with something that he agreed to. They hired my brother, Bernard, to build a chicken coop in the backyard and to put Vinnie in charge of a miniature chicken farm. My mom had always wanted a chicken farm anyway. This was her big chance to get one. Vinnie took to every aspect of chicken farming. He was painstakingly mindful of the chicken's daily schedule of free-range feeding and lock-up. And he was especially fastidious about coop hygiene. But more than that, to everyone's surprise, he started participating in activities again. He started basketball practice. And he's training again for the Special Olympics. Molly, Polly, Jeanette, and Lonnie, here. Pretty much at any time of the day, you can see Vinnie standing as still as a marble sculpture in the backyard beside the coop, his eyes half closed, and his palms cupping the breeze, thinking, or just listening to the sound of his hens. He named them after old friends and talks to them like children. Molly, Polly, Jeanette and Lonnie. Veronica Chater lives in Berkeley, California. She has a memoir coming out about her family next spring called, Waiting for the Apocalypse. This cover of 9 to 5 was recorded in 1985. It's the Hammond State School Performing Group in Louisiana. They are developmentally disabled kids in a music therapy program. Our show today was produced by Jonathan Goldstein and myself with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr and Starlee Kine. Senior Producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Maria Schell. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can get our free weekly podcast or listen to old shows online, for free. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who has this message for America. God bless your life. Watch The New Love Boat. 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. Jacobs and the other guys did not like their boss, Manright. Manright was full of himself, he took credit for things that they did, he was hard to deal with. And they set out to sabotage him. A sociologist named Calvin Morrill, watched how they did it as part of a study of office politics in different companies. These guys all worked for an old line banking firm that he calls Old Financial. All the names in this story have been changed. In traditional companies like this one, Morrill says, all the politics happen in secret. It's all subterfuge. Here is how Manright was destroyed by Jacobs. Manright used to rely on this fellow, Jacobs, to prepare him before he would go before the senior executive committee meeting. And Jacobs is very good, very smart guy. And he could anticipate some of the questions that his boss would be asked at these meetings. And so when he prepped him, he would just neglect to tell his boss about some of the key questions that he could anticipate being asked. And there his boss would stand at the committee meeting, naked, without the information that he needed. And eventually, he was removed as a result of this. Now did Manright understand that he had been sabotaged? He didn't. Actually, he got back each time-- this happened to him over the course of several meetings, where he was mis-prepped, if you will-- and each time he came back, he was firmly convinced that his subordinates were incompetent, because how else could this have happened? It never dawned on him that they were so competent that they might actually be intentionally engaged in sabotage. Another multibillion dollar company that Morrill studied is one that he calls Playco, in the toy and education product business. Unlike Old Financial-- where bosses were bosses and underlings were underlings, and so all the scheming had to go on in secret-- at Playco, there was no real hierarchy. It wasn't clear who was in charge of whom. And while that might sound like a kind of nice place to work, with no big bosses, it turns out that with no one absolutely in charge to make decisions and keep people in line, all the fighting was right out in the open. At meetings, people would try to humiliate and out argue each other. They would form alliances. The executives at Playco would talk all the time about honor and respect, as if they were medieval knights, or maybe mob figures. Then I even witnessed violence in this firm between executives. One of the incidents I talk about was about two executives actually getting into a fistfight in front of the world headquarters of this multinational firm. Yeah, just tell what happened between those two. Yeah, well one guy was called-- I call him Greer. And the other guy actually had a nickname, called the Terminator. And he was called the Terminator because, as this one guy said, he liked to hunt big game. He liked to look for executives who he could best in arguments at meetings. And so these guys were parking their cars in the parking lot. And they called each other out, essentially. Greer accused the Terminator of playing around with women at a local health club and embarrassing the corporation. Meanwhile, the Terminator accused Greer of being a weak executive. This thing escalated. And after a few minutes, one of them had the other over his Lotus sports car. There is this idea in capitalism that companies are making decisions, and products, and strategy, based on rational evaluation of the market and their customers. To what degree is that true, based on what you saw? And to what degree are decisions being made based on office politics, and not a rational evaluation of where their company is in the market? There is some rationality. But thinking about the bottom line is sometimes a myth that outsiders tell each other about how decisions are made. And it's not always about the bottom line. It's about politics with one another, maneuvering with one another. Given all that, given all the conflict that Calvin Morrill saw at all kinds of offices, what is surprising is not how many fistfights there are in offices, but how few. I know I've been in one. This happened years ago on a public radio show that was just starting up. And I do not think of myself as much of a fighter. But here's how it went down. The guy who raised the money to start this show had this vision. And what his vision was, was he said, what if there were a radio show where you could turn on every day, and you would hear something like Spike Lee, and Philip Glass, the composer, and Stephen Hawking, the physicist, sitting down together, and just talking, talking about the things that interest them in common. So this show was two hours a day. This guy had never worked on a daily program. He had done other stuff, but never a daily program. I and a number of the other people who worked on the show had worked on daily shows. At the time, by the way, I was not on the air. I was just a producer. And so we're trying to start this show. And every day, we would come in, and we would work, and work, and work, and work. And every day we would have this experience of-- we would say, OK, here is what we think we can do. It was a very, very small staff. Very small staff. And every day we would say, OK, here is what we think we can do this week. And we would lay out the programs, and this, and this, and this, and this. And at the end of the whole thing-- all this work had gone into it-- at the end of the whole thing, the guy who had raised all the money and was our boss would say, you know, that's really very nice. But it's just not our original idea. It's not Spike Lee, and Philip Glass, and Stephen Hawking sitting down and talking to each other. And those of us who had worked on daily programs would always say to him, you know, that is a perfectly good idea. That is a very valid idea. A perfectly good idea. But you have to remember that you are on for two hours a day. You have two people making phone calls and booking this, you have one or two tape cutters, one or two other people. It was a very, very small staff. And so even if you could get Spike Lee, and Philip Glass, and Stephen Hawking into a room, and you could figure out what in the world they actually have to say to each other, which would take a certain amount of research and time on someone's part, even if you could make all this happen, that's only one hour. That's only going to be one show. And so we have to think about what's going to happen in all these other hours. And so that's a very good idea, a very fine idea. But here are all these other ideas that we're going to do to fill all this other time too. And this went on for day after day and week after week. And people were working very, very hard and sort of burning out. And finally, after weeks of this, we're all standing around. And we've just finished our first five shows. And it has been grueling. It has been really, really hard. And we're evaluating what to do next, and how we should change the format of the show, and all that kind of thing. And we get to the end of this long, long discussion. And it seems like we're all on the same page. And at last, we're all in accord. Here is where we've been, here is where we're going. And our boss says, well, you know, there's one thing that we haven't gotten to. And that is, I think we're forgetting the original idea of the show, that really what it needs to be is-- I think every hour needs to be more like-- well, just imagine if Spike Lee, and Philip Glass, and Stephen Hawking could sit down together and just chat about whatever. And it had been a really hard few weeks. And as Nelson Mandela said in a very different context, you know, we had tried reason, but reason had failed to produce a solution. And so violence was our only option. And I didn't really see anything else to do. Well, to say I didn't see anything implies a kind of thinking that really wasn't exactly happening. It was just straight, pretty much gut instinct. And I walked over, and I punched him in the stomach. And his reaction, I have to say, was not really as satisfying as I was hoping for. He was sort of cushiony. I didn't feel like I was making much of an impression. And we're standing very, very close now, closer, I think, than we had ever stood to each other. And he looks me in the eyes. And he's a little bit sweaty. And he doesn't get mad at all. The whole thing just makes him get really, really sincere. And he says, "You know, Ira, I really think that you should think about what you're doing for a second." Which I have to say, just made me madder. Like if you're really mad at somebody, and they just start to talk to you like they're your therapist, it just makes you madder. And so I punched him again. And again, not terribly satisfying and sort of a cushiony kind of feeling. And punches don't make as much of a sound in real life as you think they might. And again, he sort of looks me-- our faces very close to each other-- looks me in the eye, and he says, "You know, Ira, I think you're really having some feelings here that maybe you might be expressing a different way." Which of course, made me punch him again. At this point, at the third punch, pretty much people had gathered around us. And I was pulled off by the public radio staff of the show, which included a guy in a wheelchair, which gives you a sense of the tough kind of fight that was going on here. And I say all this now just to illustrate that even in the offices of an outfit known for its calm-voiced, let us all sit down together and reason together kind of reasonableness, even in the offices of public radio, even here, in the office where I speak to you from right now, feelings are so extreme that they can lead to hitting. Our relationships at our jobs, I think, contain all of the feelings we have in all of our personal relationships. There are people you like, people you don't like. There is gratitude, there is resentment, there is jealousy. It's all there. All the feelings are there. Except in the workplace we can't express it, because it's a workplace. You have to keep it bottled up inside, and then it ends up seeping out in all these other ways. Well, today on our program, Office Politics, we bring you three stories of conflict and high drama from our nation's workplaces. Act One, Hang in There Kitty Cat, It's Almost Friday. In that act, a lowly office worker gets in a jam, and discovers that in times of trouble, when all else has failed, when all hope is gone, companies in her industry turn to one woman, one woman, my friend, in a suburban home in Long Island, who solves their corporate problems without ever turning off the TV that plays in the background. Act Two, Sheetcakes in the Conference Room, Whiskey After Dark. David Rakoff discusses the world of birthdays and other holidays, as they are celebrated on the job. Act Three, When the Job to Get You off the Streets Is on the Streets. In that act we hear stories of the intricate office politics that take place in a location where you might not suspect there is any politics because there is no office. Stay with us. Act One, Hang in There Kitty Cat, It's Almost Friday. Starlee Kine tells the tale in this act of an office problem that refused to be solved by ordinary means, and so extraordinary means had to be employed. Kelly worked for small start up. There were only about a dozen people on the staff. And the office was just one big room with no walls, like in a classroom. And a lot of the same office politics that happens behind closed doors in other offices happened in this one, except without the doors. It didn't take long before the employees took on the established roles. There was a cool kid, the flirt, the gossip, the nice boss who was really mean, the mean boss who was really nice. There was even the person who functioned as the unofficial psychologist. Every office has one, the person who is everyone's confidant, who listens to your problems and gives you a shoulder to cry on. In this office, though, the politics were so extreme that even she couldn't be trusted. Our person would come in with the person who was crying. And the person who was crying would be like, "Thanks. I'll buy you a beer sometime. I really needed to get that off my chest." And the psychologist would be like, "It's OK, anytime. I'll be right back." And literally walk over to the person, who the other person had just been saying is torturing them, making their life hell, and that they think might want to kill them, and then go over and be like, "You see that person sitting right there? Yeah. The one right in front of you? She thinks that you might want to kill her." Since it was a start up, the company was having trouble even staying in business. Pressure was high, hours were long. There was lots of stress, and breakdowns, and tears, and fighting, and of course, sex. There was one person, in particular, who was sleeping with one of the women in the office. And until the last day, I think that most of the staff thought he was gay. There was a woman who was heterosexual, but obviously had a crush on the one lesbian we had in the office, like a hot and heavy crush. And also on the men, too. She doesn't discriminate. And a certain amount of sexual tension is great. It gets you to get up in the morning, to actually wash your hair. But in this office it was flying at you from such strange directions. And there were couplings happening within office. From Kelly's perspective, the creepiest coupling was between her two bosses. The three of them were working super closely on a new project. The two bosses had both pretty much already hated her, and it had been hard enough to deal with them as individuals. But together they formed this sort of invincible two-headed monster of hate. And Kelly was their number one target. When you're working with a very small staff, it's like being stuck on a ship with people. That's your only existence at all. So let's say you're stuck on this boat. You're out at sea, calm waters in the beginning, a lot of celebrating, I like you, do you like me? I like you too. Yeah! And then things start to get rougher. Things start to get rougher. People are testy, because they've been stuck in that boat for a long time. You now know things, things that you don't even want to know about people. You're forced to know in those environments. So imagine that. And then imagine the two people that I need to work with on a daily basis not talking to me, and not liking me, and sleeping together. So imagine we're all on that boat. And we have to make room for them to sleep with each other. We're like, OK, move over on the cots. They just wouldn't make eye contact with me, wouldn't talk to me for the entire deadline that we were on. And also this person is only sitting six feet away from me. So the uncomfortability of that was through the roof. And then, slowly the ship began to sink. They were running out of money. The bosses grew paranoid, and started picking off their employees one by one. A person answered the phone incorrectly, and was fired that same day. Malaise set in. Employees started coming in late or not at all. No one believed in the project anymore. And then one day, some irreplaceable photographs that Kelly was in charge of went missing. I looked everywhere. I looked in the bookcases, under my desk. I looked in other people's offices on our floor. I looked in the drawers that were public. We had public drawers where people could store stuff. And then we had drawers that were private, which I didn't go into when people were there. But I did get so desperate that I went through everyone's stuff. I was getting irrational. Kelly suspected that one of her bosses had stolen the photographs. They knew that she had to return the photos to the photographer, and that her reputation was on the line. It would be a huge embarrassment if she had to actually call the photographer and tell him they were gone. In her office, sabotage was becoming trendy. Kelly has seen other examples of it. It just had never happened to her. She thought all was lost, until a friend told her what other companies in the industry did when objects like this couldn't be found. If the situation arises, they will hire a psychic to help them locate the images. A girl gave me a number of someone who she said was certified by the state of the New York, was a crime psychic. I called her. She said, OK, I've got a half an hour for you two days from now. Come. Apparently once you've accepted the notion that your bosses are actually trying to sabotage you, the idea of going to a psychic just doesn't seem that crazy anymore. It seems appropriate. Kelly called the psychic from her desk in plain sight of everyone, including the suspected boss. She didn't even bother lowering her voice. And then she set about following the psychic's instructions. She took Polaroid photos of the office and all the people working there. And then she got on a train to the psychic's house in Long Island. She was hoping that the psychic would be able to tell her something, anything about where the photos were. What she got was a whole lot more. The psychic lit a cigarette while Kelly laid out the Polaroids she had taken. Then the psychic started describing the subtlest nuances of her coworkers' personalities. Sometimes she would just say words, like, "Oh, she's so insecure." As if she was having like a whole other conversation that wasn't with me. And she'd be like, "Oh, she's not pretty. Oh." And she would start to feel sorry. And then she would be like, "Oh, OK, he doesn't like women. Not like he's gay. He just never thinks that women are worth that much." Of all the reading rooms in all the homes of all the psychics in Long Island, Kelly walked into this one, the home of Ann, the office politics psychic. Ann had Kelly draw a little map of her office with lines indicating where everyone sat. The psychic went from desk to desk to desk, describing the office politics between Kelly's coworkers. These two are always gossiping with each other. Don't trust them. This one was your friend, but they didn't like her, so she got fired. He's sweet. You can tell him things. Then she got to Kelly's two bosses. And then she said, "Oh, OK, the person who sits here talks to the person who sits here all day long." She actually drew a line between the two bosses who are sleeping with each other? She drew the line. Well, she would draw a little stick person behind the desk. And then she would draw another little stick person. And she'd be like, oh, this area to this area. My two main bosses, she was saying, were constantly talking to each other all day. She went into things that I didn't even know happened, that later I found out happened. Like they went on a trip. She knew, basically, that he was living at her place. There was not anything that she didn't know. The same amount of information, with added psychic phenomenon, as if she'd been sitting next to me the whole six months. I've never called Miss Cleo. I've never had a tarot reading or had my tea leaves read. I've never crossed over. But when I heard there was a psychic on Long Island who could tell who is lying about breaking the office fax machine, I had to go. I called and made an appointment. She had one stipulation for letting me come, no debunking. Ann lives with her elderly mother and her seven year old daughter. When I get there, grandmother and granddaughter are nestled in easy chairs, watching Golden Girls. Ann is doing a reading in the back. And her mother turns to me and asks if I'm there for a reading too. I tell her I'm not. We watch TV together in silence for a few minutes. And then Ann's mother turns back to me and asks if I'm there for a reading. This pattern continues for the rest of the show. I finally give in and say, yes, I'm there for a reading. Then she gives up and shuffles off to the kitchen. And I can hear her muttering under her breath, [BEEP] gypsies. Then Ann comes in and takes me to her reading room. --the floor we kept the red carpeting. It is a root shocker. And it gives me a lot of energy, because I'm actually in a beta level sleep state. So I'm kind of groggy. And the best thing to wake you up in the morning is that nice red carpeting. Ann's reading room looks like a suburban guest bedroom. There is a daybed that she likes because it makes it feel more like a therapist's office, pictures of her family, and a TV cluttered with chachkas, like a jar labeled, ashes of problem customers. Ann prefers to be called a clairaudient trance medium, which means that she can hear stuff that isn't there, as opposed to seeing stuff that isn't there. She goes into a trance, and then her three spirit guides feed her the information. When I talked to Ann on the phone, she told me she would be in a trance when I got there. In fact, she had been in a trance when she told me that. It turns out Ann is almost always in a trance. At her house, I saw her receive payment for her services, recommend a good restaurant, and usher her client to the door, all while in a trance. This seemed to be a complete abuse of the word trance, not to be debunkey or anything. Appointments with Ann are hard to get. She'll take anybody, but she is usually booked months in advance. People come for the usual stuff, like channeling dead relatives. But she does a big business of finding lost objects. And a large percentage of her clients come about problems at work. If you think about it, that's where you spend most of your waking time during the day, in most cases, is in offices. That's why there are so many issues that people have-- the variety of issues, I couldn't begin to count or measure. You name it, I've had them all. I watch Ann's clients drift in and out of her home from morning till night. And what I learn is this-- it doesn't matter that the people work in different kinds of jobs, all their stories are the same. There's the cop with the corrupt boss intent on making his life hell. You know, you could be sitting in a room with five people. He would walk in and say hello to the other four, and just ignore me like I wasn't there. There's a woman from the car rental agency with a boss who didn't like women. He had already been responsible for firing the two other girls in the office. I was the last remaining female. This woman from the phone company who worked with a lot of people younger than her. There were a few managers I had a problem with. She was the type that will laugh in your face, but she actually did you in behind your back. Talking to Ann about all this, every office is Othello, full of jealousy, and greed, and intrigue. Kelly's story wasn't surprising to her at all. Surprise me? Not much of it, honestly, because I find it very common in the workplace. And very oftentimes enough, there is a lot of backstabbing. At some point, I'm guessing, you have worried about investing too much emotional energy in your colleagues, your boss, your work. At least we're all doing it. In fact, for Kelly one of the best things about going to Ann about the missing photos is that Ann didn't view her freak out as excessive. Up until that point, I would be calling my mom saying, they've taken them. They have taken them. I know they have. And she would be totally freaked out, as all of my friends were. And they were like, let it go. You're going to find them. And I would be like, no, no. This is bad. This is a horrible place. And I'd be going on these rants. And my friends and my family were trying to be OK about it. But she was the first person that was like, oh, yeah, this is bad. And you're right, and that's unfortunate. And I said, well, I brought photos. So I wanted to show her the photos, to show her the different places in the office. And she, basically, looked at the first one-- which was a Polaroid of all the guys in the office-- and said, oh, that's him. He was really mad when you were taking that photo, because he knew that you were coming here. The man she pointed to was Kelly's boss. He is red in the face in this photo, glaring at me. His veins on his neck are sticking out. And it looks like he could probably hit me. How much actual clairvoyance was involved in this is anyone's guess. Ann's clients all swear by her, love her actually. But Ann and her clients all say that a part of what Ann does is confirm what you already know. Kelly suspected her bosses. Ann told her she was right to. Armed with this new knowledge, Kelly did absolutely nothing. She didn't confront her bosses or go over their heads to the head of the company. She didn't do anything. She didn't need to. She felt better. I felt totally vindicated. I felt released after Ann. Yeah, I totally felt release, because before I went to her I kept waiting for them to break. I kept thinking that maybe they'd tell me, or that they would admit to it, or that they would just put them on my desk at night, and I would come in in the morning and then they would be there. I have had fantasies about that a lot. And then afterward, I didn't have to worry anymore. I had no suspicions. I knew that everything that I had thought, she had told me was true. And I stopped caring. I felt like I could look at them from a different angle. And it wasn't personal anymore. It was just more like, wow, that's pretty pathetic. The lost photos were never found, just like Ann said they wouldn't be. Kelly now works somewhere else. Ann is booked through next summer. The problem with office politics is it never really makes sense outside the office. Your friends and family will never fully understand what it is you hate so much about the girl down the hall. With Ann, not only does she seem to understand, you don't even have to tell her about it. Starlee Kine is one of the producers of our show. Act Two, Sheetcakes in the Conference Room, Whiskey After Dark. Americans are, as everybody knows, spending more time on the job, which means more people's social lives are organized around their work lives, and more holidays are celebrated more intensely, and mean more, on the job site. David Rakoff wrote this next story while we at This American Life took our show on the road a little while back, doing our show before live audiences around the country. It is a parable of three such holidays as celebrated on the job. Holiday, the first. National Secretaries Day. At least, we consoled ourselves, we were assistants, not secretaries. In the world we were in, the world of New York publishing, these titles meant everything. It's a loathsome distinction, the almost meaningless difference between field and house slave. After all, we all of us-- secretaries and assistants alike-- had much the same duties. Filing, photocopying, taking dictation, and making reservations for meals we would never get to eat. There was one glaring discrepancy between us and the secretaries, specifically their salaries dwarfed ours. But our penury came with the promise that we were bound for better things. We would be mentored, promoted, and one day raised to our rightful stations as book editors, our faith in the East Coast meritocracy restored. Still every April when National Secretaries Day rolled around, many of us took sick days, genuinely nauseous with worry that we might be mistook for them, and there on our assistant's desks would be the asparagus fern and baby's breath-surrounded long stem roses, with the heartfelt note from the boss who just couldn't do it without you. Instead of National Secretaries Day, we assistants had our own folk traditions with our own holidays, one of which we celebrated often, almost nightly, in fact. We called it drinking. With disturbing regularity, the end of the workday found us at the old Monkey Bar, the Dorset Bar, the [? Warwick ?] Bar, all of which were attached to serviceable and somewhat down-at-heel hotels. Midtown Manhattan used to be full of just such comfortably shabby establishments, where career waiters with Brilliantined comb overs and shiny-elbowed jackets served marvelously cheap, albeit watery, drinks, along with free snacks. Withered celery sticks, unironic faux Asian Pu Pu platters, pretzel nuggets accompanying a cheese spread of a color that in nature usually signals, I am an alluring, yet highly poisonous tree frog. Beware. Dinner and forgetfulness, all for $10. Youth is not wasted on the young. It is perpetrated on the young. Hooch, happily, was one luxury we could afford. Our drunkenness was twofold. First, there was the liquor. But there was also the intoxication brought on by the self aggrandizing conviction that we happy few, we cheery booze hounds, were the new incarnations of that most mythic bunch of souses, the Algonquin Round Table. This pipe dream sustained not just us, but I suspect countless other tables of publishing menials all over town. So desperate were we to assume the mantles of Parker, Benchley, and their ilk, that we weren't going to let some silly thing like a dearth of wit or the complete absence of a body of work on any of our parts deter us. With enough $4 drinks sloshing through our veins, even the most dunderheaded schoolyard japery qualified as coruscating repartee. What do you want, a repose might begin, a medal or a chest to pin it on? Oh, touche, we cried merrily, as we clutched our martinis. That represented the high point of the discourse. Gradually, our tongues thickened and our moods darkened unpleasantly. As the evenings wore on, a hostile, gin-scented pole fell over everything. And our glittering aphorisms were reduced to the wishful and direct, I hope my boss is dead right now. Paying the bill, we stumbled out into the street and back to our apartments, where we spent the rest of the night jealously reading the manuscripts of those who actually wrote and didn't just drink about it. Rising unrefreshed, we would return to the office, and-- rubbing alcohol and cotton balls in hand-- get down to work swabbing, leaf by leaf, the potted plants in our boss' office, a vain attempt to stop the outbreak of white fly that was going around the floor. Impressing the higher ups became our constant purpose. We spent an inordinate amount of time attaching disproportionate significance to our message taking skills, our collating acumen, no small feat from under a hovering cloud of job hatred. How sad to realize, from the vantage point of years later, that the answer to the question that was perpetually on our minds, what do they think of me, was-- they didn't at all. Realistically, we were the help. And it was best not to forget it. Holiday, the second. Christmas. Those three weeks or so of midtown Manhattan Christmas are an assistant's dream. No work gets done. And all is romanticized melancholy. It was precisely why so many of us had moved to the city, so that we too might gaze misanthropically at the corporate Christmas tree in the lobby surrounded with gift-wrapped empty boxes that fooled nobody, and in the institutional fluorescent-lit sadness of it all, feel something approaching depth. The phones idle, we spent our days going to the movies during lunch, returning hours later to troll the halls of the office, foraging through the gift baskets like a ravening pack of voles, subsisting on Carr's water biscuits, individually red waxed thick balls of baby Gouda, butternut toffee, popcorn, smoke house almonds, and fancy fruit preserves eaten directly from the jar. A diet that had our faces peppered with blackheads and glistening with oily sebum as unto the shining visages of the apostles. Our bosses were away with their families at country houses having real lives. We wondered how they might greet the sight of the empty food baskets upon their return, such anarchy, such transgression. As usual, they never even noticed. We on the other hand, could not even conceive of a world wherein we did not know the exact quantity and location of our giant cashews. Holiday, the third. Happy Birthday. After any moment of extreme assistant subjugation, say a morning wherein one might innocently open an unsolicited manuscript only to find that someone had mailed the publishing house a jiffy pack full of human feces. Or one might be sent to the corner to pick up a cappuccino for an author who had just been given a $1 million book advance, a coffee for which I was not reimbursed. After such moments, we would make our way to Sheila's cubicle, where we could always be guaranteed clear-eyed advice and cigarettes. Sheila was our bad girl leader. A poet and writer herself, she despised her job, and didn't care who knew it, smoking openly at her desk and standing on ceremony for no one. "These would be my pajamas that I slept in last night," she would say, indicating the black long sleeve T-shirt and black workout pants she was wearing. "And this," she would add, fingering a crusted white smear on the hem of the top, "this would be spilled food. Nice." Well, they say, dress for the job you want not the job you have. So of course, it was immediately to Sheila that I went when I received my birthday card. It was late November. Opening the envelope, my eyes fell upon it, a reproduction of one of those tinted B movie stills from the 1950s. A woman in a smart worsted business jacket wearing a pair of glasses at which men seldom make passes, and a switchboard operator's headset out of which were shooting tiny lightning bolts, was shown to be thinking, someone needs coffee. Above her head, in screaming sci-fi acid yellow type, was the title of this card's purported movie, The Amazing Tale of the Psychic Secretary. I slid the card back into the envelope, walked over, and showed it to her. "Get your coat," she said, her voice businesslike, her face unreadable. We went to the [? Warwick ?] Bar. "Don't talk for a while, just smoke," she said. And then as an afterthought, she added, "But you knew I was going to say that, didn't you, psychic secretary?" Across from us in the darkened booth, a couple sat, a man and a woman. They had clearly been there for hours, because the woman's head was lolling about on her neck as she alternately whispered lubriciously or laughed too heartily at her companion's jokes. We had a clear view under the table, where we could see her rubbing ever higher up his thigh. I knew where this exchange was leading. Psychic. Not long after that evening, I sat in a movie theater packed to the rafters. Just before the lights went down, a woman marched up the aisle, looked at me, and asked, "Is that seat taken?" I was nowhere near the end of the row, but trying to be helpful, I asked, "Which seat?" Looking directly into my eyes, she said, "That seat." She pointed. She was pointing to the center of my chest, to my very heart. "Well, I'm sitting here," I managed finally. As if I were her college age daughter who had suddenly announced that I was a vegetarian, she shrugged in a kind of suit yourself indulgence of my fantasy of existence, and moved on. I looked up and down the row for some sort of laughter, some eye rolling commiseration, or just plain corroboration that this had just happened. But I got no response. To this day I can not explain it. Was this an emissary sent from on high at that time of year, not to trumpet the birth of the son of God, but to proclaim with heavenly proof my complete and utter insignificance? She's right, I thought. This seat isn't taken. It was the perfect moment for that time in my life. I mean that, of course, in the worst way possible. The theater went dark. Up on the screen, the camera zoomed past a huge closeup of the Statue of Liberty, swooping down to find the Staten Island Ferry scudding along the water, transporting our working girl to her office job, where we already knew she would triumph, vanquish the harpy boss, and win the love of the man. Sheila taught me a survival technique for getting through seemingly intolerable situations, interminable lunches, stern lectures on attitude or time management, being trapped by the office bore beside the sheetcake in the conference room, and the like. Maintaining eye contact, keep your face inscrutable and mask-like with the faintest hint of a smile. Keep this up as long as you possibly can. And just as you feel you're about to crack and take a letter opener and plunge it into someone's neck, fold your hands in your lap, one nestled inside the other, like those of a supplicant in a priory. Now with the index finger of your inner hand, write on the palm of the other, very discreetly and undetectably, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, over and over again as you pretend to listen. You will find that this brings a spontaneous look of interest and pleased engagement to your countenance. Continue and repeat as necessary. In the dark of the theater, I write my message, pressing hard into the flesh of my hand. Although I don't know who I am writing to, I'm just glad to feel that it hurts. Thank you. David Rakoff. He put a version of this story into his first book, which is called Fraud. Coming up, Philip Glass, Spike Lee, and Stephen Hawking sit around, have a casual conversation about, you know, whatever. That will be the day. 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 some theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Office Politics. High drama in our nation's workplaces. We have arrived at Act Three. Act Three, When the Job to Get You off the Streets is on the Streets. In New York City, at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, pretty much any day you will see tables on the sidewalks, manned by scruffy-looking men. This extends for two blocks. What they are selling on the tables are magazines and books. Most of these have been pulled from the trash, found in dumpsters. Julie Snyder reports on the politics of this particular business. After spending a couple of days on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, what strikes me is not how different street vending is from other businesses, but how similar. As if the rules of business are so deeply encoded in us that as soon as anyone starts to sell anything, in any setting, the rules and hierarchies of a company start to gel around them, even if what they're doing is selling other people's trash. On the corner, you've got your entry levels, and you've got the people who have worked and clawed their way to the top. That's more or less what Ishmael Walker did. When I visit, he has the best spot on the block, right on the corner, in front of the Barnes & Noble. And what got him there was simple ambition. At one time, I was down the block. I was just sitting out. I said, damn all the money is up there and everybody up there. Because see, that bookstore, people go and buy books, right? And I've got books on the table. I've got magazines. I might just got what they want. There were other reasons Ishmael wanted the corner. Right across is Gray's Papaya, a hot dog restaurant with plate glass windows that looks directly onto the corner. When it rains, he can sit inside and eat and still keep an eye on his stuff. Also, there's a small alcove that is right in front of Ishmael's table, where he keeps a chair and can relax or nap during the day. To understand how you rise to the best space on the block, or how you get demoted to the worst, consider Ron's story. I told you one time I had this whole block from the light post to the light post. This was when I first came out here. Ron is at the very end of the blocks in what is, arguably, the worst location. Years ago, before Ishmael made his move to the top, Ron controlled the entire block, including the area where Ishmael is now. Now how I got control of this whole block was that I was living here. I was living right here on the sidewalk. There was no way anybody was going to get here before me. You understand? And I used to sleep over there. Me and a few other guys used to sleep over there. I packed my stuff up in a dumpster, a post office thing. And I would push it over there. You understand, I could be up 24 four hours if I wanted. More than half the guys on Sixth Avenue are homeless. So it's easier for them to stay with their stuff and keep their spaces on the street. Eventually, Ron moved in with his aunt in Harlem. He lost control of the block, and now he doesn't get as much business as Ishmael does. He's away from all the action. But it's just not worth it to Ron anymore. Because I'm not going to stay out here all night to hold down a spot. I have got a place to live now. You understand? I'm going to pack my stuff up at night and go home. The way Ron started here is the way all the guys start. He was a panhandler. But you're lucky if you get any of the guys to admit that, because for the most part, the vendors are embarrassed about their panhandling past. The panhandlers, meanwhile, look down on the vendors, saying they have too much pride to sell someone else's trash. Ron remembers panhandling as just being humiliating. I was panhandling over there on Ninth Street. And I remember one day I walked up to my brother-in-law. I didn't walk up to him. I was panhandling-- my back was turned. And he walked up. And I turned around and said, spare some change. And it was my brother-in-law. And he looked at me like-- he said, I have got a wife and kids to support. And he kept going. And one time I was really embarrassed. This time, I was working at this job as a time keeper. And I was getting good money. And I ended up leaving that job, because I'm out drinking. One of the coworkers that I didn't really get along with that good was a girl. And she had a boyfriend. Her boyfriend was a New Jersey cop. And I remember one day I was panhandling uptown. And she walked up, and she looked at me like she was real startled. And she was with the guy. And I remember I was real being embarrassed that time. So I'm actually glad that I was able to start vending, which is more respectable. When you spend time on the corner, what it looks like is there will be 20 or 30 guys all around the tables. And it seems like they're just hanging out do nothing. But it turns out they all have different and distinct jobs, with different responsibilities and pay scales. There are place holders, who camp out overnight on the sidewalk, holding a space that they sell to vendors in the morning. That usually pays around $20 to $30. Guys called storage providers have places either in their apartments, or under the subway tracks, or in empty store rooms, where they charge $7 to $10 for the vendors to keep their tables and crates of magazines during the night. The movers help the vendors haul their stuff on and off the sidewalks. They generally make $5 to $10 a move. If you were to show up on Sixth Avenue tomorrow to start in the business, even with a high school or college degree, even with other job experience, you'd have to work your way up, the same as anyone, before you would make vendor. When sociologist Mitch Deneier came to the block to write about the vendors, he was first put to work getting coffee and helping out in little ways for months before getting his own table. He ended up spending years with the vendors. Not anybody can come out here and set up a table. You have to work your way through the system, because there's only a certain number of legal spots on the street. The city regulates how many spots there can be. And so some guys show up in the morning, and their whole job is just to be a mover. And in fact, that's how Conrad got started out here. He was originally just a mover. And now he moved up to getting his own table. And there are many people who start out as table watchers, watching a table all night while someone else goes to sleep, or watching a table while people go to the bathroom. And they may wind up having their own table one day. Mitch introduced me to everyone on Sixth Avenue and explained that excessive drug use is pretty much what brought all of the guys out here. Most times, a person's position on the sidewalk correlates to their level of addiction. If you smoke a lot of crack and aren't too trustworthy, a place holder is about the best job you can get. It you're pretty clean, you're probably a regular table watcher or a vendor. So there are cliques on the sidewalks and mutual snobberies between the panhandlers and the vendors. But like in any workplace, there are people who sidestep those trivialities, ignore the politics. B. A. is one of those people. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] I told you that lady here, all right? Some people say the B. A. stands for Bad Attitude. But B. A. prefers Business Administrator. It's an apt title for him because he's sort of a floater on Sixth Avenue, one of the few guys who jumps from job to job during the day. On this afternoon, B. A. is table watching. He is also place holding a space next to him for a vendor named Joe, an elderly white guy who sells rare and out of print books, but only comes to the sidewalks on weekends. And then on top of all of that, at 4:00 in the afternoon most days, he goes down to the PATH train station to panhandle, though today he isn't going. I've got somebody down there working for me. At the train? Yeah, the PATH train station. You pay somebody to go down there for you if you can't go, and then-- No, they pay me when they come out. They pay me. Because you have a spot down there too? Yeah, they take my time. Do you know what I'm saying? My time is from 4:00 to 6:00. So if they want to get on my time, I tell them, give me half. If you want to got down there from 4:00 to 6:00, give me half. So right now you're making money down at the train station, and then you're also making money right now on the table. Of course. That's how I go. And then you'll also make money tonight by holding the space for Joe for tomorrow. Got it. What would you do if somebody just went down there from 4:00 to 6:00 and started panhandling, and you didn't know them, and they didn't pay you? Isn't that possible? No, no, no. They've got to go. Because I go at 3:30, and I check out my spot. Do you know what I'm saying? I got out at 3:30. I go make sure everything is clear. I go set myself up, my crate down there, get my cup ready. I change my clothes to look like a bum. Wait. At the risk of making homeless advocates cringe, I want to make sure you caught that. Right now, B. A. is wearing a polo shirt from the Gap, khakis, and Adidas. But when he goes down to panhandle, he says, he changes his clothes to look like a bum. I change my clothes to look like a bum. You change your clothes to look like-- because right now you look really nice. That's why I say I have to go change and everything. When you have to go down and go panhandling, then what do you wear? I put on my overalls or something. I change my sneakers out. You know, just [UNINTELLIGIBLE] or my do rag or something like that. You know, I just sit down and just look homeless. And in two hours, how much can you get? $60 to $80. Hey Shorty, where you get those babies from? What's that? Magazines? At one point on the corner, Ishmael's friend, Shorty, pulls up on the sidewalk, and gets out of a cab carrying several cardboard boxes. Someone had cleaned out their apartment and given Shorty a bunch of old books. You've got something up in there. The guys gather around and evaluate the books. Most of them seem pretty old, with titles nobody has ever heard of. But there are a few known sellers. Oh, look over here. We used [UNINTELLIGIBLE] The Baby-sitters Club. The Baby-sitters Club. These will sell, bro. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] A person that don't sell books or magazines don't know nothing about it. Some of these guys have known each other for over twenty years. In the mid '80s, they lived together in Penn Station, before the city cleaned it up. After time in jail and treatment programs, the guys regrouped on Sixth Avenue. And they are close in a way that makes it nice to hang out with them. They joke around. They get into little arguments that last a day or two and then blow over. These are all good prices, my friend. How much [UNINTELLIGIBLE]? I'll give you $1 a piece on them. That's a good deal for those. Starting around 4:00 in the afternoon, the sidewalks start getting busier, the music gets turned up on the stereos, and what's known as the power hour begins. Each table has about 150 to 200 magazines laid out. The sellers, Vogue, Vibe, GQ, Martha Stewart Living, Architectural Digest. There are foreign fashion magazines, like Italian Vogue and the occasional specialty order. I have a girl right now, she wants Drew Barrymore Playboy issue. She said on the internet they're asking $60 for it. I've had that book many times. I'm waiting on it now. I'm going to just charge her $3 or $5. The losers, any weekly magazine. The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek. Neighbors will often donate stacks of weekly magazines, like People, to the vendors. The vendors will take them just to be polite and later quietly throw them away. It seems that smut sells the best. And there's a surprisingly large stock of gay porn that everyone is completely matter of fact about. In fact, it's all pretty relaxed, no hard sell, except for Ishmael, sitting in his premium spot at the top of the block. At one point, a cab driver, who Ishmael has apparently dealt with before, pulls up next to the tables and asks Ishmael if he has any computer books or software. Yeah, right there. The whole section, the whole foot. Come on out of your cab. You've got to get up out of the cab and come on by the table, bro. The cab driver is reluctant to leave his cab parked, sitting in the middle of a lane of traffic on the side of a busy New York City street. You've got to come on out. You've got to get up on it. We aren't going to have that accident no more, like we did last time. I don't want a ticket. Don't worry about the ticket. I want you to see the books, man. Ishmael actually gets the cab driver to come out of his cab and to the table. He sells the computers book for $10. Now I don't understand how you're going to see like that. You have to go around the table-- What got Ishmael to the top of the block is pretty much what get someone to the top of any business. He just wanted it more. When he first started on the sidewalk, there was a guy named Scotty sitting at the corner by the bookstore. So Ishmael made a plan. He says he stayed inside, and rested up for a week, and got ready to make his move on Scotty. So the day comes, he ain't come yet. So my tables are in there. Next minute, here he comes. Oh, boy. I fought for three mornings, three days straight, physically fighting, tables in the street, comic books in the street, books in the street. You kicked his in the street? He kicked mine, and I kicked his. For three days straight, 8 o'clock till about 11 o'clock in the morning. When Mitch first introduced me to Ishmael, Mitch said he'd met few people in his life with the determination that Ishmael has. And I know it's weird that the path to triumph would be kicking the ass of your opponent for three hours every morning. But if Coke and Pepsi could do the same thing, don't you think they would? Ishmael, I have seen you in 30 below zero weather, at 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock in the morning, I've seen you preserving this space out here when everybody else was gone. That's right. Because it's like this. They say the ghosts come out at night. And if you're not there, believe me, somebody is waiting to slip up in there. On a good day, when the weather's nice and lots of people are out, Ishmael makes about $150. But he works seven days a week. And a lot of days it rains. Julie Snyder is the senior producer of our show. Mitch Deneier's book, documenting several years in the lives of the vendors, is called Sidewalk. Our thanks to him for acting as our guide for this story. Thanks today also to Monica Hall and Chris Neary. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. When Spike Lee walks in on Torey, me, Philip Glass, and Stephen Hawking, this is what happens. He would walk in and say hello to the other four, and just ignore me like I wasn't there. 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. Keep this in mind. There is another quart of oil in the trunk of the car. OK, I'll take the Corolla. This tape is from the documentary TV program American High. A kid named Morgan is fighting with his parents because he wants to use the good car, the Corolla, and not the bad car, the Acclaim. If I wear my Tigger suit can I take the Corolla? No, it's particularly if you're wearing your Tigger suit you can't take the Corolla. Why? There is just something about the way this family argues that is deeply, deeply entertaining. They're out to amuse themselves, even when they're fighting. How am I supposed to get women in that car? You're not. That was one of the reasons I bought it. I tested it first and I didn't find any women when I was driving it. You can't-- I said this is the car for Morgan. You can't be like, hey baby, you wanna get in my love machine, baby? Got to get a homely car for you. One of the things that was fascinating about watching this TV show, American High, was watching the family dynamics. The other families that the producers filmed fought completely differently than this one did. Less humor, more strain. Now, of course, nobody in a family chooses the family dynamic. It just kind of happens. And when things go wrong in a family, it can feel like nobody had any choice about that either. You know, a kid does something that sets off a parent, who then does something that sets off the kid, and on and on and on. Well, today on our show, we bring you two stories that are sort of worst-case scenarios for any parent, both kind of incredible stories, because when you take apart how what happened happened, it's really hard to see how anybody could have prevented things from going bad. Our first story is told by a mother and two of her four daughters. Her two oldest daughters, teenagers when the story begins. Though the mom remembers their baby years this way. When Amanda was born, I was 21 years old. All I wanted to do was care for her and that's what I did. It's funny, when I got pregnant with Stephanie, I was thinking, I'll never love anybody like I love Amanda. I could not imagine that my heart could grow large enough to accommodate another child because I loved Amanda with such an overwhelming sense of identity. She was me and I was her. I mean, we were so linked. And then, of course, when Stephanie was born, this astonishing thing happened, in that I fell in love with her too. And I was really, really close to those two. They were my-- there was no difference between them and me. My name is Debra Gwartney. We left Tucson the day I signed my divorce papers after a 13-year marriage. And I had thought about it for a long time and decided that it was really best for everyone involved if we moved away. The relationship had become volatile and it just wasn't going to be good for the girls or for me or for my ex-husband if we were all in the same town. Everybody I grew up around had that code of moving on and toughness. And I had a job offer in Eugene, Oregon, and I took it. My name is Stephanie. It was cold and wet. I didn't like it. And I didn't like the house we lived in. I didn't like the school I was going to. I don't know, I was pretty angry. I'm Amanda. I hated the rain in Eugene. It was just dreary and cold all the time. It would settle in your bones. I still had this huge loyalty to my dad. And he was so depressed. I felt guilty that I was with my mom. I felt like I was disloyal, dishonest with my dad by being there with my mom. I think that's where the anger came from. You feel like they're trying to make you pick sides. It felt like we were abandoning him, abandoning my father. And I blamed that on my mom. Stephanie slept every night with a photograph of her dad under her pillow. There was a tremendous sense of guilt about leaving him in Arizona, and they couldn't understand why we couldn't go back. And I just kept thinking, well, if I could just do things the way I used to do it, we'd be OK. So I'd come home from work and make these elaborate meals and make sure that we had homemade muffins. And then on the weekends we'd drive to the coast to look at tide pools. And I'd just demand that we do these things together. And the older girls were stomping along bitterly and angrily. And they just wanted to be isolated, and I just thought, if I could un-isolate them as much as possible, we'd get through whatever this was. When I first really started getting into the punk rock scene, I got into it purely for the angry, drunk, violent aspect of it. That's what really spoke to me at first. I guess it was 6th grade, yeah. I don't know, I just started hanging out with people that weren't necessarily motivated to be 12. I met people that were smoking pot and skipping school and stuff. And so both of us kind of bled into that culture. I wore ripped-up stuff. And I had these plaid pants with zippers up the back that were skin tight, and big huge boots and angry spiky jewelry. Then we cut our hair off. I cut my hair into a mohawk. And I had just dyed my hair pink. I dyed my hair pink. Amanda dyed her hair blue. Took my hair in my hand and took the scissors and chopped it off. It was just a scraggly pink mess of hair. Totally killed my mom. She took away my Pearl Jam and my combat boots, and told me that I needed to start wearing happier clothes. Like, stop putting off the air of being so sad and angry and depressed. Like, she thought it was the music I was listening to. I made an immature assumption that we were going to come to Eugene and we were going to be in this together. Whatever the barriers were to happiness or peace, the five of us were going to confront those together and get through it. And when the girls first started acting out, I was really astonished that they would do that to this effort of making a new life. They weren't going according to plan, the plan that I had in my own head about how we were going to create this new life. I think that my mom's protectiveness and her need to hold things together, just that frantic need to hold things together, kind of pushed Amanda and I away. But I think that she wanted things to work so badly that any move that we made that was not what she had had in mind, the tension rose so easily. And I remember telling them, when times got tough during wars and during depressions in this country, the kids rally. They stick with it and help the family get through the toughness. And they would look at me like, uh, [BLEEP] that. I mean, I'm sure they said that right to my face. We would come to school high, just run around, and smoke in the bathrooms, and chase people around with sporks. That was one of our favorite things. Do you know what a spork is? It's a spoon-fork. We would pretend like everybody was aliens. It was our, like, honing in device. It was crazy. And we would stand at one end of the hall and crouch down and-- we would call it the rampage. In the commons, all the soccer girls, all the really preppy kids would hang out. And we'd put our arms in front of our head and run through the crowd, knocking people over. And then Amanda-- oh, Amanda-- she lit the bathroom on fire, and all the trash in the trash cans. She was just playing. And these two girls walk in-- super rich girls-- and went to the principal. And Amanda got arrested. She got charged with arson and got suspended from school. And that's when I really started despising the upper class, girls that played soccer, rode horses, got fake tans. So that's when I really started hating those kind of people. I got a call from their school saying that they hadn't been in school for at least a week. And I thought, well, where are they? I'm dropping them off at the front door of the school. Where are they going? So I raced home to try to find them. And they were there. And they said they just didn't feel like going to school. They were sick of school. There was no reason to go. And I said, well, where are you going? And they said they were just hanging around downtown. And I -- this is just untenable. We can't live this way. I mean, I can't have my two older daughters just wandering and then coming home at night for dinner like nothing-- like this is normal or something. If you want to live here with me, you have to go to school. About an hour later, they went into the bathroom and they were getting all dolled up. And Amanda was dying Stephanie's hair this bright color of pink with this Manic Panic dye. And I could see that they were getting ready to go, and putting all this tons of makeup on, big black streaks around their eyes, and spiking up their hair. And I opened the door and I said you can't go out. Amanda just pushed the door closed in my face. And they locked the door and they were in there just turning the music up really loud and laughing and shouting at each other. I was so determined not to let them go out the door that night. So I went to the front door of the house and I just stood there. And they came out and they both had backpacks on. They walked over and said, get out of the way. And I said no. I was blocking the door. I was keeping-- my legs were apart and my arms were out. And I said, I'm not going to let you go out. You can't go. And I remember Amanda saying, Mom, we don't want to hurt you. By that time, both of the little girls were on the periphery and shouting at all of us to stop this. They pushed me aside and they ran out. And as they pushed me, I tripped over a chair and fell. I drove around until about 4:30 in the morning and never did find them. And we didn't see them again for eight days. It was just a rough night, drinking 40s of malt liquor and smoking pot. And it just was a hard night for both of us. Me and Stephanie started sleeping in abandoned parking shelters. And we would find houses that weren't lived in and sleep in their backyard. And it was freezing cold too, and we only had these little blankets. That first time they left, that's when I kind of entered the world that I never knew existed. It's not against the law to run away from home in Oregon. The truancy laws are also gone. If your child is missing from school for an extended period of time, all they do is basically drop that child from the rolls. No help from the police, no help from the schools. So I started looking into social service agencies. And they're really set up to help the child. But there's really no place for a parent to go and say, my child has run away. What can you do to help me get them back? I went to Amanda's counselor for help. And he suggested that I look into a therapy program where they would take the girls into the woods for several weeks and get them cleaned up off of drugs. And they suggested a person who specializes in going into the underground, the subculture of kids, and finding kids so they can put them in a group and get them out into the woods. So it really came down to finding a stranger and paying him $200 a day to seek them out. It was terrifying to get involved with someone like that, former cop, a former LA cop. I gave him a map of downtown Eugene and where I thought they liked to hang out. They at that time were very fond of the IHOP. One day, me and Stephanie had woken up and we were walking downtown, and some guy comes up to us and points at me and goes, you're Stephanie? And points at Stephanie and goes, you're Amanda? We shake our heads, no, we're not. He's like, no, I know you guys are. He was like-- told us he was a private investigator hired to find us and the police were going to pick us up, and that he was going to take us to a safe place where we could eat. And he was a horrible man. He was just a bad man, with his son. They got us in their car and it was weird. And they drove and drove and we drove to Sisters, Oregon. And then it got really scary. And they strip-searched us and put us in crazy clothes. And they took Amanda. And I stayed there for a week with all these other girls, just milling around, wanting a cigarette more than anything in the world. It was just such a weird, surreal situation, really horrible. I drove to Albany, Oregon on a Saturday. And then the people in Sisters transported Amanda there first. And we met in this room and she was a ball of fury. And we were in this very cold, impersonal room with 10 sets of parents and their angry teenagers. I guess I was still, at that point, thinking, if I could just make the right move, if I could just find the right puzzle pieces, then this is all going to fall back in place again. I guess I was still in that illusion that there is a cure here, and if I could just find it, we'll be OK. And they explained to the kids that they will have a small packet of lentils and rice and a few vegetables and a pan, and that they'll be responsible for building their own fire, and that they would teach them how to build a snow shelter to try to stay warm. And so they locked them in this van. And here we were, all these parents standing in this driveway. And they just backed out and drove away. A week later I did the same thing with Stephanie. We were in the Cascades and there was about 11 feet of snow on the ground and we were in this huge blizzard. They had a wall tent with a wood stove in it. We'd met another group there. And I didn't know, but it was Stephanie's group. So I walked past Amanda. And I didn't see her because it was in the dark. I couldn't tell which one was her, but I knew I was walking past her. And I was singing Blondie or something. I don't remember, something she would recognize. She knew I was there. I sang all night, sang to her. They let me talk to her for five minutes. We were just looking at each other's hands and I still had fingernail polish on. She said, how'd you keep your fingernail polish on that long? And I was like, I don't know. I just wear gloves all the time. And we were just looking at each other, just faces and hands, and then got ripped apart again. That was the only time we got to see each other for about six months. After the wilderness trip, Amanda went to live with a family in eastern Oregon, where she worked on their ranch. And Stephanie was living with our friends in Montana. And the thought that-- I mean, my whole image of myself was as a mother. And the thought that I had failed so much that my daughter was now called a foster child. And when we would go there, I felt so tiny, tiny and sloppy. I just felt like this-- you know, like the welfare mothers you see in line buying candy bars with their welfare checks and everybody's clicking their tongues and judging them. I felt like that. I felt like such a failure. When Amanda was in foster care, I saw her quite often and I thought a lot had been healed between us. She was really dependent on me, so I thought we were really off on a good footing for that next fall. We started the year off and it was just-- it was a fiasco. They didn't want to go back to school. It just wasn't working. It was a continual battle with them. And they just wanted to be out partying with their friends. I just couldn't have these street kids that came home now and then to eat. It was basically a mantra. If you don't do what I say, you're not going to live here. If you don't do what I say, you're not going to live here. And that would just ring in my head over and over. And that just planted a little seed, like, fine. I'm not going to live here. And the girls walked in the house. And I was outside doing some things. And they came out with these huge backpacks and bed rolls. And you know, I just didn't even have the strength to say, stop. I had my backpack and a pair of shoes tied onto my backpack. She said, where are you guys going? Out to coffee. Why do you need two pairs of shoes to go out to coffee? That's the last thing she said. And they walked down the street and that was it. It was weird. It was fun, exciting, adventurous, new. Lots of good stories. Every day was a story, like a book. Going by Shasta, Mount Shasta, in a box car, and just seeing things that not many people get to see. It was like nothing else I've ever done. There was a lot of pain involved, but at the same time, it was like every moment I was actually living in the moment and I was there. I haven't really felt that since. In the next couple of months, every now and then Amanda would call-- never Stephanie-- and either leave a message or she'd get me on the phone and say, we're alive, we're OK. But she would never tell me where they were. And I would say, come home. You need to come home. We need to work this out. She'd just hang up. When we were in San Francisco, that was the crazy times. Me and Amanda, that's when we first started doing dope. But one night, I had wandered off. I was totally screwed up and out of my head. Alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy, pills, psychotropic pills, all that stuff, 40s all day on the block. So I had my dog in my hand and I wandered off up the street, and just was wandering around, totally cracked out, like, walking around in the Tenderloin at 11:00 at night. At night in San Francisco, the crackheads come out with all this stuff they've gathered during they day, because crackheads gather things. They're like pigeons. They're attracted to the shiny metal. A lot of times, they roll out pieces of carpet and lay all the things they've found out: lamps and spoons and hub caps and prosthetic pieces of people, I've seen, just lost treasures. At night, it's like the crackhead fair. There's people with their shopping carts laying out all the stuff they found. When you're high on drugs, like I was that night, I thought I was at a little market place. And so I was walking along and this one crackhead had all this stuff, a carpet laid out with all this stuff. And I picked up a candle. And he came out of nowhere, just like a banshee out of hell, just screaming towards me. And I don't know, in the struggle I got cut on my arm. I was just kind of dumbfounded. I was like, what just happened? So I just left. And then I remember walking and just being covered with blood. And I walked up to Sixth and Market, and all my friends are sitting there. And I walk up and my mouth is open and there's blood everywhere. And my friend cleaned it up for me. It felt like there was almost protection around us, or a bubble, just something protecting Amanda and I, something special about our journey through this dark place. We just glided through it and remained untouched. She and I have such a different way of looking at that time. She was so happy and she was making her part in this community. And I feel used and-- I don't know. My idea of the whole thing was to put my life on my back and just go, and stop looking back, stop feeling guilty, stop all these raging emotions, just keep going, keep moving. I had saved about $1,500. And I had an ATM card. And so we would panhandle and we would live off what I had, until I got a heroin habit, and then it went pretty fast. So we made it to Tucson. And we decided to get some heroin. And so we went down to this drainage tunnel, and Amanda took her shot of dope and as I was about to-- as I was about to-- I had drawn up my blood and I was about to put it all back into my arm, I looked over at Amanda and I said, you're looking kind of gray, Amanda. And she says, oh, I feel fine. She's really, really hammered. And the boy that was next to us said, oh, she's fine, and so I pushed all the heroin into my arm. And right then, Amanda fell over. She had done too much and it was not a good batch, because I couldn't-- could barely walk. I was crawling over to her, and this was the first time I've ever done CPR. I'm sure I broke some of her ribs. And I couldn't get her to breathe. Her heart would beat for little bit and then stop and start again. And she would-- she took like two breaths the whole day. And I don't know how she did it. I just kept telling people, call a [BLEEP] ambulance. Everybody wouldn't. They said, no, we're just going to wait for a little while longer. We could all get in big trouble for this. I was like, I don't give a [BLEEP]. I'll got to jail for the rest of my life. Get me an ambulance. And then this guy put her on his back and he was dragging her in her shoes. Like, the next day, you could see where her shoes were all worn down. There was all these little Mexican kids chasing after him, going what's wrong with her? What's wrong with her? And we got her as fast as we could to this house, some fat guy's apartment. He was watching The Simpsons. Right as the ambulance pulled up, Amanda lifted her head up by herself. We got to the hospital. And so we're sitting there and a cop comes in. He handcuffs us both to the bed. And the phone rang. And it was a hospital in Tucson, calling to tell me that Amanda had been found. And it was the first time I had any clue that she was using heroin. And that was really a lot to take all at once. She was in a hospital. They'd had to restart her heart, and she was a heroin addict. The policeman took us in his car down to this halfway house. We booked as soon as he left. Two days later, the police stopped us for loitering and ran our names. I spouted out my false identity and Amanda gave her real name. And I turned and looked at her, shocked. Whenever we talk about it, it always comes back to, well, why did you give your real name to the cop, Amanda? It's your fault. Can you understand why I gave my real name to the cop, Stephanie? I just want her understand it, that it was the only thing I could have done in that situation. And maybe I wasn't-- maybe I was tired. I had just died. They ran our names and Amanda's came up dirty, as you would say. And they took her backpack, put it in their trunk. I gave her a big hug and kiss and I said, I'll see you soon. And that was the last time I saw her for a year. And we were torn apart. And we never really healed that wound. She went and did it alone. I was so mad that she was still doing it and I was stuck. I was her sister. I don't know, it was like a journey we had to complete or something and it felt like it was cut short. I had to keep going, for some reason. It was like some kind of Homer's Odyssey. We had to make it to the end, whatever that end was, which we didn't really know. I left Tucson. I hopped a train to Texas. So we'd go through Arizona, go through Benson and out to the border of New Mexico. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you're in a town. And Stephanie was 14 years old. Where was she? I went to San Francisco because Amanda thought she was maybe there. And she thought she was perhaps in the Tenderloin district, because they had found a community there. And this friend of ours went with me. And that is a really horrible area. There are all these majestic looking buildings with homeless people everywhere, and weird piles of used clothes all over, that I guess people just dump there and let people look through. Every park bench, every fountain, ledge, every step up to the library had another little blanket tent. It was like walking through a campground of some sort. We were looking, trying to look at faces to see if we could see her. She was looking for me when I was in Texas. I wasn't anywhere near San Francisco at the time. I understand why she went there to look for me, or why she went anywhere. It's a really sad story that she has to tell. And I feel incredibly guilty that I put her through that, and that she had to go to the places where I'd been and had to see that. So I was waitressing at a pizza place for about 50 hours a week, and got really good at it. Great tips. Walk out of there with $100 sometimes at night. Of course, I was coming out of my addiction. I was praying a lot. So then I started going to the Catholic church. It was a block away from my house. Saint Austin's Church. And I used to sneak my dog in. I would put him in my shirt, my jacket. And I would put holy water on his face and holy water on me. And we'd sneak into the back and it was this huge old church and we would always go to the Mother Mary. So we used to go hang out there for hours and just sit and be quiet and pray, light candles for my family. So Christmas Eve came and we did all of our usual traditional things, which was very hollow and cold. We all were sitting in the living room, kind of staring at each other on Christmas Eve, not knowing what to do. And I said, well, why don't we all write Stephanie a letter? And I thought, corny and a little contrived, even. But it just came out of nowhere. So, to my utter amazement, Amanda was into that. She really wanted to do it. So we each took a couple pieces of paper and went to a different place in the house and wrote. And Amanda wrote for over an hour. She just wrote and wrote and wrote. Yeah. I just asked her a lot of questions. Why are you doing this? What are you trying to accomplish at this point? You're hurting us all so bad. Please, let's try to work this out. Please call. Please tell us you're alive. Please be alive. And finally, Amanda came in with her pieces of paper that she'd written. And we all folded our notes up to Stephanie. And we took a pan, just a pan from under the stove, outside. It was a very cold night. And we stood in our driveway and we each put our letter to Stephanie in the pan and we lit it on fire, lit them on fire. And then we said prayers that she would call. I mean, I got a little taste of what my mom went through in those nine months where Stephanie didn't call us. I've never been so completely sad and just ruined. I mean, Stephanie wasn't even my child. She was just my sister and my best friend. And I couldn't sleep at night. I was just so sad that she was gone and I mourned her every day. And we just stood there while they burned and the smoke went off. It's really amazing to me that we all survived this. There's just so many ways that somebody could have slipped away. Stephanie was 14 years old, and she got herself down to Texas and got a job and lived in an apartment and paid bills. I did not rescue her from that life. She rescued herself. And I think she'd very much like me to recognize that. And intellectually, I can. But when she's in the same room with me, and we're talking about this, I get so hurt. I think she still rolls her eyes and feels hurt by me saying that this experience had some value. It's my life experience and it's important to me. And I just hope that someday she can acknowledge that. Things aren't easy with either of the girls yet. They're so much better. And I can so freely say, I love you. And they say, I love you, Mom. And the words are so real. And I'm incredibly proud of both of them. We are evolving and building a relationship now that's a lot stronger. We still don't really know each other very well, but-- It feels like our situation's changed, especially this year. She listens to me. She gives me advice. We're friends. She's my mom. I have a mom. That story was produced by Sandy Tolan of Homelands Productions, in collaboration with Debra Gwartney, with her daughters Stephanie and Amanda. Debra has just come out with a book about her experience, called Live Through This, which had been featured in Salon and People magazine and reviewed all over the place. Stephanie is now in college in Massachusetts. Amanda has finished college and she lives in Oregon with her husband and two small children. Coming up, sounds like an ordinary school day, until the end. That's on Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show we bring you two stories that I think anybody would consider parents' worst-case scenarios. Our first story was about girls who ran away. This next story is about someone, a teenager, who did something to himself that I think most people would find unthinkable. And he wasn't a loner. He had friends. His mom was a teacher, interested in his life. He wrote an account of what happened on that day, when he did what he did. A warning that some of the moments in this story are not appropriate for small children. Monday, February 4, 1991. Falls Church, Virginia. I'm awake, listening to the radio, and mom is yelling at me to wake up and get out of bed. I don't want to get out of bed. Maybe I should play sick. But I've done that too many times this year already. The bathroom is right next to my bed, so I don't have to put on a robe or anything. I just go in and lock the door behind me. And then the door that leads to the hallway, and then the one that separates the shower and toilet from the sink. It's weird that this bathroom has three locking doors, but I like it. If I ever have to hide from anyone, like a burglar or something, or really just want to be by myself, I can come in here and lock all the doors. The shower is nice and warm when I get in, and I suck a little water into my mouth and spit it out again. I don't want to go to school today. I'm going to be in such trouble. it's like a god damn black cloud hanging over my head, like in the cartoons when it's only raining on the one guy and it follows him around wherever he goes, even indoors. That guy is me. I run the whole thing back in my head. I did so many things wrong I can't even believe it. I shouldn't have taken the matches from Adam. I shouldn't have lit that match. I shouldn't have set the whole pack on fire. I shouldn't have thrown them in that locker. And I really shouldn't have put that lock on the locker. I'm so stupid, I say out loud, and turn off the shower. I'm going to wear all black today. I always do. Downstairs my dad would be drinking coffee, staring at the paper. But he's on a business trip so there's a big hole at the breakfast table. My brother's still in his room getting ready for high school. But he can leave late because his friend Schmid picks him up. My mother's moving around the kitchen, cleaning things up. She puts my lunch bag on the counter. She doesn't write my name on it. When the bus comes, I get on and walk all the way to the back. There's still a seat next to Anna, the girl from down the street. I sit and turn my body just enough so I can slide my hand under Anna's sweater. At first she doesn't move. But when my hand touches her belly she exhales really loud and whispers, it's too cold. I take my hand back, rub it and blow on it until it's warm. And then I slide it back under her sweater and rub my thumb against the rough fabric of her bra and the top of her breast. Sometimes, I ask her how it comes undone and she says, it's a latch on the front. And I spend the rest of the ride trying to figure out what that means. And once I noticed a hole in the crotch of her pants and I tried to put my finger in it. But she said it tickled too much. Today I'm happy just to feel the warmth of her skin. When we get to school, I pull my hand from under her shirt and get off as fast as I can. My best friend Steven and I are in home room together because both of our last names begin with R. And that makes it the most fun class of the day, which sucks because it's also the first. We sit in the back row, holding copies of The Catcher in the Rye, which I haven't read, but I might read because I like books about baseball, and whisper about Megan. I say, did you call her? Yeah. Did you ask her out? Yeah. What did she say? She said maybe. Maybe? I ask. She said she kind of likes someone else. Who? I ask. You. This is bad news because I know how much Steven likes her. And I'm sure she likes him back. Why do I have to screw everything up? I'm such a freaking idiot. Mike and I sit in the back row of Mr. Wolf's civics class, figuring out how to spin a pencil between our fingers like Iceman does in Top Gun. Leah sits in front of us and pays attention to Mr. Wolf the whole time. She used to write notes to me, asking who I liked, and dropped them onto my desk. I'd write back, asking her if she wanted to join my religion, the Ace of Spades. Back in seventh grade, I had a lot of time on my hands. And I'd come up with crazy ideas just to freak people out. I came up with the idea about a religion based around a god called the Ace of Spades. And we'd all worship the Ace. And he'd be the one true creator and always wear black. But I never really figured out how to make people believe that he was the one true creator. So I sort of gave the whole thing up. Leah always thought I was a freak for talking about things like that. But she used to at least pay attention. Now she just ignores me, maybe because of the time she got a B plus on her report card and started crying because it was the first time she'd gotten anything lower than an A, and I called her a stupid bitch for crying about something so stupid. I used to get all A's too. And now I'm getting F's in a couple of classes. And my parents think I'm a retard. But you don't see me crying about it. I meet up with my friend Adam halfway down Main Hall, and we walk to gym together. He says, I swear, man, did you see Katherine in that sweater? She's so stacked, especially for a seventh grader. Yeah, I guess. I'm not even thinking about that stuff today. I've got bigger things on my mind. Friday in gym, when me and a bunch of guys were changing, dropping our pants and pulling up our green gym shorts as fast as we could, Adam got out a book of matches he'd gotten from the 7-11 and showed them to me. I don't know why, but I grabbed them and lit one. And then because I thought it would be funny to see everybody's reaction, I set the whole pack on fire. And all of a sudden there was a big ball of fire in my hand and I didn't know what to do. So I opened one of the lockers and threw the burning thing in. Then I realized there was a shirt in the locker. I panicked when I realized that the shirt had caught fire too, and I grabbed a loose lock from the bench and put it on the locker, thinking that it would put out the flames. And then I ran over to the water fountain, cupped some water between my hands, and carried it back to the burning locker. I tried to throw it through the metal slats, but by that time the shirt had just about burned itself out, and then my problem was the smoke. By that time, all the other guys had already gone out to gym and I was the only one left in the locker room. So I just opened all the windows to get the smell of burning cotton out, and then went out and played volleyball. When we came back in at the end of the period to change, you could still smell the smoke, but the gym teacher just thought somebody had been smoking. But when I walk into gym today, I can see Mr. Huff is standing in the back of the locker room, right next to the locker that was on fire. He keeps moving his bottom lip over his mustache, so it looks like he's trying to eat it. He says, OK, boys, settle down. On Friday there was an incident in the locker room. Some arsonist among you purposely set a shirt on fire. We had the fire chief come over and investigate. He took some fingerprints and we expect the results later today. Boys, whoever did this is an enormous amount of trouble. Charges will be pressed. He'll be expelled. But now I'm prepared to give the guilty party a chance to confess. So whoever did it, or if you know who did it, come see me in my office before the end of the period. His eyes lock with mine on the last word and I feel a cold sickness all over my body. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I say over and over as we walk out into the gym and start stretching. We're playing dodge ball inside today because it's cold and raining. Kevin picks up the purple ball and wings it, nailing me in the back. And I go sit on the sidelines for the rest of the game. Nick beans Adam and he comes over and sits next to me. They were his matches. His fingerprints were on them too. What are you going to do? He says. I don't know, I say. Are you going to turn yourself in? No. You're not? No. What are you going to do? He asks. I'm going to kill myself. You are? Yeah. But how will they know it was you, not me? I don't know, I guess I'll write a note saying I did it. You will? And he gets up and starts to walk away, and then calls out, Hey, thanks. Brian and I sit in the back row during English. Sometimes we draw Motley Crue and Aerosmith symbols on our notebooks. He likes me because I tell him what the books are about when he doesn't read them. Brian, I say, could the cops-- the cops couldn't get fingerprints from a book of matches if it were all burnt up, could they? He thinks for a second. He knows this kind of thing. Yeah, they could. They could? Yeah, because fire doesn't burn away fingerprints. It doesn't? No. Unless the person who lit the matches also poured lighter fluid or some other emollient like gasoline or something on the matches. Then they wouldn't be able to find anything. But, like, the school doesn't have our fingerprints on file, does it? Yeah, of course they do. They have everybody's fingerprints on file. They do? I slide a little lower in my seat. I'm so screwed. Yeah, he says. Don't you know anything? These days in Algebra, I have to sit up front with the brains. I used to sit in the back with Nick and Kevin, two of the coolest kids in school. We'd open Mrs. Loftus's file cabinets when she wasn't looking, and steal school supplies. We got white out and pencils and big yellow legal pads. And we'd take them back to Kevin's locker and store them there. We never used them or anything. We just liked stealing. I don't know how they figured out it was us. Kevin thinks they installed a security camera, but I'm not sure. The night before the school called my parents, I got dressed up in my best outfit-- a black blazer, black silk shirt, black dress pants, and a black tie-- and lay in my bed listening to Warrant's "Cherry Pie" album. I took my kitchen knife from its hiding place between the mattress and box spring and held it against my wrist. When the music got really loud I sliced as fast as I could and bit my lip from the pain. I hung my arm between the two twin beds pushed together, from when my brother used to share the room with me, and let it bleed. I was surprised when I woke up in the morning. My blood had clotted into the carpet. I had to find a Band-Aid big enough to cover the wound, and I told my parents I had scratched my wrist on a locker. We got three days in school suspension for stealing and my parents were pissed. They sat me down at the kitchen table and told me how upset they were. Just the looks on their faces was terrible. My dad was scowling at me like I was a hoodlum. My mom looked like I'd broken her heart. It was like they didn't recognize me. They said, we've never been so disappointed in you. I promised them I'd do better, and I tried. I wonder how they'll feel when I get expelled. I see Steven in the hall on the way to lunch. I pull him over next to the blue lockers out of the way of the crowd and say, I'm in big trouble. Why? he asks. I lit a book of matches on fire in gym and burned somebody's shirt up. That was you? Yeah. That was my shirt. It was? Yeah. Why'd you do that? I don't know, I was just screwing around. That was your shirt? Yeah. What are you going to do? They took fingerprints. I know. I don't know what I'm going to do. I walk down the hall towards the cafeteria and I know that I'm completely screwed. I think about that movie we saw in English class, about the guy who's standing on the bridge waiting to get hung. I wonder why all the ways I've tried to kill myself haven't worked. I mean, I tried hanging. I used to have a noose tied to my closet pole. I'd go in there and slip the thing over my head and let my weight go. But every time I started to lose consciousness, I'd just stand up. I tried to take pills. I took 20 Advil one afternoon, but that just made me sleepy. And all the times I tried to cut my wrists I could never cut deep enough. That's the thing. Your body tries to keep you alive no matter what you do. During drama class, they finally call me into the vice principal's office. She's wearing a red dress that I can't stop looking at. She asks if I know anything about the fire, and I tell her no. She stares at me for a few seconds and says, you can go. She knows that I did it. When seventh period is finally over, I run to my locker and put all my books inside. I won't need them anymore. I grab my lock picking set and a spare Ace of Spades that I have lying around. I touch Michelle Pfeiffer's lips with my thumb. At the end of the hallway, I can see Steven talking to Megan, the girl we both have a crush on. I walk up to them and say hi. She smiles at me and I try to smile back. Steven looks a little suspicious. I don't want to tell them what I'm going to do. I hand him the Ace of Spades and say, goodbye. And I walk away. I hope they'll be happy together. I see my friend Jake at his locker and give him the lock picking set. Use them wisely, I say, and head towards the bus. Laura walks with me down D Hall. She says, hey, I heard you set that fire in gym class. What are you going to do? I'm going to set myself on fire. She stops at her locker, but I keep walking. On the bus ride home, I sit by myself. I lean my head against the cold, glass window, and try not to think about all the stupid things I've done and all the pain I've caused everyone. My brother Craig is playing basketball outside the house when I get home. He's shooting free throws. I rebound the ball for him and throw it back. I don't want to take any shots. I tell him the whole story about what I did and what they're going to do to me. I don't tell him what I'm going to do to myself. When I'm done talking he says, that sucks. And I go inside the house. I don't have to write a note anymore, because Craig knows everything. I walk out to the shed to get the gas can. I bring it inside, upstairs to the bathroom, because that's the room with the most locks. I go back downstairs and get the matches from the kitchen. I take off all my clothes and put on the pair of red boxers with the glow-in-the-dark lips that my mom bought me at the mall last weekend. I bring the bathrobe into the shower and I pour the gasoline all over it. The gas can is only about a quarter full but it seems like enough. I step into the bathtub and I put the bathrobe over my shoulders. It's wet and heavy, but there's something kind of comforting about the smell, like going on a long car trip. I hold the box of matches out in front of me in my left hand. I take out a blue tip match and hold it against the box. Should I do it? Yes. Do it. I strike the match. But it doesn't light. Try again. I light the match. Nothing happens. I bring it closer to my wrist and then it goes up, all over me, eating through me everywhere. I can't breathe. I'm screaming. Craig, Craig. I fall down. I'm going to die. I'm going to find out what death is like. I'm going to know. But nothing's happening. This hurts too much. I need to stop it. I need to get up. I stand. I don't know how I stand, but I do. And I turn on the shower. I unlock the door with my hand and open it. My hand is all black. I walk out. There's Craig with Rusty, our dog, next him. They have the same expression on their faces. Craig yells something and runs downstairs. He's calling 9-1-1. He hands me the phone and runs off. There's a woman on the phone asking questions. I try to tell her what's happened but there's something wrong with my voice. The woman on the phone says the fire trucks and ambulances are on their way. Somehow she knows my address. There's smoke coming from the bathroom upstairs and I can see that the whole room has turned black. If the room is black, then why am I OK? And I look down and see my flesh is charred and flaky. And the glow-in-the-dark boxer shorts are burnt into my skin. The woman on the phone says everything's going to be all right. She keeps asking me if I'm still on fire and I say, I-- I don't think so. I'm walking around the kitchen, waiting for the ambulance to come. I can see my reflection in the microwave. That's not me. That's not my face. That's not what I look like. Where's my hair? Where did my hair go? We used to put marshmallows in microwave. We used to watch them get bigger and bigger and then shrink down. Oh God, just tell them to get here. Just tell them to get here, OK? I just need them to get here. She says, they're coming. They're almost there. I'm so sorry, I say. I'm so sorry. It's OK. That's OK. I can hear the sirens in the distance now. It hurts to talk. I think there's something wrong in my throat. I say, I want to lie down. I'm going to lie down. You can't lie down. But I have to. The men are here. The firemen are here. They're putting me on a plastic sheet. They say I'm going to be OK. One of them puts something over my face. That feels good. That feels so good. The cold air feels so good going into my lungs. What are they talking about? What are they saying? They're giving me a shot. They say it's going to make the pain go away. I'm looking at the faces of all the men who are gathered around me, and their eyes are so blue and clear. My brother is yelling in the background and punching the walls. He's so angry. I'm being lifted. They're rolling me through the front door, down the path, and into the ambulance. I wonder if anybody in the neighborhood is watching. I don't want them to know. And then my mom is here. And she's smiling and saying she loves me. And her eyes, which are green like my eyes, are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Brent Runyon. His account of this time in his life is collected in a memoir called The Burn Journals. He also has a new book called Surface Tension: A Novel in Four Summers. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Our production manager is Seth Lind. Production help from Andy Dixon. Production help on the runaway story from Ellen Yuan and Rhonda Bernstein. It was part of the World Views series, a collection of first-person narratives. Some of that funding came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Our website, where you can get tickets to our movie theater event, for one night only. Thursday, April 23 we're going to do an episode of our radio show live on stage and beam it to movie theaters all over the country. Tickets are available at thisamericanlife.org. A shout out to my own dad, with apologies for my own teenage years. I am very glad we are all older now. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who explains what attracted him to public radio in the first place. I got into it purely for the angry, drunk, violent aspect of it. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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It is an old, old story. A group of friends gets together, decides to start a business, put on a show, or begin their own church, or take a political stand, together, as a group. Hearts are full. Everyone's close. But over time, there's some small thing that comes up, some dispute. And the dispute starts small and takes on more importance, and more until it becomes the most important thing that any of them think about. Until it becomes the main thing that they all think about. And until it destroys the group. Well, it is This American Life from WBEZ Chicago. I'm Ira Glass. The premise of our program is that each week we document everyday stories of these United States, using all the tools of radio storytelling-- documentaries, monologues, overheard conversations, found tapes, occasional radio dramas, anything we can think of. And today we bring you three stories of friends coming together to do some kind of project or work together, friends who end up as enemies. Act One is about a religious group, Act Two about a political group, and Act Three about a racial group. Stay with us. Act One, Saints of the Last Days. Our first story today takes place in Utah, home of the Mormon church, which, out there, they sometimes called the LDS church. LDS for Latter Day Saints. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young received visions when they founded the church and established it there. And to this day, it is not uncommon for Mormons to see visions and to set up their own variations on the main LDS church. Scott Carrier has the story of one such splinter church, how friends began it and how the friends over time, split apart. This is a story about a group of radical Mormon polygamists who live in central Utah in a little town called Manti. I call them radical because they've all been excommunicated by the church authorities, not for practicing polygamy, not because they were sinners. They were excommunicated because they said over and over again that the church authorities were working for Satan. I'll begin this story by introducing Jim Harmston, a middle-aged man of common qualities, a man who used to sell real estate up in Davis County. He was a Mormon, a good Mormon, a member of the high council. He had a house on the hill and a new Continental every six months. But then, in 1990, he started to believe that the church had become wicked in the eyes of the Lord, and he started praying in the true order, and seeing angels, and receiving divine messages from across the veil who told him first that he should quit his job and move with his family to Manti, which he did. Next, to become a polygamist, which he did. And then, to become the prophet and president of his own new church, the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days, which he also did. He did, in effect, have very nearly the same experience that Joseph Smith had 160 years before. I had an experience where four dispensation heads came across the veil and laid their hands on my head-- Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Moses-- restoring again the apostleship. And this happened on a Sunday. They were magnificent resurrected beings clothed in white garment, white clothing, to their robes hung to their ankles. They had white hair and beards. They were magnificent, and I was overwhelmed with the Holy Ghost. And it's been interesting to observe. People give up their careers and their professions, their businesses, and begin to gather here in Manti. On Sunday afternoon, Harmston's church has a testimonial meeting. 150 men, women, and children on folding chairs in a newly constructed meeting hall. Testimony meeting is a Mormon tradition where members stand and bear their testimony in the truth and validity of the church and its doctrines. But many of the people here have recently been excommunicated, and so their testimony is that the Mormon church has become corrupt. Indeed, that this congregation now is the only true and living church on the planet. You know, I've been searching for a witness of this work and of this church. And just tonight I got my witness. And it's burning within my soul at how important this work is and how true it is. I know it is. And it's hard to believe that just a year ago I was in high school. I was in plays. I was a typical teenager. And now I'm in a plural marriage and struggling. I'm not going to lie to you. Welcome to the club. But I know without a shadow of doubt that this is the Lord's work, that I have finally found it. And I love you guys, and I'm thankful for your prayers and for all that you have to offer me. I say this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Members of Harmston's church practice the principle of plural marriage because they believe polygamy was one of the fundamental teachings of Joseph Smith. This is why polygamists often refer to themselves as fundamentalists. They also believe in practicing the law of consecration, wherein all goods and services are held in common, a communism, and that there will be a gathering of God's chosen people into a nation, a Zion nation. This gathering is to be in a safe spot, an area protected during the Millennium and the Armageddon. It's all there in the Book of Revelations, and it's all happening now. Hundreds, some say thousands, of fundamentalists from around the West have moved to Manti over the past three years, all believing that this is the place for the gathering. Steve McKinley has lived in Manti for 15 years. This is a very special place. There have been very sacred things happen here. And I moved here to Manti 15 years ago because the Lord told us to move here. I've seen a lot of people come and go from this valley for spiritual reasons that are totally different. They didn't even know who Jim Harmston is. And they come, and they go. Steve McKinley and Jim Harmston used to be friends, but now they're more like enemies. They met when Harmston moved to Manti in 1990, and so McKinley has seen the development of Harmston's church from its beginning. It began as nothing more than a group of men from the Manti area who came together once a week and sat in a circle in an upstairs bedroom. There were 17 men who came together because they were concerned about things that were being taught and accepted by people as doctrine. And we were concerned, and we came together. And we prayed, and we asked, Heavenly Father, will you teach us? Will you tell us what is your doctrine and what is not? And will you protect us as individuals against things that we might do that would destroy ourselves? The other thing, if Randy needs a lump of coal to keep his family warm and Steve's got two, then Steve says, Randy, here, have one of my lumps of coal. And let's take care of each other. Let's help each other, because we love each other, and we're concerned. So there were two reasons that we came together-- to pray together and to help each other with our temporal needs. They also did a lot of talking about the evils of the new world order, perhaps the need to stockpile weapons, the necessity of taking the kids out of the public schools, various conspiracies, secret combinations, and so on. The men held the meetings in each other's homes. And on special occasions, they'd set up a tepee on top of a mountain. In the tepee, they'd sit in a circle and bear their testimony and pray in the true order, which is a secret Mormon ritual that's supposed to be performed only in a temple. Mormons believe that by praying in the true order, the veil that separates heaven and earth can be parted, enabling angels and messengers of the Lord to cross over into this temporal plane. Which is exactly what the men say started to happen in the tepee. They say their prayers called down lightning and thunderstorms from heaven. They say that this is where God first told the group to organize themselves along Iroquois guidelines, wherein all decisions were to be made by unanimous revelation. Not just unanimous consent, unanimous revelation, where everyone would pray and have a vision, the same vision, at the same time. Then they all received a vision that they should give each other titles like war chief and peace chief and medicine chief and historian so that every man would be a chief with certain responsibilities, but that no man would be the ultimate chief with control over all the others. I recall the testimony meeting. And Jim Harmston stood up and he said, if any man here were to stand and declare himself a leader amongst these men, there would be 10 men who would stand up and shoot him in the knee caps, because none of us independently are the leader. We are a group of individuals who have come together, and nobody has authority over anybody else. That's how it started. That's how God called us together. The men started calling themselves the high council and then realized by unanimous revelation that they were actually new apostles of the Lord and that they should begin an entirely new church, the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days and that they should start confirming each other as members. And so I asked Jim if he would confirm me. And as I sat in the chair facing the wall-- not the window, but the wall in Bart's living room-- Facing east. Facing east. I had my head bowed, and my eyes were closed. And when I opened my eyes and was wondering why he was pausing. And then I closed my eyes again and I saw three men walk through the wall. It was Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball who came through the veil. And they placed their hands upon my head and revealed many things concerning my life and my [UNINTELLIGIBLE] to certain things upon this earth that I should do. And I could see the vision as he spoke. I could see it, and Jim described what he saw, what we both saw in vision. And Jim was so overwhelmed, he closed the vision. Because he was so overwhelmed he could not continue the vision, Jim ended it. But it continued for me. And I saw many things that Jim did not speak. The first major conflict within the new church came early on. One of the high council apostles, Randy Dalton, the historian, came to a meeting and presented a teaching on polygamy he called "Hearts and Flowers." I have a firm testimony that we are to become perfect. The Lord has commanded us, be, therefore, perfect, even as I or my father in heaven are perfect. Well, what does that mean? In the Greek and in the Hebrew, the word that is used that we translate as perfect really means to be whole or complete. I do not believe that it is possible for us to become whole or complete through intimate relationship with only one other person. Now, the fact of the matter is that men just do not form emotionally intimate relationships with other men. It's really kind of foreign to our being. And yet, look at women. They have these incredibly emotionally intimate relationships. They know everything about each other. The empathy is incredibly. They feel what the other is feeling. And there is, in fact, one of the problems that is fundamental to most marriages, is that a woman craves a kind of nurturing in her relationship, in her marriage, that men are rarely capacitated to give. We're just not the nurturing types. And yet, a woman needs that. And as men, we just tend not to be able to give it. And yet, a sister wife can give so much of that emotional support that as men, we're just not very good at doing. And it can work very beautifully if you can get over issues like jealousy and things like that that get in the way. So I was talking about these kinds of things. We thought he was talking about homosexuality, and we were going to go out there and rip his head off. We were upset because we didn't understand. We thought, is he talking about homosexuality? If he is, we're going to set this boy straight. We're going to explain some things to him. And Randy says, wait a minute, guys. That isn't what I said. You see, let me tell you. And so we talked about it for a long time. And that's not what Randy was talking about. But we misunderstood it, and so did a lot of others. A lot of others thought that's what he was talking about. That was not it. It was a teaching that grew into an argument, that grew into a conflict that couldn't be resolved. The question wasn't whether polygamy was OK. Everyone agreed that it was. The question was about sex, whether a polygamist man could have more than one of his wives in bed at a time. For two weeks, the group met and prayed in the true order. Some said it was an abomination. Others weren't so sure. I told you earlier that many of us experimented with different things. The true order prayer, we experimented with a lot of things. I think that Joseph Smith was the greatest example of an experimenter. He experimented with a lot of things. He had seer stones and peep stones and witching rods to witch wells and water and all kinds of things. He experimented. He tested. There were many of us who tried and tested this so-called understanding of our sexuality with our wives. Many of us on both sides. Members of Jim's church, members of the quorum of the 12 apostles, members of the first presidency of Jim's church who participated and experimented with having sex with more than one wife in the bed at a time. They experimented with it, and they're OK. They're members of Jim's church. Three weeks after Randy Dalton gave the "Hearts and Flowers" teaching, there was still considerable tension within the council. And at the next meeting, it split apart. Instead of the council talking it out and coming to unanimous revelation, Jim Harmston stood up and said he had received revelation for everyone that three in a bed was an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. And while he was at it, he said he also received revelation that he alone was now in charge of the church. He stands, and he says, I have received revelation for these people. Thus sayeth the Lord. And I want to emphasize that. He said, thus sayeth the Lord. Then Harmston and four other men stood and walked out of the meeting, leaving the others as outcasts, ostracized from the True and Living Church just as they had been ostracized from the Mormon church before. At that moment, Jim Harmston placed himself in a position above the others. At that moment, Jim Harmston took control of the church. The sex thing was a smokescreen. It was a smokescreen to cover up Jim's ambition to take over the council and the nation and everything else. And what more better tool could he use than something that was disgusting to most people. If he could say, well, these guys are perverts. They're having orgies. They got everybody in bed, and they're a sex-crazed people. Well, if anybody believes that plural marriage is about sex, they got another thing coming. It has nothing to do with sex. It's about a relationship between people. And God. And God. It has nothing to do, very little to do with sex. Believe me, I know. But you know, Nietzsche made a very interesting comment. He said, "Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster. And when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss is within you." And I think that's what happened is that Jim Harmston has spent so much time fighting against the LDS church that he's become a general authority. It may well be that every abuse he has accused the LDS church of may yet be found in his own circle. This split in the True and Living Church happened three years ago, and since then, Harmston has baptized hundreds of new members, whereas McKinley and Dalton and the others who were ostracized have pretty much just kept meeting with each other, four or five families getting together, sometimes on Sunday afternoons. It was at one of these Sunday meetings that I interviewed McKinley and Dalton. And the scene in the house was very different from what it was like at the Harmston's. McKinley and Dalton and the others joked around and laughed a lot. Their wives talked loudly in the kitchen, and all ages of children were running around inside and out. Occasionally, one of the wives would come into the living room where we were talking, and it was difficult to tell which man was her husband, they all got along so well. But at Harmston's house, his two wives were upset and not talking to each other. The first wife told me she'd gone after Jim that morning with a frying pan. The second wife hid in the back room. And there were no kids. Everything was quiet and serious. It was like going from interviewing a group of hippies to interviewing Richard Nixon. Harmston sat at his desk in his study, looking out the window at the Manti Temple just a couple of blocks away, a temple built by the Mormon church over 80 years ago, a temple he still considers to be sacred and holy. But it's a temple he's no longer allowed to enter. He was kicked out of the Mormon church. He kicked out his friends from his own church. His closest allies now are the angels and spirits who promise him that he alone holds the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Well, I'm either completely nuts or right on target, one or the other. And there isn't anything in between. They have to judge for themselves. Saints of the Last Days was produced and reported by Scott Carrier with help from [? Caroline Campbell ?], Alex Caldiero, and myself. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Act Two, Political Faction. Well, if you read the first books of the Bible, as the story of the Israelites coming together as a people, it doesn't take long. It does not take long before some Israelites are casting others out as undesirable. Just two generations after God makes the deal with Abraham to create a great nation, Joseph's brothers decide they're in and Joseph's out. Soon he's sold into slavery. Not long after, in biblical terms anyway, when the Israelites are in the desert fleeing Egypt, factions are doubting Moses' ability to lead them. They make the golden calf. There's another faction in the Book of Numbers. It happens a lot. Well, this next story takes place mostly in the mid 1970s, entirely among great believers, political believers in this case. And they're believers who had great ideals as well. And the ideals were not only about political matters, international and national affairs. They were very idealistic about how to treat each other. They made all decisions by consensus. They told the truth to each other. They believed that there was great value in being able to hear the truth and speak the truth to each other about how things were going, and they still split apart, painfully. Beau O'Reilly tells this story. He's a prolific local playwright, musician, performer. And we welcome him. I broke my own rules today. I slipped into the Water Tower Mall. And when I saw Betty Byzantine, I knew it was her right away, even though her whole physical aspect had changed quite a bit in the seven or eight years since I had last seen her. Her body in the old days was lumpy and full of itself. But it had gone all sculpted and molded, a '90s weight world training woman's center body now. Her hair, which had been a mossy color of brown was now hennaed red, and it was the red hennaed highlights that made her stand out on that escalator. She looked good, better than I looked. At least better than I felt that day. And I thought, well, better to leave old Betty Byzantine alone. We didn't part on the best of terms. And I thought she hadn't recognized me, but as the escalator reached the eighth floor and she got off, she turned and deliberately pointed one long finger, cold. Just that one finger and Betty Byzantine was gone. Now, the terrible thing about Betty Byzantine was that there was really nothing terrible about her. She was more plain, I guess. That's a nice way to say it. She had tended to fade into the background and become one of the small facts of the day. There was nothing that really stood out about Betty Byzantine when I knew her. And I have examined my behavior towards Betty Byzantine occasionally over these last 15 years. Although I found myself wanting and insensitive towards her, even in my efforts to tell her story, I've never felt compelled to do anything to make it all right between us. I've never felt the latent Catholic urge to confess it all and to throw myself at her feet, beg forgiveness for my coldness in the past. This is another one of my rules I'm breaking. I tend to be very amends oriented. The first time I saw Betty Byzantine was in the kitchen of The Palace, our collectively run vegetarian restaurant and coffee house. And Betty Byzantine was covered in this finely ground whole wheat flour. She was desperately trying to force it into a pie crust shape. First pie crusts are unbearably a failure, and Betty's would prove no exception. She was working under the watchful eyes of Small Craig, who was in charge of all of our desserts and our volunteers. Pies and cakes and tarts, they were a lot of work, and Small Craig was always on the lookout for that rarest of individuals, the hardworking volunteer. Small Craig was the most amicable of the hippies that I knew. And yet, at the same time, he was a man of efficient and disciplined work habits. I could give Small Craig any job and consider it done. And we, the hippie family of The Palace collective, leaned on him. Betty Byzantine was a sniffler. She was sniffling now. And that sniffling would never stop the whole seven years I knew her. Betty Byzantine had allergies, the year-round variety. Allergies to dogs, milk, copper, dust, snow. And it was those allergies that brought her to our palace in the first place. We were, in 1974, an island of health in a world collapsing under fast foods. It was the allergies that brought her to The Palace where we hippies, 10 or 12 of us, lived and worked together. It was the allergies that brought her there, but it was Small Craig's eyes that kept her there, I think. She had eyes for Small Craig. And long after her hands had proven too clumsy for pie crusts, we were all still eating Betty Byzantine's pies. Forced to by Small Craig who believed such diligence must be rewarded by the rest of us. Our pie palates might suffer, Small Craig argued, but Betty Byzantine's satisfaction at seeing all of us chew on her ashen-tasting pies was well worth it. And two years later, after the collapse of The Palace under a mass of debt on debt, bad decisions leading to no decisions, we moved in smaller groups of three or four, hunting the great Midwest, the small college towns, for the last outposts of the hippie nation, which had spread and spewed itself like so much volcanic ash at the end of the Vietnam War and now flickered with a doubtful light. And the increasing draft of the '70s, that post-Nixon shame era, flickered with a still wild and a restless energy. Madison, Wisconsin, was one of those places. It was comfortably feminist, cooperative, organic. And Small Craig landed there, and I did too. And Betty Byzantine followed like a magnet in a ball bearing factory, showing up the same day Small Craig did. She just happened to be looking for an apartment in the same neighborhood. She just happened to need a roommate. Betty and Craig became roommates. Me, I had already started looking for the next big issue. The war had done a lot for the left. It had forced us into action. But what was next, nuclear weapons or that quiet nastier cousin, nuclear power? Nuclear power had slowly replaced the faded war in our conversations, and it was all over our personal view screen that summer. There were activists' "let's do something about the power plants" edges to every political conversation I was having. And I quickly became impassioned and determined to take an activist stand. There were others around me feeling the same thing. So soon we had a new alternative family, the nuclear radioactivists we called ourselves. And I invited Small Craig along, and here came Betty Byzantine uninvited, but not unexpected. We picked a nuclear power plant that was doing terrible things in an increasingly obvious way. It was in a section of Illinois that was closest to our Madison home, so a justifiable move on our part. A stand could be made there. And after a series of late night rave-ups about it all and nonviolence training workshops, we went, and we made one. And this was us. Mordecai, the crazed chemistry grad student who wanted to be a dancer, a filmmaker, or Allen Ginsberg but who carried this huge weight of serious chemistry all over his body and his shoulders. But he was the most naturally anarchistic one of all of us. He drove recklessly. He smoked too much. He dated all the women we knew. And there was Maggie, who we said would smile and hand you a hand grenade like it was a lovely piece of fruit. She would later become a New Yorker, a macrobiotic lesbian witch painter who crammed her canvases with live fish and dead fish bones. But back then she was clear as a bell, a real hippie girl. And there was Teddy, who had this laugh like Bugs Bunny. Teddy was everybody's best friend and confidant. Teddy had a major flaw when it came to activism though. When it came time to be arrested, Teddy was out the door. There was Michelle. Michelle was a stalwart, a Quaker. She was well trained in nonviolence and consensus decision making. And she was the most radically left of all of us, first to be arrested and last to back down. There's Kirk. Kirk was beautiful, and he rode a 10-speed bicycle up and down the hills of Madison without ever touching the handle bars, reading Joseph Conrad or William Faulkner. Handsome Kirk was Stalwart Michelle's lover until Small Craig's eyes moved him into Michelle's heart. That change left Kirk quivering with emotion and Betty Byzantine just quivering. That was the core of my radioactivist family, and I was often our unofficial spokesperson. I was 27, usually barefoot, and my hair was down to my hips. Came from a poverty background with little education. I was weak on the facts, but fierce with emotion and so earnest in those days. Earnest with the cops, earnest with the plant workers, earnest with the judge. That was the group of us that went into battle armed with good intentions and a not long for the real world glow of love for each other. And we blockaded that nuclear power plant. Beau O'Reilly's story continues in a minute when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week here on this program we chose a theme. We invite a variety of writers and performance to take a whack at the theme. And today, all of our stories are about friends who get together to try to do some thing and who end up enemies. We return now to Beau O'Reilly's story about his radioactivist friends. As you will recall, they have blockaded a nuclear power plant with results they more or less expected. The initial jailing lasted three or four days, and it was quite frightening for Betty Byzantine. She was with Maggie and Michelle, and both of them remained cool throughout. But that couldn't have helped her. Her fear was now sprinkled with that hot sauce of shame when she judged herself in comparison to them. There were the sounds of beating in adjacent cells and women weeping, and the cell was giddy with disinfectant. It was very frightening for Betty. That was probably the first crack in the bond between Betty Byzantine and the rest of us. Because the rest of us delighted in having some of the real dirt of the system under our fingernails. That dirt was everywhere in the county jail. And that same dirt, it made Betty Byzantine shake. And as she was already quivering from the recent coupling of Small Craig and Stalwart Michelle, this trembling had become her way of being. By the time we got to the trial, we were in hippie heaven. And we did wild things there. We read Dr. Seuss books to the jury, and we actually won the judge over and were acquitted. But Betty Byzantine wept on the stand. She snuffled, and she sneezed and spoke in badly formed half sentences, forgetting the judge name. The rest of us, we radioactivists rejoiced in our victory. And we came home from the trial prancing and proud and puffed up like David after he delivers that stone onto the head of Goliath. We had an instant reputation amongst the activists for our intensity and our recklessness. And we had two or three, four more actions over the next two years, sticking to the principles of our nonviolence and growing closer and closer to each other. Probably I never loved anyone as cleanly and without qualm as I loved those radioactivists. All except Betty Byzantine. She loved only Small Craig, and she clung to him like a burr to a blanket, standing off to one side and offering her opinions when asked. And helped when needed, but never initiating anything. Always just there. Her eyes were hooded and secretive as she watched Small Craig and Stalwart Michelle boastful in their pink love haze. They of course were oblivious to Betty Byzantine's painful observation role. But I wasn't oblivious to it. I could have acted on it. I would have too, except this coldness I felt for her. I was aware of her tension and her fear, and I could have helped her. I could have helped her vent her emotions. I could have suggested kindly that she take a sabbatical. And with any of the others in the group, I would've done that. I saw Betty Byzantine's hurt, but I didn't follow my own rules and reach out to her. We were in our most active period, driving every weekend to trials, actions, conferences, speaking up and speaking out, often driving hundreds of miles a day and sleeping in a pile on someone's floor or couch. It was fun, but it necessitated very close quarters. And Michelle and Craig's affair intensified and deepened. And they pooled their monies together, and they bought a double sleeping bag so as to have some pretense of privacy when we all collapsed at the end of the day. And Betty Byzantine watched like a hawk in those minutes before we all bedded down, and she grabbed whatever strip of floor or carpet that remained next to the sprawling double Michelle-Craig sleeping bag body, no matter how humble or pathetic it might seem. And in the dark, she would sniffle herself awake, her nostrils hungry after the lovers' pheromones, her ears struck wide by the sounds of skin against skin. In the meantime, nuclear power plants still belched and threatened all mankind. And the anti-nuclear movement grew larger and clumsier and more strident. We began to argue with increasing force about what steps to take next. We were small and able to act cleanly and without compromise, and that seemed great compared to the bloating anti-nuclear organizations that were growing like mushrooms around us. We needed to be what? More forceful, more aggressive, more knowledgeable? More compassionate? More Marxist? More what? And finally, one night after a long demonstration where we'd been very much in the forefront and there was lots of press and lots of passion, I was sitting up late with Small Craig and Mordecai and Teddy having one in an endless series of dynamic discussions, how the grouped worked and how the group didn't work. And we all agreed that the group needed a renewal of focus. And what was keeping us from getting that new focus? After all, we were all deeply committed to each other. We loved each other. Distraction. And what was the distraction? There was a short list of possibilities. Political rhetoric, day jobs, marijuana, love affairs outside the group, love affairs within the group, Betty Byzantine. Betty Byzantine, like a huge crack in your favorite coffee cup. Once it's there you can't ignore it. I don't want to be in a group with Betty Byzantine, one of us said. But what a shudder of relief we all felt when we heard it. None of us wanted to be in a group with Betty Byzantine, and we would simply tell her that. And meeting after meeting went by, with the four of us telling Betty Byzantine. Now in retrospect, this seems outrageous, I guess, that we would spend months stuck on this one thing and unable to get through it. But in those days, that was how we did things, our group process, how we talked. That was our strength. That was the subject of endless fascination to us. It was what really interested us-- group consensus. And group consensus insisted on Betty Byzantine acknowledging our rejection and agreeing, consenting. And she would not. I mean, Betty Byzantine would state flatly that she had no intention of leaving this group. Maggie and Michelle at first listened. They played it neutral, trying to be helpful to both sides of the disagreement. But slowly, this began to shift. Betty Byzantine did not wish to leave the group, and she should not be forced to leave, they argued. Our process was more crucial. It was more actively nonviolent. How we got to our decision, that was the important thing. That was much more important than the decision. Maggie and Michelle called for a decision, an agreement in our argument that would include Betty Byzantine. But Betty Byzantine grew flatter meeting after meeting. And the men, they grew hotter and harsher. Betty Byzantine needed extra help. She needed extra attention. She was not strong enough. These were our surface reasons for not wanting to work with her. But these declarations of candor, this need to tell the truth under fire, it took on a life of its own. And all four of us felt compelled to just tell all and hold nothing back. Betty Byzantine was not charismatic. That was a problem. Betty Byzantine was not essential. She was not cool enough. She was not attractive. Betty Byzantine was a drag. And Betty Byzantine hunched her shoulders and she quivered and she stuck to her guns. She took it. But she would not leave this anti-nuclear family. And then finally, one night, I'd had it, and I just said it coldly and flatly. You know, you have to leave the group for the sake of the group. And if you don't, the group will cease to exist. And I will not agree to continue on like this. And Betty Byzantine said, no, she would not leave. And in that moment, the group ended. And the look on Betty's face, and the other women, and maybe on all of our faces, was a look of horror that it had gotten so hard and harsh between us all. And the door slammed. It just slammed shut that night. And we'd failed to reach an agreement, and there would be no unanimous revelation. We ended as an activist group, and most of our friendships just sort of blew away. Maggie and Michelle left the community. Betty Byzantine surprised us all then by deepening her activism, becoming a major organizer in the women's movement. And ironically, the rest of us just drifted from activism. Betty Byzantine really showed us all. So today when I saw her at the mall and she gave me that long, cold finger, I could see that she had progressed. She was no longer hunched and quivering. Betty Byzantine seemed to be doing just fine. Act Three, Racial Factions. People do things in a group that they would never do one-on-one. For yet another example of that, we turn now to Glenn Loury. Glenn Loury's on the list, whenever anybody makes a list these days, of the preeminent black intellectuals in this country. Formerly a professor at Harvard, now at Boston University. His writing appears in a variety of scholarly and popular publications, including the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and many, many conservative journals of opinion. In the prologue to his book, One by One from the Inside Out, a book of essays on race and responsibility, as it says on the cover, Loury tells the story of an incident that happened to him in the 1960s on the south side of Chicago where he grew up. He was at a black political rally, the exact nature of which he writes he does not remember. His best friend, Woody Jordan, brought him. Woody is a guy who looks like a white guy to anybody who didn't know him and who'd be walking by on the street. They would assume that he was white. Anyway, we're at this rally, and Woody wants to say something. And the leaders, these guys in dashikis, the Black Power captains, sort of turn on him sharply, and they sort of say, what are you doing here? How can you have something to say at our rally? That's part of our problem. White people are always peeping our hole card was the phrase that was used, I remember very clearly. But we never can go downtown and find out what the white man is thinking about. And then finally the guy says, who can vouch for this man? And to my everlasting shame, the fact of the matter is, I failed to speak up for my lifelong friend. I failed to vouch for him and to tell them that this guy was OK. I was intimidated by these guys and perhaps insecure in my own authenticity as a black person. And I abandoned my friend in order to not offend the sensibilities of people who were essentially strangers. Can I ask you, at one point in the essay you write, "I would always be black in white America, yet my standing among other blacks could be made conditional upon my fidelity to the prevailing party line of the moment." I wonder, do you see part of this as the nature just of any group, any religious, or political, or social group, that as soon as it begins to define itself as a group, inevitably it begins to define who is in and who is out? Who is really in and who is really out? Well, yes, I suppose that's so. Although, as I say, I would always be black in white America. That is, there's a sense in which for African Americans, to a certain degree, those boundaries are given in the situation. And we then add to them by, as I say, constructing these tests of what it means to be genuinely or really black. Black people are not supposed to be interested in classical music. They're not supposed to be interested in the German language. We're not supposed to like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and so on. Glenn Loury says in his essay that after that rally, he and Woody never discussed the incident. And while they continued to be friends for a while, things were never the same between them. When I called Woody Jordan to get his side of the story, he had not spoken to Glenn Loury in years. He didn't know that his former best friend had written any books, much less any that mentioned him. Jordan still lives in Chicago, is an attorney in the Public Defender's Office on the murder task force. He has a caseload of 25 adults and juveniles, all of them accused of homicide. The largest thing on the wall behind his desk at work is a poster, put out by the Black Panthers. "Eldridge Cleaver for President," it says, with the word "revolution" twice in huge block letters. And though his old friend Glenn Loury doesn't remember what rally it was a quarter century ago, Woody Jordan remembers. He says it was a Black Panther rally immediately after police killed panther leader Fred Hampton in his bed in the middle of the night in Chicago. The evidence showed that there were 72 rounds fired from outside of the apartment. Man, this gets me mad just talking about it. There were 72 rounds fired into the apartment. And maybe, maybe, one round fired out. But while he remembers the politics of the rally and the details of the murder, he had completely forgotten the incident that Glenn Loury describes in his essay. He said this kind of challenge about his blackness happened to him all the time when he was a kid. On the street, at parties, at school, from cops. And he was surprised that his friend found any reason to write about the rally at all. It didn't bother me any more than to the end of the day. You know, I never said anything about it because it wasn't any big thing. Obviously, it was a big thing for him. And if it was, he should have said something by now, doggone it. But by then, my emotional callouses were quite thick. That particular incident, I had honestly forgotten about it because it had happened so often before. It didn't stick in my mind that much. Let me ask you what you make of this sentence from Glenn Loury's writing. He says, "Upon reflection, my refusal to stand up to Woody exposed the tenuous quality of my own personal sense of racial authenticity. The fact is I willingly betrayed someone I had known for a decade, a person whom I loved and who loved me, in order to avoid the risk of being rejected by strangers. I had feared that to proclaim before the black radicals in the audience that this white boy at my side was in fact our brother would have compromised my own chance of being received among them as a genuine colleague." Let me ask you, what do you think of that? What's your reaction? I can take it two ways. I can take it one, as just being-- I mean, you got to remember. He's talking about a time when he was still a freaking kid. OK, that's one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is, let us assume that this is an adolescent who was, in fact, in possession of all of the faculties of an adult male, of a grown man. Maybe what was going through his mind is, what's more important, one individual or my people? Unity or one individual? And how do you answer that? How do you answer that? I think that in the final analysis when you're talking about a situation where you feel that your people's survival is actually threatened, then your people are more important than one individual. But if you follow that argument to its logical conclusion, then you're saying that he would have been right to turn his back on you in that crowd if the situation were dire enough. I'm not so sure it wasn't. I'm not so sure it wasn't. But he would be right at your expense and at the expense of your friendship. What's more important, your people or one individual? I'm just one person. I'm not that important. Maybe what he did was the right thing. Maybe what he did was right. The issue is unity, not friendship at that point. Oh, that's fascinating. He certainly has got the spirit of the moment just right because the issue was unity. And I wish it were true. I wish it were the case that my motives had been that pure, that I had said, ah, the right thing to do here at some level is to defend Woody, but that would disrupt the unity of this meeting. But you see, that wasn't my thinking. I mean, I was not a politician. I was an 18-year-old kid. I was somebody who was overwhelmed by the more immediate and visceral feelings of acceptance and embarrassment and insecurity. The only unity that I was interested in was the unanimity of that group in thinking that I was a good guy. You know what I'm saying? Not black people forever and we got to stick together to fight the man. It was just merely, please don't look askance at Glenn. One of the odd things about this story is that it's Woody who takes you to the rally, and then it's him who ends up having to leave in shame. Yeah, and Woody is the guy who's working as a public defender defending black and Hispanic, I'm sure almost entirely, people accused of murder. And I'm the guy who people call a black neoconservative whose daughter, ironically, is an assistant district attorney in Chicago at this very moment. Really? So your daughter could be prosecuting cases that he's defending? She prosecutes juvenile felons, some of whom are up for murder. I don't know if his practice includes the public defender of juvenile defendants. But in theory, yes. I think you guys should sell the movie rights to this to somebody. I don't know exactly who. There's some made-for-TV movie in here somewhere. I don't know what. You know, yeah, that's an idea. But it abounds in ironies, that's for sure. I should tell you that in his office he sits-- the largest thing in his office right behind him when you come in and see him is, there's an Eldridge Cleaver poster. Get out of here. No, for real. That's unbelievable. , Unbelievable in what way? Well, you know, the last time I read Soul on Ice it almost made me want to throw up. I mean, Eldridge Cleaver of 1968, yeah. Eldridge Cleaver looked at now with 28 years hindsight, my god. What's on the walls of your office right now? Photographs of me in the company of Ronald Reagan on one occasion and Margaret Thatcher on another, among many other things. But let me just duly note that those things are there. Well, our program was produced today by Peter Clowney and myself, with Dolores Wilber, Alix Spiegel, and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt and Margy Rochlin. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this or any other of our programs, visit our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can also to listen to our programs for free. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who describes his management style this way. Well, I'm either completely nuts or right on target, one or the other. And there isn't anything in between. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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This is how far it's gone. In his office at a place called The Innocence Project in New York, Huy Dao stands amidst piles of letters and legal documents. I'm not really sure how to describe it. At some points, the piles are actually as tall as I am and I'm six feet tall. It might be funny if it weren't so sobering at the same time. Just outside the door of his office are four stacks of letters that go waist high. We estimate there's 2,000 letters here that have only been logged in and not even looked at. The volume of mail has grown exponentially. If you had come here two years ago, there would have been two weeks worth of mail and now there's eleven months worth. All these letters from prisoners who hope that DNA evidence will set them free. These are the only cases The Innocence Project takes on. For after they're done screening the letters and choosing the best cases and sending the prisoners to get their DNA tested, half the time, the test proves the prisoner was guilty, which when you think about it, the prisoner knew all along. How far has it gone? How much have things changed because of DNA evidence? The largest and oldest private DNA forensics lab in the country, Cellmark Diagnostics in Germantown, Maryland, still tests for murder and sexual assault cases. But now the fastest-growing part of their business is old, unsolved cases. They test evidence for over 500 of these a month. Lab director Charlotte Word says they're also doing robberies, assaults, criminal paternity suits, private eye work, insurance fraud, medical malpractice-- Well, there have been cases where individuals were told they had cancer. They went in and had an organ or tissue or something removed, and then when the pathologist did the review of those tissue samples, no form of cancer was identified. So the question was, in the original slide that was looked at, was there a mistake that this slide really belongs to someone else who truly has cancer? A person who actually has cancer but doesn't know it because the slides got switched? That's correct. How far has it gone? Even medium-sized cities like Arlington, Texas, population 350,000, are going back through all their old, unsolved homicides to see if there's evidence with usable DNA. I found it very interesting to go through some of these large case books or three-ring binders full of yellowed investigative notes from decades gone by. Detective John Stanton says that one case he stumbled upon was one that he had worked on himself on his first day on the job as a crime scene officer on Valentine's Day, 1985: the grisly murder of a young woman. Back then, we had a cigarette butt in that case, believe it or not. And, of course, back then, just how definitive a piece of evidence this is going to be, it's probably not. There's probably a lot of people who smoke this brand of cigarette. Nearly 20 years later, he opened the evidence bag that he'd sealed back in 1985. And the DNA in the saliva on the cigarette butt was perfectly preserved. Matching it with a DNA profile in a database is probably the only hope of ever solving this murder. There are over 1,266,000 DNA profiles of criminals in government databases. But that number is climbing fast as more states gear up their programs. 1,300 criminals are matched to crimes every year by the FBI through their DNA. So that case may rest very strongly on that little cigarette butt. How far has it gone? Here in Illinois, there have been more wrongful convictions overturned with DNA evidence than anywhere in the country. 18. Enough people wrongly sentenced to death that a Republican governor put a moratorium on the death penalty and commuted the sentences of everyone on death row in the state, 167 people. Maurice Possley has written a number of investigative stories about wrongful convictions for the Chicago Tribune, and he says that one of the most important things about DNA evidence is that by overturning these convictions, it's giving us a window into some disturbing police procedures. How they get innocent people to confess to crimes they did not commit, how they get witnesses to lie, and pin crimes on innocent people. People said these things happened before. These are not new accusations. But now people can make those with a new certainty. This is not guesswork in these cases. The newest thing that's happening, he says, is that even in cases where there's no DNA evidence, prosecutors and judges are willing to go back and consider whether there might have been a wrongful conviction. Because DNA has showed us that mistakes can be made and are made, they are willing to take a look at those cases. That's significant because heretofore, you really needed incredibly powerful evidence to even get in the courthouse door. This is just how far it's gone. This is the historic change that's been wrought with DNA evidence. Never before have we had evidence that is so good, so indisputable, that it doesn't just prove wrongdoing by criminals, it sometimes proves wrongdoing by police and prosecutors. Today on our radio show we look at what it has revealed to us as it's done that. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in two acts. In Act Two, in the second half of our show, we will look at how police interrogation procedures-- common procedures, no violence, nothing fancy-- were able to get a normal, suburban, 14-year-old boy to confess to killing his own sister, a crime it was proven later he did not do. And we begin our show with Act One, an act that we are calling Rabbits and Hawks. This is a story about some teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of murder and who served 15 years before DNA evidence got them out. One of the things that's extraordinary about this story is that there is no ambiguity at all at this point about their innocence. We don't have to wonder about any little loopholes. Not only did DNA evidence prove that they had not done the crime, two other guys confessed to the crime 15 years after the fact and their DNA evidence was a perfect match. Shane DuBow about tells this story and explains how police pinned the crime on these first guys. This is the story of how one tragedy became two. The first involves a young woman named Lori Roscetti who was raped and killed in 1986. The second involves four innocent teenagers who were wrongfully imprisoned for that crime. In Chicago that year, 284 other murders took place. But Lori's was the one that grabbed the top headlines and came to be viewed as a symbol as much as anything else. A typical quote from the papers read, "It wasn't just a murder. It was a bestial, barbaric, horrifying, senseless massacre." She was a medical student, bright, promising. Of course the fact that she was also white medical student murdered in a black neighborhood was a constant subtext. Her body was found by some railroad tracks, not far from her car. Her head had been bashed in with a rock. When no arrest came quickly, people got upset. A reward was offered. There was a march on a police station. Some students held a vigil. The pressure was on and the police needed suspects. On January 24, three months after the murder, they dragged in 16-year-old Larry Ollins. A little about Larry. He's got an angular build, a slow smile, and a habit of squinting that can make him seem moody even when he's not. Back then, he'd already been arrested several times for things like non-violent burglaries. The police, he says, strapped him to a wall, slapped him around, and then started asking him leading questions about a vague but brutal crime. They wanted him to admit to it. Instead, he told them this. I don't know nothing. I can't tell you nothing because I don't know nothing. I know a little bit about the law because I have been arrested before, man. I'm not taking no murder case or no rape and all this other stuff. I'll take one of them missing candy bar cases you all got missing in the back, but I ain't going to be able to do this, man. The police were unable to bully a confession from Larry, but their tactics worked better on his friend, Marcellius Bradford and his 14-year-old cousin, Calvin. Marcellius says the police beat him up until he gave in. Calvin says he was tricked. After keeping him for hours, Calvin says, the police told him that if he'd just sign a confession, he could go home and see his mom. He signed. They locked him up instead. And because both confessions also named Larry, the police locked him up too, in solitary confinement, without even fully explaining his charges. I'm sitting in that room. I can't come out. I'm in there 24 hours a day for about a week. I was just so depressed, man, from not understanding how it was that they pulled this stuff off that I couldn't even eat. I couldn't even drink. And I wasn't using the washroom that much. All this stuff just happened instantly. And when they detained me and put me in this room, I could hear the TV out there. I could hear the TV, and it would get real quiet because the TV is talking about me. Well, two of three teenagers being held in the rape and murder of medical student Lori Roscetti are being held without bond tonight. 17-year-old Marcellius Bradford, shown here in the yellow hat, appeared in court today along with 16-year-old Larry Ollins, who is being tried as an adult. And I could hear through my doors because it's got big cracks through the doors. And it's talking about the Roscetti case and this and that. So I put my ear to the door and I'm starting to hear the story. With one of the youths driving, Roscetti was taken a mile south to this isolated stretch of railroad tracks. Once at the location, one of the offenders took Miss Roscetti out of the vehicle to the rear of the auto and brutally violated her. An argument ensued between the first offender and the others over who would assault the lady next. This is a particularly gruesome crime and the ages involved of the people that perpetrated it is absolutely incredible. One of the things that's so amazing about watching these old newscasts is how even now, even after these four men have been completely cleared and the real killers have not only confessed on video but been matched with crime scene DNA, even now, you watch that old footage and you think, thank God they caught those terrible kids. You see them in handcuffs, you hear they confessed, and then there's the details of the crime, which seem so believably specific. Police say at one point, Miss Roscetti was able to break loose from the gang and tried to run away. Lori had been carjacked, police said, at the corner of Loomis and Flournoy. One of her attackers had needed cab fare. They'd all been teenage friends. And then after the first one had raped her, they'd had an argument about who would go next. 15 years later, now that the real killers have confessed, we know all those details are bogus. So where did they come from in the first place? Kathleen Zellner, the four men's attorney, keeps a handgun in her desk and has an air of someone who's seen a lot and wouldn't mind shooting most of it. She discovered where those details came from completely by accident when she noticed a name buried in an old police report. Apparently, the famous FBI profiler Robert Ressler had analyzed the case. That means he'd done what profilers do, which is he'd studied the evidence and made an educated guess, a profile of the sort of suspects the police ought to look for. But this profile wasn't in any of the police reports. And so, because she's Kathleen Zellner, she then flipped to the world famous profiler's name in her Rolodex. So I called him at his home. I have his home number. And I called him and I said, "I want to talk to you about the Roscetti case." He said, "I remember that case." He said, "I did a profile on that." And I said, "Yeah, but you didn't write it up." And he said, "Yeah, I did. It's in my book." And I said, "What's your book called?" And he said, "Whoever Fights Monsters." And I said, "I've got that on my bookshelf. Let me put you on hold." I said, "What page is it on?" He knew the page. So I went over and I got the book and I opened it and I thought, my God, I'm looking at the confession. Ressler's best guess profile matched exactly what Calvin and Bradford confessed to. To Kathleen, it looked like the police had taken Ressler's scenario, filled it in with some local names and details, forced her clients to sign it, and then called it a confession. Whoever Fights Monsters by Robert Ressler, page 166. "My guess was based on what I thought was likely to have happened after Roscetti had left the garage. She probably stopped at a light in this run-down district and some people came up to her, locked the car, and one pulled a door, which happened to be open. To my mind, this had been an opportunistic crime. The attempt to rob had been a primary motivator and the sexual assault was secondary. It was subsequently learned that the reason Miss Roscetti was victimized originally was because one of the four offenders needed money to get to his home in Cabrini-Green. And the group had decided to rob the first person who comes along. Detectives will not reveal the specifics of how the case was solved. Meanwhile, police are now searching for a fourth suspect. Steve Sanders, WGN News. When the real killers were caught, they explained what actually happened. They jumped Lori Roscetti in an alley near her house, not at the corner Loomis and Flournoy. There were only two of them, not four. They were adults, not teenagers. And neither needed money to get home. The Chicago Police declined to be interviewed for this story. Because of pending lawsuits, they're not commenting publicly on the case. But if the original defendants are to be believed, what happened next, in 1987, was this. The police didn't just sell their version of the crime to the TV stations. They also tried to sell it to some possible witnesses. Omar Saunders says he was brought to the Area 4 headquarters on February 11 by detectives James Mercurio and Thomas Lamb. Omar says it soon became clear what they wanted from him. This is detective Mercurio and his partner Lamb telling me, "We want you to say that on the night of this crime, you was breaking into some railroad cars. You was attempting to break into some railroad cars and you heard a scream. And you began to walk towards the direction of Ashland where you heard the screams. And as you got closer, you noticed four black guys and a white--" This was their words. Four black guys and a white broad. This was their words. I'm like, "I'm not saying that." So basically, they wanted you to say that you were a witness to seeing these other guys committing the crime? Exactly. I would have not even been arrested for this case had I went on ahead and took the deal. But, of course, by refusing to tell the detectives what they wanted to hear, he didn't take the deal and he, along with Larry and Calvin, got charged with the murder. Do you think they ever, even in the very beginning, ever thought that you were really involved and then took it so far where they couldn't backtrack? They got in too deep an had to cover it up. Or do you think they never thought you were involved and it was just straight from the beginning a massive fraud? I'm convinced, from what I went through and what I know today that they never once thought that I was guilty. Omar, Larry, and Calvin all had separate trials and uphill legal fights. Remember, the crime's details were ugly, the case was big news, and the state's attorney, Richard Daley-- current mayor, by the way-- really, really, didn't want to lose. Omar's powerfully built with a shaved head, a huge grin, and an easy charisma. He remembers sitting at the defendant's table with the victim's family seated behind him. If eyes could kill, I'd have been dead. I'd have turned into a pillar of salt because it was-- and it's only justifiable that people were feeling that way because they were misled. But I was sitting in that courtroom and I knew I wasn't supposed to be sitting there. And was your family there? No, nobody. I had one cousin. Her name was Iyo. She showed up with her son, Brandon. People, for me, didn't even want to show up in the courtroom because it was always filled with people from the victim. In fact, the day, I think, when I got sentenced. No, I was going for sentencing. And I was listening to WGCI, if I'm correct, they was talking about our case. It was early in the morning. They said, "Well, from what I've read, I understand that the Saunders kid likes it cold," meaning that I had sex with the victim when she was dead. All these listeners listened to him say that. Any little vestige of integrity that I was trying to hold onto, man, they tore my whole character down, destroyed, obliterated it when they said that. Even some of the female associates that I had. They would come and visit me. I could look in their eyes and see they were trying to find the person that had been described over the radio. All I had to hold on to was the truth that I'm innocent and that the truth is going to prevail. Because at that time, I was reading the Bible very, very hard. And that scripture that said the truth will set you free, I'm just recording that. Know the truth and the truth will set you free. So I'm drawing that, well, there's a God. I'm totally innocent. The jury's going to bring back a not guilty verdict. I don't care what nobody says because I read this book and that's what this book says. At Calvin's trial, things didn't go much better. And at Larry's trial, it was more of the same. You don't think that some rinky-dink cop that goes to some neighborhood, "Somebody saw a license plate. Let me knock on these doors, ask a few questions," got the power to just make up a story, give it to the media, and the whole world becomes involved in it. Because I saw all this stuff in Time Magazine. My lawyer had the Time Magazine right on the desk. This case, I never thought about them having this much power. The prosecution was slightly hampered by the fact that the men they were prosecuting weren't guilty. Even at the time, the state conceded that the physical evidence was slim. At Calvin's trial, they relied on his confession, even though by then he'd taken it back. At Larry's trial, they relied on Marcellius Bradford. Marcellius Bradford is the one defendant in the case who you won't be hearing from. The reason is that, after being released in 1992, he got rearrested on shoplifting charges in 1998 and is still locked up. He was out in the first place, of course, because he'd cut this deal with the prosecutors. They'd agreed to drop some charges. He'd agreed to testify against Larry, which meant he'd have to take the stand, stare out at his friend, tell the whole world how they'd raped and murdered Lori Roscetti, and all Larry could do was sit and listen. Bradford, man, told them all of this stuff. And it was just weird because I knew everything he was saying was false. And he knew everything he was saying was false. And it was just amazing to see how that can really take place. You sit up there and say you actually did all those things that you know you didn't do, you know I didn't do. You could change this whole thing around right now. Just tell them it didn't happen. That'd change the whole complexity of the whole trial. "Wait a minute, what you doing, Bradford? Hold on, your honor, I would like to have a five-minute recess." And he would've been like, "No, let this play on out." Threw the whole jury for a loop. But that didn't take place. The day that the jury returned the verdict-- Here's Omar. --they had a paper and they handed to the bailiff and the bailiff handed it to the judge. The judge was looking at it. And he looked up and he said, "This is your verdict." And I was so shocked. Because there was women in the jury box that actually smiled at me one time when a certain witness was on the stand. He was caught in lies. And she was shaking her head like this is crazy. And I was just sure I had that juror on my side. Anyway, when they all answered guilty, guilty, guilty, I just put my head down and a deep resentment and anger took over. I put one of my feet up on the table. That was my way to prevent myself from crying in front of the world. The anger. After they escorted me out of the courtroom, I went in the back, and that's when I let the tears roll. I was like, "man, they found me guilty for this." Calvin, Omar, and Larry got life, only because they were too young for capital punishment. At Larry's sentencing, the judge said, "If any crime ever called out for the death penalty, it's this one. I want to make certain you never walk the streets of this city or any other city again." Bradford, for framing his friends, got a 12-year deal, though years later, he'd tell a reporter, "I think about this every day and I will skateboard into hell." When you go to prison, you in a zone full of predators. Real, live predators that's looking for a weakness in some person. When they arrived in prison, Calvin was 15, Omar 19, Larry 18. Larry felt particularly bewildered. A lot of guys been there, in and out, in and out, in and out, before I even got there. So it's an environment that they're accustomed to. Soon as they come through the door, they know what to do, know who to get with, all that kind of stuff. I didn't know this stuff. So to me, it was almost like being a rabbit and trying to stay clear of a hawk that's way up in the sky that sees me out in the open field. And I'm just fresh on the news. I've got a bunny tail. My ears are super long. The hawk ain't ate in a week. C'mon, man. And I ain't got no hair on my face. None of this-- I don't even have a scar on my face when I went through that. All I had was a little mole on my face. What's her name? Cindy Crawford was just becoming big. She got one, and they freaking off of her. Her poster's on people's walls in jail. This is just real. I'm telling you what's real. And guys think like that and get to lusting after you. You can become that kind of prey. When I came to Joliet, I was automatically fearful-- This is Omar. --and aggressive because I was angry. My logic was weak. For me to process what happened to me, I just categorize one race. White people is evil. That was my generalization. Everybody that did this to us was white. Can you imagine from my perspective? The policeman was white. The victim was white. The judge was white. The prosecuting attorney was white. Everybody was white that done this. That's the only way I can process it. They're just naturally evil. But as I got older and the time went on in prison, I began to see that evil didn't have a color. Over time, they all found ways to cope. Omar lifted weights and read law books. Larry studied his transcripts. Calvin shot pool. But there were certain things they never got used to. For instance, here's something you never think about with prisons. You're basically locked in a teeny room with another person, a couple of beds, and a toilet. You could really call them cells a bathroom. And I remember nights when I was in the cell and my celly-- You know, his cellmate. --got up and used the bathroom, I just woke up because [LAUGHTER] That's rough. And the toilet's right by the bed. Just imagine you going to the bathroom and I'm sleeping in the bathroom. I'm sleeping right there. I used to sleep with the blanket over my eyes. Conditioned myself to sleep with the sheet or a blanket over my head just for that occasion. Just in case my celly get up tonight. Maybe it's because they were innocent. Maybe it's the sort of thing lots of prisoners figure out. But Omar says that after a while, even though everyone around them claimed to be innocent, it wasn't hard to tell who actually was. They just stuck out. I think I was able to sense it from watching guys' actions. Actions spoke louder than their words. They would act like they were free. They woud go to the law library. Always in the library fighting their case. They walk with a sense of integrity. You see it in their eyes, that same spirit that burn like your own do. Unfortunately, even though they could see innocence in other prisoners, other prisoners couldn't always see it in them. Other prisoners thought they were rapists. And being a rapist in prison isn't good. It makes other prisoners want to attack you. Because if there's one thing prisoners miss in prison, it's women. So guys learn this stuff when they get snatched away from women and get put in the penitentiary. So you come in there for taking what they miss and what they learned to have love and respect for, they're willing to bring all kind of harm to you at will at the blink of an eye, when your psychology least expects. To Larry and Omar, this was a reoccurring event. They'd be in the showers, or in the yard, or just about anywhere at any time, and they'd get attacked. In one fight, maybe a dozen guys came at them with ice picks and Omar got stabbed 14 times. A quick review. DNA testing first started making its way into criminal court cases in the late '80s. By the mid-'90s, cases of DNA testing getting innocent guys out of prison were starting to make headlines and prisoners everywhere were following the news. Larry got excited. Omar wasn't convinced. He'd become the group's unofficial lawyer by then. He'd written appeals, sent letters to journalists and civil rights groups, attacked various parts of the prosecution's testimony, and no one wrote back. Or when they did write back, they wrote things like the judge, who called Omar's last petition frivolous and patently without merit. Larry didn't care. He kept returning to a single key point. Based on biological evidence found at the crime scene, the prosecution knew the blood type of Lori Roscetti's murderers. The murderers were a blood type called O secreter. To Larry, there'd always been something sketchy about that part of the case and the testimony of the crime lab expert, Pamela Fish. But whenever he'd try to bring this up, Omar would shake his head. Until one day, Omar says. I think it was in '98. We was in the yard. And Larry was telling me, he said, "Man, Omar." He called me O. "Man, O, we've got to put something in court, man." And I said, "Man, I done tried everything. And there ain't nothing working. Every little thing, they're shooting it down." And Larry said, "Man, I'm telling you, it's the semen." Among the many things that jump out at you here is just how quickly you can get used to a word like semen, especially if it's the key to your freedom and you talk about it every day. And he was real tentative when he was stating it because he knew how I felt about this. We had separate trials, and in my trial, they said that the semen was consistent with Calvin, Larry, and Bradford. Meaning the semen found at the crime scene was the same blood type as Calvin, Larry, and Bradford's. And I'm like, is it a possibility I'm the only one innocent? That started to set in. I'm like, damn, you know? And Larry, this particular day, he was just insistent about the semen. "I'm telling you, it's the--" I'm like, "No, it ain't the semen. Because at my trial, the woman said it was consistent with all three of you all. I'm the only one excluded." He said, "No, that ain't what she said at my trial." At Larry's trial, the prosecution admitted that the semen found at the scene didn't match Larry either. And that stuck with me. Wait a minute. You sure? I'm like, "Send me your trial transcript of Pamela Fish's testimony so I can read it myself." And when he sent me her trial transcript testimony, my eyes watered up because legally, I knew what it meant. We free. What they'd discovered was this. The prosecution had given conflicting testimony. Its crime lab expert, Pamela Fish, had made it seem like at least one of them matched up with the semen found at the crime scene. In fact, none of them did. To move ahead, however, to move one step closer to getting out, they needed Calvin's signature on an affidavit verifying his blood type, verifying that he was also a non-secretor just like them. It couldn't be simpler, except for one problem. Calvin wouldn't sign. I was sitting in my room one night and all of the sudden I got a letter from Omar, "Sign this piece of paper. " I'm like, "No, I'm not going to sign this piece of paper, man." Calvin, tell about why you don't sign pieces of paper. It's how I got locked up. Last time I signed a piece of paper, I went to jail for life. And what was that piece of paper you signed? Confessions that the police made up and had me sign. He wrote them back a letter explaining his new policy on signing his name. Omar couldn't believe it. I remember that letter. Yeah, I know man. You were saying, "I got your affidavit. I'm sorry to let you know that I can't sign y'all affidavit." He called it y'all affidavit. "Y'all affidavit. And I just want to let you all know that I accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior and I wish you all well." Larry cried. I'll never forget this. Larry cried when he read that letter because Calvin was putting it on, "I don't want to sign nothing. I'll put my faith totally in God. That's it." And I was trying to find a way how can I reach him and make him understand that that ain't the way the God I believe in works. Your faith in God is good, but act on it. You can't say you believe in no God and don't believe in your own ability to think, reason, and understand because he gave you a brain to do just that with. In the end, to make a long story short, Calvin signed. They now had the documents to prove that none of them were the same blood type as the killers. But just getting a judge to look at this new evidence was a huge long shot. And it's not as if they'd been so successful at filing their own appeals. Then, one day, Omar came across a magazine profile of a trial lawyer named Kathleen Zellner. She was in the business of getting wrongfully convicted men out of prison. She liked DNA cases in particular, and then suing the state for big bucks. When I saw Miss Zellner in the magazine, it was like, "This is is who we need. We need her." Because you can see she's like a hawk. When she sees something, she focuses in on it. So I knew if I could get her to see what Larry caused me to see, this thing's going to be electric. And I just began to construct the letter based on the facts about us all being non-secretors and that the killer is an O secretor. Then, with the facts that I was saying, I put in the what if. What if what I'm saying is true-- everything that I'm saying is true? What would be the repercussions? What would be the financial benefits for everybody involved? I know you're an attorney. I know you've got things that you've got to do. You don't want people taking up your time. This is a profession. This is something that you like doing. Well, here go the perfect case. We are going to interrupt [UNINTELLIGIBLE] report for just a moment to bring you this special update. Moments ago, two of those three men wrongfully imprisoned for a rape/murder in 1986 were set free. Let's go live there now. I've prepared a statement for the press. First, I would like to thank God for returning to us our freedom and for bringing into our struggle our attorney Miss Zellner and her associates--" On December 5 of 2001, Omar, Larry, and Calvin were finally released. 15 years after their original arrests. 18 months after Kathleen Zellner received Omar's letter. She'd logged 800 unpaid hours and spent $50,000 of her own money to get the case back in court. Along the way, she'd had an independent lab test her clients' DNA and none of it matched the DNA from the crime scene. Faced with this new evidence, the state's attorney let them out. The footage that you're hearing is from the press conference outside the prison. --police. They're intimating that you were still involved somehow. Well, I believe that they've got to stand on their position. They know the facts about-- now you all did a great job in revealing the facts, so I think they know what's coming. I used to quote a statement, that the heavens ablaze with light and the distant thunder seem to herald forth a coming storm. And they know that the storm is coming. That's the truth about this case. So they can say what they want to say. But it'll bear out in the future proceedings in another courtroom. What's missing from this press conference is a review of how many things could have happened to keep these guys from getting out. Before Omar wrote to Kathleen, for example, he wrote to the nation's best known wrongful conviction expert, Barry Scheck. Barry Scheck contacted the police about reviewing the Roscetti case evidence. The police told Barry Scheck that the evidence had been destroyed. Which means that if Kathleen Zellner hadn't had an inside court contact agree to double check for the supposedly destroyed evidence, and if upon finding that evidence Kathleen's contact hadn't agreed to keep it hidden in her desk, all could have been lost. And that's just the beginning. Omar's letter to Kathleen could have never been read. Larry could have decided not to press his seminal insight that day in the yard. Calvin's faith in the Lord might have stopped him from signing that affidavit. Any one of them could have been killed in jail. And then there's the most likely thing that could have happened. They could have just lost hope. Did you ever give up hope? Did I ever give up hope? No, I don't think I ever actually gave up completely. But there was a time I felt like I wanted to give up. Any other questions I would like to refer to my attorney. Around the country there are thousands of cases in which people are reexamining DNA evidence. Maybe tens of thousands. But as of December, 2001, the month Calvin, Larry, and Omar got released, only 98 people had ever been released from prison based on DNA. It's still hard to get out of prison. Nearly all of those 98 had been convicted for sex crimes, which makes sense if you think about it. Those are the crimes where it's most likely that the biological evidence is still around somewhere to be tested, as it was in Omar, Larry, and Calvin's case. In the months since their release, Omar, Larry, and Calvin have had to enter a new world full of big and small firsts. First time writing checks. First time taking driving tests. First time for Larry getting really lost. Now they call him Compass. First time for Omar getting in a fender bender. Now they call him Crash. And Calvin, in a first of his own, tried to adopt a cat only to be screened out by an animal control clerk who denied his application because he lacked a job history. And then there's their obsession with pictures. Almost every time I visited, they wanted to take pictures or they wanted to show me pictures of people they'd recently met. Lots of them were basically strangers, like kids they'd talked to at a high school. But after 15 years in prison, it sort of makes sense. They don't have a history, and so they're filling photo albums trying to catch up. The last time producer Alex Blumberg and I sat down with Omar in Kathleen Zellner's suburban office, we ended up having a long chat about the Declaration of Independence. Omar had read it in prison. When I read that document, I was like, wow, that it actually incorporates rebelling against an oppressive government. If the government becomes too oppressive, the power is actually in our hands. That's why when you talk to anybody that claims-- especially these people that speak about the American character and what we should do-- you should ask them, "Let me hear you recite the Declaration of Independence." Omar looks over at us and recites from memory. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." And you will come to find out that the average American don't even know it. What was that like to read that document and know in light of what had happened to you, is that-- it sounds like what you were just saying is that it actually made it seem like America's actually on your side. America is all-- the concepts and principles on which the country is founded has always been on our side. You talk about what you like when you went in. And it almost sounds like you've had this horrific miscarriage of justice done against you. And here you are on the other side of it. And you have more respect for the system than maybe when you went in, in a way. Yeah, because I understand that it's a lack of understanding the system that caused this. It's like if the police do something to me, I ain't going to go blow up the whole Chicago police force because you've got a lot of good Chicago policemen. That's why I always say that the media said that we got out and we spoke vehemently against the system. I never spoke against the system. I love America. I understand that the system don't operate itself. It's people. There ain't nothing wrong. America's got one of the greatest jurisprudence systems in the world. Some countries, when you do something, they kill you. Ain't nothing to talk about. See? So my whole view today is I understand that if we want to make America a greater place, it's going to take people like us to understand what the nation is based on and do what the Founding Fathers did when they thought that their freedoms were being jeopardized and that their rights were being infringed. You do that by knowing the law. When you don't know something, people can take advantage. This is a beautiful democratic republic. One day a few weeks ago I went to court with Larry, Calvin, and Omar. The real killers had some early hearing to show up for. This would be a first chance to see them face to face. But for some reason, the hearing got postponed. Walking out in the hallway of this giant, stone building, Larry, Calvin, and Omar suddenly froze. They stared as a stooped, older man shuffled toward us. Calvin blurted out, "It's Patrick O'Brien." This was the man who'd prosecuted their case, the man who'd called them rapists and murderers, the man who they held most responsible for stealing half their lives. He looked up at them and seemed to experience the same momentary shock. You could see him almost start to turn around, but then it was too late and we were passing by him and he was nodding his head. What he said was, "Gentlemen." Shane DuBow in Chicago. Coming up, how to make a 14-year-old suburban kid confess to the murder of his own sister when he did not do it. In a minute from Public Radio International and Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Perfect Evidence. We look at the world that has been revealed to us now thanks to the most perfect evidence in the history of criminology, DNA evidence. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Snitch. One of the biggest changes that's come about in this era of overturned convictions and DNA evidence is that we've learned that one kind of evidence that most of us would think it's irrefutable and that historically has been the strongest possible evidence, a person's own confession, might not mean anything. In many wrongful conviction cases, the person who was mistakenly thrown in prison actually was on record confessing the crime. How does this happen? Well, consider this case. On January 20, 1998, 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe was stabbed to death in her bedroom. There were no signs of forced entry into the house. Nobody heard a burglar. So the police suspected that it was an inside job done by a family member. And at some point, they brought in her 14-year-old brother, Michael. After 11 hours of interrogation, he confessed to the crime, though later, he was cleared when a DNA test found that Stephanie's blood was on a vagrant who'd been wandering around the neighborhood the night of the murder. So how did the police get Michael to confess? Well, for one thing, his parents were not there. They believed that he was in protective custody getting grief counseling. His sister had just died. Richard Leo is a criminologist who has studied false confessions. He reviewed the videotape of the confession with me. Virtually every interrogation that I've ever seen of a juvenile, the police try to figure out how to keep parent out of the room. They might tell them that it's not necessary or that they're not allowed to be there or they simply, as in this case, might tell them something false so they have no idea their child is being interrogated. At the very beginning of the interrogation, there are two officers. And one comes in and he's a little tougher and he's presenting the evidence and the accusations. And then there's another cop who's acting like the good cop. They're doing a classic good cop, bad cop. And the good cop is saying, "Well, we're trying to believe what you say." I'm here to verify what you're saying, OK? We're going to work through this together, OK? I can tell you this instrument here is what they call a computer voice stress analyzer. Now you will appreciate this, being into computers. The computer voice stress analyzer. Just explain what this is. Well, the computer voice stress analyzer is an offshoot of the polygraph, or so-called lie detector. It's a recently-invented a device by law enforcement that purports to be able to tell whether somebody is lying or telling the truth based on analyzing the microtremors of their voice. The problem is the computer voice stress analyzer is a fraud. There's no evidence that it even measures anything like microtremors in the voice. And even if it did, there aren't microtremors that go off when you're lying and microtremors that go off when you're telling the truth. So the real purpose-- and police know this-- the real purpose of the computer voice stress analyzer is not to verify whether somebody is telling the truth. When they interrogated Michael Crowe, they believed he was guilty and their goal was to get a confession. Are you sitting down? Yes. Do you know who took Stephanie's life? No. Is today Thursday? Yes. Did you take Stephanie's life? No. The real goal of the computer voice stress analyzer is to intimidate somebody who is naive or ignorant into thinking that science-- irrefutable, error-free, high-technology science has just proven that you did this and now there's no way you can deny it. It's a gimmick. What did you think? What were your thoughts through the whole thing? That it might be wrong. OK, in what way? That it might say I killed Stephanie. And I can understand your feelings there, OK? You're 14 and you've been through a lot, OK? But this instrument doesn't know you, does it? Science is in our favor, OK? Technology's on our side. One of the most fascinating things about watching the videotape of this happening is how the police officer involves him in the process of working with this machine. For a long time, they sit down and they make up the questions together. Michael helps make up the questions. And he gets completely caught up in it. And then they give him the questions and the police officer leaves the room and comes back with the results and talked to him about the results and then finally reveals to him that on one of the questions, question number 12 in the little questionnaire they made up, he failed. The question, "Do you know who took Stephanie's life? Do you know who took you sister's life?" This is common. And there's a reason why they're doing this. They know he's going to fail it. They're setting him up for failure and manipulate him and intimidate him into confessing. At some point very early on, they start lying to him about what evidence they have. They just say straight up, "We found her blood in your room." And it freaks him out. I'm sure you know-- What? God, I don't-- no. I don't know. I didn't do it. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Does that mean you can't tell me about tonight? I don't know what you're talking about. It had become one lie after another about what they have pointing to him. Is that legal? Yes. I think it's highly controversial in lay circles, but there's no controversy in the law. It's perfectly legal for police to lie about evidence so long as their lies don't imply promises of police or prosecutorial leniency or threats of harsher punishment. So they can make up any evidence from DNA to hairs to blood to video surveillance cameras, witnesses. This happens all the time. And it can turn their whole perspective upside down. Because once you think that that evidence must exist because the police say it exists, you come to doubt your memory. And we see this occur later in the Michael Crowe interrogation. Oh, God. God. Why? You tell me. Why are you doing this to me? If I did this, I don't remember it. I don't remember a thing. And you know what? That's [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Now, in many forced confessions, the suspect doesn't ever come to actually believe the story that they're confessing to. But they're in a situation where the police are lying to them about all this evidence they have and the person thinks, "All right, they're going to pin something on me. I might as well confess to something and get a better deal." But in Michael's case, it's really amazing. He really comes to believe that he might have done it. You didn't mean for this to turn out the way it did, did you? I don't even know what I did. I can't even believe myself anymore. You really didn't mean for this to turn out this way, did you? I don't even know what I did. Now I've been told I did this awful thing that I don't remember. And, in fact, if they're telling the truth, there is no other logical possibility. He must have done it. If they were telling the truth, that's right. At one point, right around this point where they're pressing him about the notion, well, maybe he did and he blacked out, they just leave the room. They leave him alone. The camera stays on him. And he just puts his head in his arms and just sobs. He just sobs and sobs. It's heart wrenching. [CRYING] Why? Why? If I'm being interrogated by the police and if they're roughing me up and they're playing with what I'm thinking about myself and what I'm thinking about a crime, if I think to myself, "All right, I'm pretty sure I'm innocent here. I don't remember committing this crime. And these guys are just nuts. I'm not going to get out of here until I sign a paper." Let's say I sign the paper. I think to myself, "All right, I'm going to sign a confession." Because eventually, I'm be in front of a judge and I could just tell the judge, "Look, those guys were playing with my mind. We were in this tiny room. But here I am with you. I'm telling you this is the actual truth. I was just saying that stuff there to get out of that room." Do I have a shot? I don't think so, usually. I've seen that happen before. People have said, "Look, I told them what they wanted to hear, but they said there was blood at the scene. I assumed once they tested my blood, I'd go home. I didn't know that I would get convicted." Oftentimes I've see this happen. Prosecutors will suggest that every aspect of the confession is false except for the admission. So yeah, "He said he left his fingerprints at the crime scene. It wasn't there. Yes, he said he stabbed the person. The person was shot. Yes, he said he buried the body or threw the gun in this location and it's not there. He's just trying to minimize his evil deeds and a lot of what's in the confession is false. But he said he did it and that's true. Why would somebody say they did it if they didn't do it?" Does that usually work? I think it does. I think it resonates with how culturally and psychologically we think about confessions. Think about all the times when you read in the paper that somebody confessed. And most of them are true confessions. You don't stop and think, "Well, I wonder if it's a false confession or a true confession." So in the end, Michael Crowe, 14 years old, confesses to the murder of his own sister and even sort of believes that he did it. And one of the most disturbing things about watching this it is the police officers who do this, they don't seem like they're corrupt cops. Do you know? They don't seem like the guys who are out to pin a murder on an innocent kid. They seem like they actually believe they're doing their jobs and doing a good job of it and they believe he did it. I think that's absolutely right. There's no indication from watching that interrogation that they are corrupt. In fact, if they had been corrupt, they probably wouldn't have tape recorded it. And I think they genuinely believe that he's an evil person who did this. But the police, in this case, are just sloppy and they're stupid. It's not that they're corrupt or evil. They should have investigated more before they started interrogating anybody. That's one of the fundamental precepts of all police interrogation training. You never start interrogating until you've completed your investigation. I have to say, I can't figure out which I find more disturbing, the thought that some police are corrupt and forcing confessions out of people or this thought that basically, this is just the institutional way that we get a confession in our country. Do you know what I mean? "This the way we do it. We lie to them about the evidence we've got." You know what I mean? That seems, in a way, more disturbing. Or I can't even tell which is more disturbing. When I teach this subject to undergraduates, they're often split about that as well. I think myself, personally, I am more distressed by the idea of corrupt cops because I think many corrupt cops, whatever area of police work it is, have crossed a moral line and there's really a point of no return and they just get dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. Does the threat of civil litigation, of people suing, as in this case with Michael Crowe's family suing the city of Escondido, as in the case that we're looking at elsewhere in today's radio show, this Roscetti case where these guys who went away for 15 years are suing the City of Chicago and the police officers. Does the fear of being sued and having to pay out millions of dollars to falsely accuse people actually cause police departments to change in any cases that you've seen? I haven't seen that cause any police departments to change. That perplexes me. It's like many of these police brutality lawsuits. The City of Los Angeles, for example, pays out millions of dollars-- millions of taxpayer dollars every year. Tens of millions to resolve civil lawsuits brought against police officers who rough suspects up. And you'd think with so much money at stake that police departments would take the initiative and try to build some protections into the system so that they would save money. In Chicago, it's interesting you mention the Roscetti case. As you probably know, for several years, there's been a bill to mandate audio or video recording of interrogations in homicide cases and the police and prosecutors have resisted that and defeated that bill. It's a very simple reform, that given all the errors that the police have made, all the false confessions in Chicago, all the people walking off death row as a result of this, a simple reform like that has been resisted at every turn by the Chicago police and prosecutors. And that's highly regrettable. Richard Leo, author of Inside the Interrogation Room. Not long ago, The Chicago Tribune looked at 400 homicide cases from across the country, cases that were overturned for the most egregious kinds of prosecutorial misconduct. Misconduct of a type that the Supreme Court has said deserves punishment. Of 400 cases, not one prosecutor received any public sanction or reprimand. Nobody lost their license. Nobody lost their job. Nobody went to prison. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who says that what we say about him at the end of each show has hurt his love life. The female associates that I had, they were trying to find that person that had been described over the radio. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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When you name names, when you snitch, when you drop a dime, when you shop somebody, when you're a canary or a rat or a stool pigeon, when you squeal, or when you tattle, often you prefer to remain anonymous. And so the next voice that you're going to hear is somebody whose name you will never know. And when her story begins, she is just another hapless, nearsighted citizen like you and me. I went to get laser vision correction. And following the surgery, one of my eyes turned out totally fine, but the other one had a problem, double vision. So that was just kind of strange. And under the contract, they tell you in the agreement that it may not turn out perfectly. But within the first year, if there are any problems, you are offered free touch ups for the procedure. So she waited several months after the first surgery for her eyes to heal, did everything her doctor said she should. She even went to a second eye doctor who checked her out, told her, "No big deal." She was an easy case. "Tell your regular doctor to sit you in the chair, set the laser to these coordinates." The second doctor actually gave her the right settings. "And you will be all patched up." So she makes an appointment for surgery with her original doctor. And on the day of, I was very shocked. I was told by the doctor that I could not get the surgery after all and that he was recommending a totally different course of treatment. He wanted me to close my eyes and then press my thumb on my eyelid a couple of times a day, which just seemed a little odd to me. You'd think that science had gotten further than that. Exactly. That just seemed bizarre. So I questioned him about it. And he started to get very agitated. And he was talking about how he was an expert in this field, and he knew what he was doing. And if I went to any other eye doctor anywhere else who was an expert in the field, they would tell me the exact same thing. And so I brought up the fact that I had the second opinion. And he got more upset. His voice just got really loud-- and just saying really weird things. He started bringing up the fact that he had a lawsuit. He started bringing up how everyone wants to be like Michael Jordan, but not everyone can. It was bizarre. He was just throwing out all these weird statements at me. Wait, wait, wait. He was bringing up the fact that he had a lawsuit? Yes, he did. He was saying that he tries to help people. But he tried to help this person, and now he's getting sued for it because it didn't turn out well. You get the picture. He yells, she cries. She quietly notices that all of his other patients, like her, are immigrants. And she wonders if he's just in business to take advantage of people, that he's just going to stall her until the year has run out for her free touch up, so she'll have to pay. They call the AMA, they lodge a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, they call the Department of Professional Practices. Nothing gets results. It's frustrating. Months go by, and remember, she is still seeing double every minute she's awake. So I was very upset. And weirdly enough, I was talking about this with my therapist. And she was the one who suggested getting revenge. She said that a great way to mess with someone's head, even though you don't necessarily see the results, was to call the IRS on them. And so-- You called the IRS on the guy? I did write a letter. I did write three letters in fact. OK, let us just say here, straight up, that this is very, very wrong. There is no two ways about it. Starting with the fact that for a therapist to instruct a patient on how to mess with someone's head is pretty much a prima facie violation of the Hippocratic oath, if therapists even take the Hippocratic oath. But she did not stop there. And then the other thing that she suggested was-- Your therapist, right? Yes. --was to call building violations on him. Basically, to call in the city. Yeah, which she said was another great way to mess with someone's head, because she was saying that no matter how stupid the offense is or how minor it is, you just have to fix it. He had messed with her. He had been imperious. He had been immovable and irrational. And now he would face the most imperious, immovable, irrational foe imaginable, the government of the United States of America in its federal and local manifestations. There would be auditors. He would have to locate old financial papers. Meanwhile, the building inspectors would have him spending hours on hold waiting for this office or that office to tell him what forms and permits. You know what I'm talking about here. And yes, this is wrong, very, very tragically wrong. But who among us has not been in some situation, where the phone company, or some contractor, or the doctor, whoever, has messed with us enough that we want revenge? I think there are lots of us who would feel like this woman in that situation. We would call in the feds, and we would not feel bad about it. Either I don't have a conscience or I just am so firm in my belief that he deserves it. That, in fact, he deserves it. Yeah. And you had no other recourse? Right. Now I have to say, I think this kind of case is very rare. I think usually, usually, when people turn in other people to the government, there is a twinge of guilt or often more than a twinge. Today on our radio program, we bring you several stories of people who named names. And in all those stories, the accuser is just as torn up about it as the accused. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three revelatory acts. Act One, How Britain Nearly Saved America. In that act, Jon Ronson tells the true story of his personal role in a post-September 11 news crisis that you are very familiar with and his misgivings about his role. Act Two, One Crucible Leads to Another. In that act, a conversation from 1952 as the House Un-American Activities Committee was asking people to squeal on Communist friends and colleagues. And how, even today, it is hard to agree on what was said in private. Act Three, Beating the Erasers. How a small town in Tennessee rose up against a few middle-aged grade school teachers very recently. Stay with us. Act One, How Britain Nearly Saved America. Well, Jon Ronson has appeared on our program before. Over the last few years, he has done a series of documentaries for British television about political and religious extremists, stories that are remarkable because they are often surprisingly funny, given the subject matter. And he tells this story which occurred in the immediate wake of September 11. It was October, and anthrax scares and terrible anthrax news were everyday occurrences. Jon was in London at the time, where he lives. On a Saturday night last October, my friend and producer John Sergeant called me. "Hi, Jon," he said. I recognized a delicate blend of urgency, paranoia, and panic in his voice. You'd have to be a connoisseur of his neurotic vocal patterns to spot it. I wondered what it was this time. During our years together documenting extremist groups, we've become variously convinced we're being followed by the Mafia, Aryan Nations, the BATF, and the CIA. It wouldn't be fair to blame the extremists and say that all their paranoia has rubbed off on me and John. The fact is we've always been neurotic. If anything, we tend to connect with our interviewees over a shared sense of paranoia. The irony is that my neurosis comes, I guess, from being Jewish, whereas theirs usually manifests itself in a hatred of the Jews. John's got no excuse. He's Church of England. He's just a neurotic. But for all our regular descents into paranoia, nothing bad has ever actually happened to us. And I was getting tired of all the panicky phone calls. "I think," said John, "that we may know who's been sending all the anthrax." "Who?" I asked. "Tim," he said. I sighed, trying not to sound patronizing. "Who's Tim?" I said. John sighed, trying not to sound patronizing. "Tim who told us a year ago that the way to fight the government was to send anthrax through the mail," he said. "Oh, that Tim," I said. John and I had met Tim a year earlier at a gun show in Rochester, Minnesota. We were there with Randy Weaver. The crowds flocked to get the autograph of this icon of the anti-government right, this Ruby Ridge survivor, whose wife and son were killed by federal snipers. But Tim didn't. He stood apart, a lone wolf amongst lone wolves, a pasty-looking man wearing a lumberjack shirt and glasses. He had a deep grudge against the federal government and, it turned out, the rudimentary scientific knowledge of a lab technician. He told us that anthrax was the only way forward for the movement. In our experience, anthrax wasn't a big militia topic of conversation. In fact, we had never heard anyone mention it before. I had figured Tim was just another gun show kook. But John recognized his uniqueness and wanted him on tape. So he went off to interview him on video. We never did anything with the tape. It was B-roll to me, just a vox pop, a 20-minute chat. It had sat in my cupboard for a year. Now I dug it out, I put it into the VCR, and I pressed play. Can you just tell us where we are, and what you're doing here? We're at a gun show here in Rochester, Minnesota. I sell books that teach you how to make explosives, incendiaries, booby traps. And I also get into the more dangerous biological and chemical weapons area, the bioweapons area being that you can mail the weapons in microscopic form under a postage stamp or taped to a letter with color pictures and instructions on how to do it. And that way, you can rearm the entire nation if the government ever tries to take the guns away. One person, by themselves, anybody with this knowledge can rearm everybody in a day. The people we met at the gun shows all had their own special ways of theoretically battling the government. One guy had advocated the use of piano wire to me. Another favored firebombs. Tim's big thing was anthrax. At the time, I thought it was just blather. Tim didn't look frightening. He looked friendly, like someone's dad. Picture all that talk about chemical weaponry coming out of the mouth of Roger Ebert, and you get the idea. But now the words were chilling and so was the matter-of-fact delivery. "I should call the FBI," I said to John quickly. "Hang on," he said, "I'm the one who thought of Tim. I should call the FBI." "I want to call the FBI," I said. I was the senior partner in this relationship. I was the reporter. If anyone was going to call the feds, it was going to be me. "Well, I don't want you bloody going to the FBI without me," said John. There was a hurt silence. I heard him breathing heavily on the other end of the phone, gearing up for a fight. "OK," I said, "I promise to bring you with me to the FBI." I'd never ratted out an interviewee to the feds before. I had never given up a source. This would normally be a very bad thing for a journalist to do. But you have to remember the panic and fear everyone was feeling that October. Every day that month over 100 anthrax letters were reported. One morning, anthrax was proven at ABC News. The next day, Senate offices were closed. The next, the House of Representatives shut down. Postal workers were dying. Plus, there was nothing Deep Throat about our relationship with Tim. He didn't speak with us in confidence or ask that we withhold his name. He wanted people to know his ideas about anthrax. He started gabbing loudly to John about anthrax the minute they started chatting. It wasn't easy to find the FBI in London. Directory assistance had no record of them. "Are you sure F stands for Federal?" they said. I finally tracked them to the US Embassy, and an agent called Michael came onto the phone. When I told him what I had, he said casually, "Yes, that would be something we'd be interested in. Could you bring it in?" "Tomorrow?" I asked. And Michael agreed. I realized that things were less casual when, the next morning, at 8:30 AM, Michael telephoned to ask if I was coming in today. Things aren't casual at 8:30 AM. People call at 8:30 AM if they've been up worrying about things. Two hours later, in Grosvenor Square, West London, John and I were past the exterior security guards, quadrupled in the wake of September 11, past the ocean of fencing, the acres of dead sidewalk space between the fencing and the concrete posts designed to stop suicide bombers, through the x-rays, the bag search, up the elevator, through a series of specially enforced steel doors-- the kind of doors you find on safes-- through more corridors, through the body search, and into London's FBI headquarters. It was incredibly exciting to be there and to be part of it all at this extraordinary moment in history. And let there be no mistake about this, we walked in thinking we were heroes. We were led into an office decorated with novelty tourist trinkets, Big Ben snowstorms, and a collection of funny police helmets. These chachkas struck me as a heartbreaking stab at normal office life amid the craziness deep behind the barricades. Michael was sitting behind his desk. He was bookish, and young, and soberly dressed. He stood up, and shook our hands, and led us through to his boss's office, and sat us on the sofa. He got out his notepad and said, "So how did you come to meet this Tim?" "Well," said John, "we're journalists, and we were following Randy Weaver around the gun show circuit. Actually, no, no, Jon had hooked up with Randy Weaver a few days earlier, but I'd been researching another project-- would you believe it-- surveillance cameras in shopping malls." John laughed nervously. Michael's eyes began to glaze. I think that John, like many people who meet law enforcement officers, was feeling the desperate urge to confess. Luckily, John didn't have anything to confess to. So this compulsion was finding a different outlet, mad small talk. I glanced down at Michael's notepad. So far, he'd only written two words, Randy Weaver. "Shall we watch the tape?" Said Michael. He hit play. The only way American people can defend themselves from criminals has been with firearms or-- in the case of the government and the Army, firearms are going to be relatively worthless. So I had to look at some practical methods of which American people could arm themselves and fight back if they ever had to. And that's where the biological story came from. John and I sat there, beaming with pride. We were so sure we had the guy. Michael's facial expression was pointedly unreadable. One person could, for example, mass propagate it and deliver it. And you could render most of the major cities uninhabitable in about a week, which would wreck the economy and pretty much put an end to the government. Tim, can I just ask you, what you're actually advocating here is the spread of really dangerous information. On what grounds? Why do you feel that it's a good idea for everyone to know this terrible stuff? I was relieved that John had adopted a combative style of questioning with Tim. All too often, John and I ask extremists overly soft questions that might lead FBI agents to erroneously believe that we have gone native and are, in some way, sympathetic to extremist causes or unsympathetic to officers of the law. And sure enough, a moment later in the interview, I was mortified to hear the following exchange. Tim had just told John that the majority of gun show attendees are actually undercover federal agents. What proportion do you think might be, then, today government agencies here in this event today? In the summertime, the law enforcement presence runs anywhere from 50% to 90% during summer. And during the winter, reliably, in the range of 30% to 60%. Michael laughed, and said he wished they had that kind of budget. John and I laughed too. So you're saying as many as 90% of the people here could be actually federal agents of one form or another? Yes, that's correct. Don't you think that's a pretty outrageous and rude statement to make to all these nice people here? "Oh dear," I thought. "Should I have edited that bit out before calling the FBI? Or would that have been tampering with evidence?" I shifted awkwardly on the sofa, and I glanced up at Michael. He was sitting behind his desk. He'd put John and me on the low sofa, so we had to look up at him. I watched his face flash with disappointment when Tim started telling this cautionary tale from his own life on the video. When you're sitting in the house with a shotgun, and they send the Army out to your house over a book you wrote, and they're sitting outside, that was ridiculous. I have been targeted. And that's no secret. It has already been in the papers, in The Washington Post and in some of the other papers. At this point, I started to worry that maybe I'd oversold the videotape when I was on the phone with Michael. If the government and media already knew about Tim, maybe this wasn't such a hot tip. Michael said, "Well, it's interesting to hear these guys talk," which I took to mean, this is wasting my time. I suddenly felt silly and abashed. It was like taking someone to your favorite movie and seeing it for the first time through their eyes. And they're bored, and restless, and disappointed. And you start to think, it maybe wasn't such a great movie anyway. When the tape ended, Michael thanked us, and he escorted us back to the lobby. We had to hand in our security passes, and John couldn't find his. He fumbled around in his pockets. "You put it in your bag," said Michael softly, "while you were watching the video." It must have taken John a split second to put the pass in his bag, just an absentminded move made while we were all watching the video. I was impressed. What else had Michael noticed about us that we didn't even know about ourselves? That night, as I lay in bed, I thought of Tim. And I wondered who he really was. A week later, the Wall Street Journal provided the answers to these questions. The Journal reported that the FBI were looking for a homegrown anthrax terrorist. And they were making inquiries about a Nebraska man called Tim Tobiason who was known on the gun show circuit for advocating the use of anthrax. There was a photograph. This was my Tim. The FBI had apparently been alerted by a member of the public. "Wow," I thought, "they must have gone after him anyway." A Google search filled in the gaps. Tim Tobiason came from Silver Creek, Nebraska. He was once a pillar of the community, the owner of an animal feed mill and an old Dairy Queen, with 24 employees and $3 million a year cash flow, married, two daughters, and a chemical wizard too, mixing up witches' brews at night in his garage. "Funny smelling stuff," said his neighbors. He made some anthrax and a whole new kind of phosphate-based feed additive, which he calculated would net him millions. He set about patenting it, but the government said it would be dangerous to cattle. So they rejected it. He began bitching to his friends about a conspiracy, how the government had stolen his patent and given it to some agricultural corporation. "This is what they do," he said, "rob the small guy, the garage chemist, to line the pockets of the giants." He moved into a Dodge Caravan and plotted his revenge. He wrote Scientific Principles of Improvised Warfare: Advanced Biological Weapons Design and Manufacture. The cover promised, "If you can make Jell-O, you can wipe out cities. Enjoy!" His marriage collapsed. And he took to selling his book on the gun show circuit. In the wake of the Journal article, TV crews stormed Silver Creek. But Tim had vanished. The FBI analyzed his handwriting. They followed the instructions in his anthrax cookbook and found them to be shoddy and incomplete. They concluded Tim Tobiason was innocent. As a result of the publicity, Tim was banned from gun shows across the United States. His Silver Creek neighbors said they didn't expect him back, which was all for the best because he was no longer welcome in town. I was feeling guilty. Tim was one of those guys who always lived in fear that the federal government would come after him. And John and I made his paranoid fantasy come true. I called the FBI. I wanted to know if the hounding of the innocent Tim Tobiason was all because of me and John. The clerk I spoke to said, Michael couldn't come to the phone, he was too busy. I felt like the rat on the cop shows, forced to squeal and then hung out to dry. But nobody forced me to squeal. The clerk told me that the FBI had been tipped off about Tim by a number of people, including undercover informants at gun shows. So maybe Tim's downfall was that he was too chatty with strangers. Maybe, despite his fear of informants, he was just so lonely for a sympathetic ear that he was willing to take his chances. In retrospect, I feel embarrassed for the part I played in the whole thing. I guess no one wants to be a bystander to history anymore. We all want to have speaking roles. And now I've got a speaking role. I'm one of the guys who caught the guy who was almost the anthrax guy. The week I called the feds, a woman in Oregon called the cops to report a white powder all over her car, a white powder which turned out to be pollen. The publisher of the Yankton Daily Press in Sioux Falls called the FBI because of a dust-like substance in the office. You know what it was? Dust. It seems crazy now, and maybe a little self-aggrandizing, for so many people, including me, to imagine ourselves at the heart of the intrigue. But it's easy to forget the mood of the time. A feeling of hysteria took over, which made all these actions make sense. And then the hysteria just vanished away again. For a while, it felt like anything could happen. It's hard to say which is harder to figure out, how it all became such a frenzy, or how it's all come to feel like so long ago so soon. We'd all like to believe that, in a crisis, we'll be the ones who act calmly and rationally. Some of us have a harder time believing that now. Jon Ronson is the author of the book Them: Adventures with Extremists. Act Two, One Crucible Leads to Another. When people start naming names, it's like any other political act. Everybody involved starts to believe their own version of the truth. In their memoirs, the playwright Arthur Miller and the director Elia Kazan each tell this story about a conversation that they had back in 1952 when Kazan was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. At the time, Miller and Kazan had been friends and coworkers. They'd known each other for years. Kazan was the director of Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman. In this case, however, their stories do not exactly match up. The committee, of course, was looking for the names of Communists. Kazan had been a party member briefly in the 1930s. And at first, he refused to name names. Then he relented. He wanted to talk to Miller about his testimony. Arthur Miller says that they talked after Kazan had already told the Committee the names of friends and coworkers who had been Communists. Kazan said they talked before he had given that testimony. And there are other differences. Here's Kazan's version first. In his autobiography, he has this passage that he says comes from his diary in the spring of 1952. "Conversation with Art Miller in the woods back of my home. I mentioned that Skouras--" Skouras is a studio head-- "had implied that I couldn't work in pictures anymore if I didn't name the other lefties in the group. Then I told Art I'd prepared myself for a period of no movie work or money, that I was prepared to face this if it was worthwhile, but that I didn't feel altogether good about such a decision, that I'd say to myself, what the hell am I giving all this up for? To defend a secrecy that I didn't think right? And to defend people who had already been named or soon would be named by someone else? "I said, I'd hated the Communists for many years and didn't feel right about giving up my career to defend them, that I would give up my film career if it was in the interest of defending something I believed in, but not this. Art said that it would be a personal disaster for him if I was run out of pictures. He hoped that it would not happen. He could see that it would concern me deeply. I only had to consider this, was I sacrificing for something that I believed in? "I didn't believe in the secret membership of the Communists. I'd fought it when I was a member. I then told Art how I'd been pushed to resign from the party. Art and I had never been frank about the Communist business. This was as much my fault as his and as much his as mine. But mainly, it was that nobody asked if his friend was a Communist in these days. Art never offered to tell me. He knew I was anti-Communist, but I'd always refrained from what I considered to be red-baiting. Art went on about the political situation. He said I was naive. We talked for 3/4 of an hour. He looked terribly worried. Walking back to the house, just before we came in view of the other people, he stopped and put his arm around me in his awkward way, the side of his body against mine, and said, 'Don't worry about what I'll think. Whatever you do will be OK with me, because I know your heart is in the right place.' "I was surprised by the phrase, and, as soon as I could, wrote it down. 'Your heart is in the right place.' It was like the truth in a pop song title. There was no doubt that Art meant it and that he was anxious to say this to me before we separated. We parted on affectionate terms." Well, Arthur Miller's account of the story appears in his autobiography. His account is a bit longer than Kazan's. And we asked actor Richard Henzel to read an edited version for us. Here it is. "The day before I was to leave, Kazan phoned and asked to see me. Since he was not a man to idly chat, at least not with me, and since this was his second or third such call in the past few weeks, I began to suspect that something terrible had come to him and that it must be the committee. I drove into a dun and rainy Connecticut morning in early April 1952, cursing the time. For I all but knew that my friend would tell me he had decided to cooperate with the committee. Though he had passed through the party for a brief period 15 years before, as he had once mentioned to me, I knew that he had no particular political life anymore, at least not in the five years of our acquaintance. I found my anger rising, and not against him, whom I loved like a brother, but against the committee. "The sun briefly appeared, and we left his house to walk in the woods under dripping branches, amid the odor of decay and regeneration that a long rain drives up from the earth in a cold country forest. The story-- simple and, by now, routine-- took but a moment to tell. He had been subpoenaed and had refused to cooperate, but had changed his mind and returned to testify fully in executive session, confirming some dozen names of people he had known in his months in the party so long ago. He was trying, I thought, to appear relieved in his mind. Actually, he wanted my advice, almost as though he had not yet done what he had done. "There was a certain gloomy logic in what he was saying. Unless he came clean, he could never hope, at the height of his creative powers, to make another film in America. And he had been told, in so many words, by his old boss and friend Spyros Skouras, president of 20th Century Fox, that the company would not employ him unless he satisfied the committee. "He spoke as factually as he could. And it was a quiet calamity opening before me in the woods, because I felt my sympathy going toward him, and, at the same time, I was afraid of him. I was growing cooler with the thought that, as unbelievable as it seemed, I could still be up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I had attended meetings for party writers years ago and had made a speech at one of them. Had I been of his generation, he would have had to sacrifice me as well. And finally, that was all I could think of. I could not get past it. "I felt a silence rising around me, an impending and invisible wash of dulled vibrations between us, like an endless moaning musical note through which we could not hear or speak anymore. It was sadness, purely mournful, deadening. And it had been done to us. Who or what was now safer because this man, in his human weakness, had been forced to humiliate himself? "As I got into my car to leave, Molly Kazan came out of the house into the drizzle that had begun again. She could tell, I suppose, that it had not gone well. It was impossible to keep looking into her distraught eyes. I was half inside the car when Molly came out and asked, unforgettably, if I realized that the United Electrical Workers Union was entirely in the hands of Communists. Then she pointed out toward the road and told me that I no longer understood the country, that everybody who lived on that road approved of the committee and what had been done. I didn't know what to say anymore across the crevasse widening between us. "In the awkward pre-departure moment, after I had said that I could not agree with their decision, she asked if I was staying at my house, half an hour away. And I said that I was on my way to Salem. She instantly understood what my destination meant. And her eyes widened in sudden apprehension and, possibly, anger. 'You're not going to equate witches with this.' I told her, I wasn't at all sure I could write a play, but I was going to look into the stuff they had up there. We all waved rather grimly as I pulled away. "Once on the road, nosing the car north, I thought, she was probably right about the people in the comfortable homes I was passing, and felt myself drifting beyond the pale. The strangeness was sharper because, as usual, I was carrying several contradictions at the same time, my brother love, as painfully alive in me as it had ever been, alongside the undeniable fact that Kazan might have sacrificed me had it been necessary." Miller concludes this passage in his biography this way. "In a sense, I went naked to Salem," he writes, "still unable to accept the most common experience of humanity, the shifts of interest that turned loving husbands and wives into stony enemies, loving parents into indifferent supervisors or even exploiters of their own children and so forth. As I already knew from my reading, that was the real story of ancient Salem Village, what they called then the breaking of charity with one another." Miller, of course, did go on to write The Crucible about the Salem witch trials. In that play, John Proctor is the hero who prefers to die rather than give false testimony. Around the same time, Kazan went on to direct the film On The Waterfront. In that film, Marlon Brando plays a hero who makes the principled decision to testify against the mob. It is, many have said, the most eloquent defense for squealing on film, though in later years, Kazan said that he simply wanted to demonstrate the moral ambiguity of this kind of situation, that it is not black and white. One thing you've got to understand, Father. On the dock, we've always been D and D. D and D, what's that? Deaf and dumb. No matter how much we hate the torpedoes, we don't rat. Rat? Oh boys, get smart. I know you're getting pushed around. But there's one thing we've got in this country, and that's ways of fighting back. Now getting the facts to the public, testifying for what you know is right against what you know is wrong. Now what's ratting to them is telling the truth for you. Now can't you see that? Can't you see that? Huh? Coming up, the breaking of charity with one another in one small town in Tennessee. 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, Naming Names, stories of people turning in friends, and coworkers, and strangers, I guess too, to the government. We have arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Beating the Erasers. This next story takes place in a small town in Tennessee, a town so small, in fact, that it has just one elementary school, which is where most of this story takes place. Susan Drury tells the tale. If you spend a little time in Spring Hill, Tennessee, you will start to wonder who Noel Evans was. There's Evans Park, named for him and his wife Jerry. And the main drag through town has a sign next to it, saying that it's sponsored by friends of Noel and Jerry Evans. And people talk about him fondly. They talk about the competent and kind way he ran the local elementary school for decades, the way he taught new generations of local children and parents. They tell stories of what a dream he was to work for, how he supported teachers in contract negotiations and with difficult parents, how he brought staff and friends tomatoes and peas from his garden, and how he brought some lucky few the peach pies his wife made. Many people, dozens of people, told me that they had never heard him raise his voice. And a similar number told me they looked up to him as a father figure. But there is one story about Noel Evans that people refer to, but rarely want to tell. People here disagree vehemently about the facts and the meaning of this story. The people I found who did want to talk about it, on both sides, mostly did not want to talk on tape. Many people, also on both sides, did not want their names used. And others did not want to talk at all. Because this is a story that severed families and decades-old friendships, and people aren't over it. It's the story of how, when a few people here decided to name names, it spun out of control immediately, taking over their lives, taking over the life of the man they accused, and ripping apart the town. Here's how Wanda Wright tells the story. She had grown up in Spring Hill back in the '50s, when you could skate all the way down Main Street and get water at anybody's house because you knew them all. She had known Mr. Evans since she was a teenager. And he was her math teacher. She married the son of the man who had hired Evans. And some years later, Mr. Evans hired her to come back to Spring Hill and teach under him. Wanda knew everybody here. And she says she felt like she was just in the perfect town then, just totally surrounded by people she'd known forever. She was a true local, a total insider. This was still a small town in 1994, when Mr. Evans told Wanda Wright that his strawberries were on their last legs, and if she wanted any, she should come pick them after school because he was about to plow them under. She dropped by, picked the berries, and went into the house for a minute with Mr. Evans. Suddenly, everything changed. Evans asked her for a hug. They had hugged at school, but this was different. "He had this real weird, dark look in his eyes," said Wright. Something was definitely wrong. Wanda pulled her arms up under her chin and leaned over as he hugged her. "I have to go," she said. But he was standing between her and the door. Then he asked her to kiss him. This was not a man she expected this of. He was her boss, but it went beyond that. "It was like your preacher, or your daddy, or something like that," she said. So the day after the incident at the house, Wanda says, Mr. Evans came to her classroom and gave her a fried peach pie and an apology. She threw the pie down on the desk like it was the worst thing she had ever seen. "We have to talk," said Wright. Wright told him she was going to have to leave the school. Mr. Evans was totally apologetic. He said he didn't know what came over him. He swore it had never happened before, never, and it never would again. She told him if it ever happened again, she would report him. But that otherwise, she would not tell anyone. He asked for her forgiveness, and she gave it to him. "Let's forget it," she said. "It's over." And she didn't exactly forget it. It made her edgy. But she wanted it to be over too. And they moved on. And on the surface, anyway, life at school pretty much returned to normal. Then three years later, in 1997, on a teacher workday, when the kids were not at school, Mr. Evans, who lived near the school, invited everyone from the school down to his house during lunch time to see the indoor pool he and his wife had put in. Almost all the teachers went, but Wanda Wright did not. She had not returned to the house since the incident and was not going to go back, not even with a group. So she was doing some work in her classroom when Julia Priest came in. Julia was a guidance counselor at the school. "Why didn't you go down to Mr. Evans'?" Wanda asked Julia. "Why didn't you go?" Julia shot back. They looked at each other, and, without either of them saying a word, they both realized they were keeping the same secret about Mr. Evans. Julia told Wanda Wright that, in 1994, Mr. Evans had approached her in her office. She thought he was going to hug her. But instead, he grabbed her and rubbed himself on her two times. She had told two friends about it at the time, one of whom urged her to report it to a supervisor, which she did, though nothing ever came of it. On the day it happened, she was wearing a fuchsia, striped dress with a teal color and matching fuchsia shoes. "We used to coordinate like that," she says. She burned the clothes. She wanted to change schools, and kept her eye out for other jobs. But she thought she could just manage it, stay a safe distance away, keep her hand on the doorknob whenever they were meeting together. And she had made it work well enough. Nothing had ever happened again. And she had thought she was the only one. Wanda told Julia her story too. And again, they believed that they were the only two teachers this had happened to. Then a few months later, a younger teacher called Wanda to confide in her that Mr. Evans was coming to her house, that he had hit on her, that she was afraid of him. Then Wanda and Julia started to wonder about Susan Nelson, a second grade teacher who seemed to steer clear of Mr. Evans. Wanda asked Susan, "Did Mr. Evans ever make a pass at you?" Susan Nelson was stunned at the question. She hadn't even told her husband. She said yes. Now it started to look like there was a much bigger problem at the school. But they weren't sure what to do about it. Up until this point, they had all tried to deal with the problem face-to-face, without getting outsiders or the bigger bureaucracy involved. Wanda had confronted Mr. Evans in person, one-on-one, the way you do with someone you've known so long, when they step over the line or when they hurt you. The women talked about getting Mr. Evans some help or together confronting him in some way. They all say they didn't want to report him. Reporting him just seemed like it would unleash some process that would just blow everybody up. They ended up turning him in by accident. Wanda confided in a friend who was also the school's vice principal. And because she was a vice principal, a supervisor, she was compelled by school policy to report what she had heard. And so a few days later, Human Resources staffers were at Spring Hill Elementary, calling selected teachers in and asking them questions about sexual harassment at the school. When they brought Wanda Wright to the conference room and she saw the questions, she walked to the corner of the conference room and just slid down the wall, bawling. It took her a full week before she agreed to answer the questions. It was one of the hardest decisions she ever had to make in her life. She was terrified of doing something that she knew would destroy this man who she still had some respect for. And she, like Julia and Susan, they're private. Even when I wanted to interview them about this story, they were incredibly reluctant. And though they ultimately decided to talk to me, they didn't want to have their voices on the radio. "It's too intimate," they said. In the end, Wanda decided she could not lie and make the other women look like liars. That's how Wanda, Susan, and Julia tell the story, how they told it to me. Noel Evans denied all the allegations against him. In each case, he denied that he ever kissed, or groped, or grabbed the women, and emphasized how close he was to each of them, how friendly they were to him, and how easy it would be for people to misinterpret his actions. For instance, he wrote that Wanda was in his house, and that before she left with the berries, he gave her a fatherly hug "like I give my daughter on the rare occasions I get to see her." About a week after the women were questioned and Evans was removed from the school without explanation, the director of schools officially announced that the administration was investigating instances of alleged sexual harassment at the school. Richard Roach from the school board. I heard about it by watching the 6 o'clock news. Then of course, immediately the phone started ringing. While the broadcast was going on, the phone started ringing. And it got so bad, we couldn't eat supper. We could not, literally, eat supper. Because the moment people got in, they'd see the headline from that day, or the rumor would come through, and they'd start calling. People here knew this man. They did not, it seems, have reservations about him. He'd been at the school for over 30 years. And most people did not believe that Evans was a sexual harasser. And even the women, themselves, said that they, themselves, would not have believed it either if it hadn't actually happened to them. Again, Richard Roach from the school board. I can't remember one single phone call that was anti-Noel Evans. I think anybody that had that point of view was pretty well afraid to speak up, because you were outnumbered 30:1. They thought, this is a witch hunt. He's being railroaded. He's being accused of things he didn't do. One woman called me, and she said, my children are in Spring Hill. I went to Spring Hill. My mother went to school under him. I have known him since I was four years old. And she was so mad. She was just almost incoherent, she was so mad, crying, upset. A lot of people were mad, not at Evans, at his accusers. And even though some of the names of the accusers weren't officially released, many teachers and some townspeople started to figure out who was involved. The actual allegations against Evans weren't public just yet. It was all sort of vague, what he was accused of. And in trying to piece the story together, to understand it, a lot of people decided to believe that Mr. Evans did nothing wrong, but that maybe the women misunderstood or misinterpreted his behavior. When the women described what had happened to friends or family, they got some pretty mixed reactions. A friend asked one of the women, "Well, what did he do to you? Did he rape you?" Informed of what Mr. Evans had done, the friend said, "Is that all?" Richard Roach was typical of most people in town. I never thought it was true. He may have used some bad judgment. Now I know a lot of people, especially the teachers involved, are going to get upset with me saying that. People's perceptions, things can happen, and they may perceive something happening that didn't, in fact, happen. But my first thought and my last thought was that he was innocent. And I will stand by that. Some people concluded that the women had more sinister motives. They believed that the women had plotted to destroy Noel Evans, either to get his job or to bring him down for other reasons. But here's something you have to know about the teachers. They didn't have anything to tag them as suspicious or unworthy of belief. They weren't known as gossips or troublemakers. They all had good reputations as teachers, and were all religious, middle-aged, married ladies with kids. And all of them had history and ties in this community too. And Wanda Wright's ties were the deepest. One Evan's supporter said to me, "Wanda was the real kicker, because she was the salt of the earth. But Mr. Evans, well, he was the core of the salt of the earth." So people had to make a choice, a terrible choice, a choice about who to believe. If you believed the women, everything you knew was turned upside down. So people chose to believe him. One teacher said that her belief in Mr. Evans' character was so strong that nothing could change it. "If a man walked into the school and Mr. Evans shot him," she said, "then I know the man deserved to be shot." The atmosphere at the school became very tense. Many teachers started wearing yellow ribbons to show their support for Noel Evans. Wanda went to the cafeteria one day, and some of the workers walked off the line, refusing to serve her. One person told Julia Priest that some of the teachers were praying that Priest and the other accusers would literally go to hell to suffer for their lies. It was such a frightening climate that every day, as Wanda Wright left the school, she looked under her car before she got in, making sure there was nobody there to attack her. Then once she got in the car, she'd pause for a minute before she turned the key, half expecting the car to explode. In a sense, both sides felt they were victims of a witch hunt, Evans, who said his actions were being misinterpreted, and the women, who said they were being persecuted for telling the truth of what happened to them. Maybe this is what always happens. Noel Evans retired on May 22, 1997. He made a settlement with the district that he would get his full retirement benefits and that the investigation file would not be public. He was offered and accepted a big job as the leader of the Tennessee Retired Teachers Association. Lots of people saw him as a good man who had been run off. And they were sad to see him go. Then, two months later, Noel Evans shot his wife and then himself to death. Wanda, Julia, and Susan were horrified by the Evanses' deaths, like everyone else. But Julia also thought that more people might believe them now. They thought it would be clearer for people that something was and had been terribly wrong with Mr. Evans, something nobody could really understand. And I met people in town who changed their minds about Mr. Evans after the deaths. But for his core supporters, the people who knew him best, it only made them more certain. Mr. Evans' supporters concluded that the deaths only proved how truly cruel, truly damaging the investigation had been to him. He had been falsely accused, removed from his school, lost his reputation, and look where it led him. And many of his supporters didn't believe he murdered his wife. They believe the stress and loss of honor to both Mr. And Mrs. Evans was so great that they had made an arrangement to die, a suicide pact. One teacher told me with tears in his voice, "They had a kind of love that modern people don't understand. They wanted to die together." This theory is a popular one. The chief of police was a family friend of the Evanses. And he put it into his official report on the crime. Although he notes that Mrs. Evans was in her pajamas, apparently sleeping on the couch when she was shot in the face by her husband, he still concludes it's a double suicide. Quote, "I simply do not believe he could have killed Jerry without a pact of some kind between them. I cannot see Noel taking Jerry's life without her agreeing to it. I think Noel and Jerry had worked it out, and Jerry told Noel, 'I cannot do myself. I do not want to know when it is going to happen.'" In big letters at the bottom of the page, the police chief writes, "God bless us all." Other police investigators thought the chief's notes were wild and irresponsible. One veteran officer I spoke with who had been at the scene said, there was no evidence to support this idea of a double suicide, that this was one of the most gruesome and disturbing crime scenes he had seen in his years on the force, and that most of the investigators there concluded Mrs. Evans was murdered, plain and simple. Immediately after the deaths, people proposed to rename the elementary school after Noel Evans. There was something else people wanted. They wanted the names of the women who had accused Evans of harassment. At that point, the names hadn't been officially released. All most people had were rumors. Evans' supporters say, his good name meant everything to him, and the loss of his good name destroyed him. And so it was important to name the accusers, so that, somehow, they would lose their good names too. 10 days after the Evanses were found dead, the names of his accusers were all printed in the paper. Once the women were officially named, Evans' supporters circulated a petition to fire the director of schools and the women who made the allegations. Mr. Chairman, members of the School Board, Maury County has recently witnessed the slow torture and destruction of Principal Noel Evans. Here's Ray Williams, a local businessman and soon to be mayor, presenting the petitions to the School Board shortly after the names were released. The director of schools has publicly attested to following School Board policies and procedures, as Maury Countyers have watched common sense go out the door. Who do you think will be the next victim of a school system in constant turmoil and fear? As time passed, more women stepped forward to describe how Mr. Evans came on to them or their friends, so the women don't regret turning him in. They say what they learned from all this is that it doesn't matter what the facts are. People don't really want to know. Like Wanda says, she wouldn't have believed them either. She had known Mr. Evans for too long. It seemed too out of character. It was their good names against his good name. And in the end, he had a better name than they did. And so although the town decided not to name the elementary school after him, it did name the playground for him, and a scholarship fund, and a stretch of road as you come through town. This hasn't driven the women out. Susan Nelson still teaches music at the school, and Wanda Wright teaches the third grade. Julia Priest has a district-wide special ed job. They're tough. They've survived. And they have a heavily highlighted copy of Anita Hill's book that they've passed around. Many people still don't speak to them. And they still pause before having to introduce themselves at any function, watching for that flash of recognition when people hear their names. Susan Drury in Tennessee. Well, our program was produced today by Starlee Kine and myself with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and Jonathan Goldstein. Senior producer, Julie Snyder. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, whose new autobiography begins with this sentence. He stood apart, a lone wolf amongst lone wolves, a pasty-looking man wearing a lumberjack shirt and glasses. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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When Sarah was a kid, the number of movie stars who came to stay at their house was exactly one, and it was kind of a disaster. Robert Redford ended up at their house because he had heard about a book that Sarah's stepfather was writing about Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement. It was still just a manuscript, and the stepfather didn't want to send copies of it around. So he told Redford that the only way that Redford could read it is if he would do it at their house in Long Island. Redford agreed. Sarah says, the atmosphere in the house when he arrived was completely different from any other time in her childhood. I remember mostly my mother consciously trying to be very charming, and being very charming, and talking to him a lot, and asking all sorts of questions, and laughing a lot at what he said, and kind of flitting about the house in a way that I hadn't remembered her doing before. When Robert Redfored told stories, even the simplest story about his trip to the house, her parents nodded and smiled along with an enthusiasm that the stories did not necessarily seem to merit to 11-year-old Sarah. I was really sullen. And I think I was making a really concerted effort not to be impressed. Now, 20 years later, I think I was jealous that he was suddenly the star of the house, whereas I was used to being the star of the house. I was the youngest kid. And I was the one who amused my parents. And here was this stranger coming in who had usurped my role. And I remember when he came in, poor guy, the first night, my mother made this special dinner. And we ate in the kitchen. We had this big wooden table. And it was definitely fancier than usual, or one more course than we usually had. Maybe we had an appetizer or something, which we never normally had. And she had put down these place mats that were-- we only brought them out on special occasions. It all looked really festive and nice. And so he sits down, and we start eating. And Robert Redford says, oh, do you always eat like this? This is so nice. And I said, no. And my mother, at the same time, said, yes, we do. It was bad. And then another thing happened where the seats at that table were these benches. So I was sitting on the same bench as Robert Redford. And I started rocking, partly unconsciously, because I always did that, but also just knowing, I'm sure, that it would be highly irritating to whoever is sitting on the bench with you. So there poor Robert Redford was, rocking back and forth, trying to eat his dinner. And my mother said, Sarah, stop, stop rocking, and scolded me in front of Robert Redford. The next day, a friend of Sarah's from down the street asked if she could come over and meet the house guest. So she comes over. And she reacts the way you are supposed to react. Her eyes are opened wide. And she's just smiling and talking, and saying, I am such a fan, and I love your movies, and can I have your autograph? And he's delighted. Finally, someone is showing the proper protocol. And he's like, sure, yeah, hey. And my mother is standing there smiling, and how sweet. And she says, "Sarah, would you also like his autograph?" And I said, "No." That was the crowning blow. It's like, somehow, if you picture your family as this little solar system, in and of itself, with its own set of normal gravitational fields and all that, suddenly-- I don't even know what-- another star, another planet entered in. And it completely shifted everyone's orbit away from the way it normally is. Right. And I couldn't handle it. All my behavior, I think, was aimed at trying to get it back to the way I had wanted it, or the way I was comfortable. Because in the old solar system, pretty much, you were the sun. You were at the center. Yes, right. And he was so clearly a bigger sun. He was literally a star. He was a star. Well today on our radio program, stories of what happens when an outsider arrives and changes everything, for better and worse. 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, Psychic Buddha, Qu'est-ce Que C'est, the story of what happens to an average American family when Mom, who is completely rational and charming and funny, starts to spend every day in direct contact with an ancient Buddhist monk who no one else can see, who last walked the earth hundreds of years ago. Act Two, The Jackson Two, the story of a politician whose life is shattered by two different men, both of whom share his same name. Act Three, Mr. Fun, Jonathan Goldstein and Heather O'Neill tell the true story of what happened when he first arrived in her life, and why her little daughter explained to him that he is the daughter's 19th favorite person in the world, and not likely to rise. Stay with us. Can I have $20? Can you have 20-- Bucks. No. This is a story where another man shows up in a family, and the other man is an ancient spirit named Aaron. Mom started channeling Aaron years ago. Aaron has been through lifetime after lifetime, going back a couple thousand years. He instructs her in Buddhism and in meditation. Her son, Davy Rothbart, put together this story on what it has meant to have Aaron around all these years in their family. But also, when he went to interview everybody in the house that he grew up in, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he realized that they had never sat down as a family and actually discussed whether they thought Aaron was real, whether they actually believed in Aaron. They got a chance to do that, too. Here's Davy. I was 12 when Aaron showed up. My older brother, Mike, was 15. My little brother, Peter, was seven. I first found out about Aaron by reading through my mom's journals when she wasn't home. What some people call dirty snooping, I call being curious. And I was a curious kid. I remember reading about Aaron this, Aaron that, and all these long, incredible conversations my mom and Aaron had had. For a while, I thought Aaron was some dude my mom was sneaking around with. Then one morning, in the dining room, she explained to me and my brothers about Aaron, how he just came to her one day. She has always meditated every morning. And I guess this one time in winter, while she sitting quietly in the living room, she felt the presence of someone. Then she saw him, a biblical-looking figure with blue eyes and a long white beard. At first, my mom thought she was hallucinating. She asked the guy who he was. He said his name was Aaron. He has never gone away. I feel his presence there constantly. But it's like sitting in a room with somebody, and you're reading a book, and they're reading a book. And you don't always have to talk to each other. You just feel the other person's presence. And if it's somebody you really love, there's a comfort in that presence. Is he your best friend, kind of? It's not that kind of relationship. Yes, he's a friend, a very dear friend. But it's more a revered teacher than a pal. Do you and Dad still knock boots? Do we still-- Be makin'-- Makin'? --with the love? What does Aaron do? What does Aaron do when we make love? I've noticed that he averts his gaze. That's the one time that he's really not around, although if I called on him, he would be. But I don't feel his presence or energy. When Aaron showed up, one of the first things he did was dictate to my mom a piece of 2,500-year-old Buddhist scripture called the Satipatthana Sutta. My mom says she had never heard of it before. Aaron kept teaching her more scriptures, and coached her in meditation and the Buddhist traditions. After a while, a couple of my mom's friends wanted in on the teachings. So she started showing them how to meditate, and began channeling Aaron for them. It was strange. My mom and Aaron became these gurus, and more and more folks started coming by. Every night of the week, we'd have a crowd of New Age types in the kitchen, grazing on vegan cookies and foraging through our herbal teas. My mom and Aaron would lead meditation sessions out in our converted garage. Gently bring your attention to the touch of the breath. Wherever my mom was, so was Aaron. And if you're wondering what it was like growing up in a house like this, the only way I can describe it is, it felt completely normal. Aaron was just another member of the family. We'd be at breakfast or driving in the car, and my mom would tell us things that Aaron was saying to her. It was like he was an old college friend of hers who we all knew well. He had a weakness for puns and dumb jokes. He was always marveling at new things that hadn't existed in his last lifetime. I remember how intrigued he was one time by the sight of a Ferris wheel at a school carnival. When kids from school came over, me and my brothers always explained about our mom and Aaron. We never really felt embarrassed or weird about it. This was Ann Arbor, the Berkeley of the Midwest. Our friends' parents were ex-hippies and liberal professors. Nobody thought channeling was that strange. Not long ago, on a winter weekend, my brother Mike was in town visiting. And we went for a walk to the elementary school playground near the house. I wish I could remember exactly the point when I started to believe that it really was channeling, and not just Mom going slightly psycho. You know what I remember? I just remembered. There was that Shirley MacLaine movie on TV, Out on a Limb. Out on a Limb. I remember that. And it was just the worst sappy, silly stuff ever. Right, but Mom loved it and wanted us all to watch it. Yeah. She was eating it up. And it was soon after that she met Aaron. And I was like, that's convenient. Mike is 30 years old and married now. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He's a professional photographer, and he's into the outdoors. Out of me and my brothers, he's probably the most spiritual. When Mike started getting into Aaron and his teachings, I wasn't sure what to make of it. I just felt like, you and me and Peter used to all make fun of Mom's students and stuff like that. Mostly, you and Peter used to make fun of them. OK. Yeah, me and Peter used to make fun of these weird people that come to the house. But sometimes, you would try to be down with me and Peter. And you would try to make fun of them, too. But then you were up there doing all the voodoo stuff along with the rest of them. I did used to feel torn that I did want to be cool, or be accepted by you and Peter. But I was really interested in what they were doing. Of everyone in the family, Mike has turned to Aaron the most. In his freshman year of college, Mike basically had a breakdown. What happened was he started dealing with the fact that he'd gotten molested by a neighbor when he was little. The emotional weight of that started tearing him apart. He couldn't function. At first, I felt like I was sinking, like in a pit. I was sinking further and further, getting depressed, not doing much of anything. And then, I don't know. I just basically-- eventually, it got so bad that I just called Mom and asked for help. And basically, she said, well, I'll put Aaron on the line. Right. Some dude touched you improperly. And that seems pretty [BLEEP] up. What can Aaron say that would make that better or go away? He can't take it back. I wish Aaron was more like the punitive type of spirit. And if you said, some dude improperly touched me, he would just put a bolt of lightning, and like, kshhh-kshhh. You know, we read about it in the paper the next day. Then I would be like, yeah. Right. Basically, when I would call, I would explain how I was doing. And Aaron would just really help me to see things from a more universal perspective. Like here I was-- Like your problems weren't really that big, or like-- More that my problems were temporary. I remember when Mike would call from school to talk to my mom and Aaron. She didn't have a deaf telephone back then, so Mike would talk to me, and I'd translate into sign language for my mom. And I remember there would be long stretches where I would just do the sign for crying, running my finger down my cheek, again and again. Over the past 12 years, I've watched my mom and Aaron help literally thousands of people. Folks come to them in so much pain and seem to leave feeling so much calmer. I have always felt really proud of my mom for all the work she's done to help people through their darkest times. In fact, when Aaron first arrived at our house, things in our family were pretty miserable. Both my mom and dad say that when my mom when deaf, it was incredibly difficult for them, and that it began to tear them apart. Here's my dad. I think one way to characterize it would be, just to show how tough it was, it was [SCREAMING] That's the way I felt every day, just about every minute, like screaming. And I think I did it frequently enough. When I first lost my hearing, it was devastating. It was totally cut off. There was no communication at all, just a sense of being totally isolated from the world. When my mom first went deaf, she didn't read lips or use sign language. She lost her job teaching sculpture at the university. She couldn't communicate with her friends. In fact, a lot of them just disappeared. My dad got frustrated and upset with her when she couldn't understand him. He says he felt like she was taken from him, like his wife was gone. And he didn't handle it well. It was a big shock. I had never met anybody that was deaf. And I was concerned that maybe she had brought it on herself, because we went through a mall in Detroit one time on a very cold and windy day, and she refused to put on a jacket or a coat or anything. So I figured that it was her fault. And I kept asking myself the question-- it seems strange now, but the question was, why is this happening to me? And Dad was totally overwhelmed by it. He couldn't talk to me. I could talk to him, because he could hear me. He couldn't talk back to me. So we had so much anger. And this anger kept me out. I would get mad. I would curse at her. I would yell at her. Of course, she couldn't hear me cursing. But then she told me that, yeah, she could tell the expression in my face, that I was saying something vile. It was like this for 15 years. We could never tell when my dad was going to just blow up. A couple of times, my mom packed me and my brothers into the station wagon, ready to leave. My mom says, she was praying for some kind of relief. And then, Aaron it appeared. And after that, things began to change. My mom got a focus and purpose in her life. People looked up to her. She wasn't isolated anymore. And Aaron worked with my dad to help him learn how to manage his anger. It has always seemed to me that my little brother, Peter, is the one in my family most skeptical of Aaron's existence. Growing up, me and him would tease our mom for talking to ghosts. We used to mess around and do imitations of Aaron for our friends. Our favorite thing was when salespeople called and asked for Aaron. Usually, it's for Mr. Aaron Undetermined. They ask for-- I guess that's-- yeah, they ask, is Mr. Aaron Undetermined there? I have to explain to them that Aaron is not of this world. Do you believe in Aaron? In what sense? Do I think that everything Mom says about Aaron is real? I don't pretend to know. I don't think it's important to me. Like, is Aaron really a higher spirit that tells Mom all this stuff? Or is it just some sort of imaginary friend that developed as a psychological tool for helping her figure out her own problems? It's just like, it doesn't seem like something I can really figure out. I've got to say, I completely understand Peter's agnostic stance. It's tough to start asking the question of whether or not Aaron is real when either answer you get could be pretty unsettling. I mean, say Aaron is real. Then all the stuff he talks about is real, too. It means God exists, and reincarnation, and that there really is this whole vast spirit world that most of us can't see. But all right, say Aaron's not real. If Aaron's not real, either my mom is lying, or she's deluded. I know she wouldn't straight-up lie about this. She clearly believes in him. Which means if Aaron's not real, then she's a crazy person, and that now, she has snookered thousands of followers into believing along. I decided I should just go to Aaron directly. I asked my mom if he would take a meeting with me. She was down, and she said Aaron was down. One snowy afternoon, we went for a walk in the woods behind our house and sat down to talk on a big, old fallen tree. I had a list of questions. Should I ask them one at a time, or should I ask them all? Probably ask them one at a time. OK. First, could I ask Aaron, what other kinds of humans has Aaron been? Start there. Start there. My mom leans back slightly and closes her eyes. She perches on the snowy log, breathing deeply and sitting completely still. I have lived in every color of body, male, female, arctic climates and tropic, in deserts and wilderness and mountains. And so have you. But you don't remember them. I do. Aaron says he last walked the Earth in human form about 500 years ago in Thailand. In that lifetime, he was a Buddhist meditation master, and my mom was one of his prized students. One night, a man attacked Aaron with a spear. And my mom gave her life to protect him. Aaron says he and my mom have been together in many lifetimes as teacher and student. In a couple of lifetimes, he's even been her father. I have a question for you, Aaron. Aaron, isn't it possible that my mom invented you, because she felt so alone and isolated with her deafness? I would not phrase it quite that way. First, I can not prove that I'm real, and it's not necessary. Certainly, she could have invented me. In my experience, that's not what happened, because I exist. Since it's not something one can prove either way, I tend to simply ask people, whether she invented me or I'm quote, "real," the ideas that I offer come from somewhere. Are they useful to you? Forget me. Are the ideas useful to you, [INAUDIBLE]? Baseball-- Davy, these are all baseball cards. Later that afternoon, Mike and I went up into the attic to look for some old pictures and things. Where do you think your-- wait, what's this one? At one point, my mom came up to help. She started telling me about a weekend channeling workshop she gave a few years ago. She said that channeling is not some sacred gift, that even my brother Mike had channeled once. Mike channeled? Mike channeled-- You don't remember that, Davy? Yeah. Is that hereditary? I thought channeling skips a generation. No, my experience is that anybody can learn how to channel. As I said, it's like playing basketball. Doing it is easy. Doing it well is hard. Davy, Dad was channeling too. Dad was channeling? No. True. Dad was channeling. You're pulling my-- you're yanking-- We had 20 people here, and about 18 of them ended up channeling by the end of the weekend. Ask Dad. Is Hal down there? Hal, come on around here. What? OK, a word about my dad. He's a real performer, the kind of dad who will improvise Gilbert and Sullivan songs with new lyrics, always willing to entertain. Did I ever channel? Yeah. Yes. So you remember channeling? Sure, I took the channeling class through your mother. You channeled? I channeled, yeah. Beautiful, was it? Oh yeah. I have a tape of it. Who'd you channel? You're saying? I channeled Munga, Munga. Who did he channel? I could probably do it again. Can you channel Munga right now? I'm asking Dad to channel Munga. My dad stands there on the pull-down attic steps and closes his eyes, while my mom gets an increasingly worried look on her face. Hal, I would strongly suggest that you not take Davy up on that challenge. --sit down and meditate and get yourself into a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] place. Dad, just don't worry about it. She's crazy. She's [UNINTELLIGIBLE] I think I'm feeling his presence. I'm asking for respect for the process. OK. I can sit down. If I sat down-- I'd have to be more comfortable. I think my mom hoped that that would be the end of it. Hey, Big Papa. The next morning, I got my dad alone while he was shaving in the bathroom. How come Mom wouldn't let you channel Munga earlier? Here's my feeling about it. I think she felt that it wasn't sincere, but it was real. It was real. Could you do Munga now? Can you try? I know sometimes you feel him closer than others, but-- I could do it. I feel his presence. I won't be able to shave. I'd have to stop shaving. But I could do it. I feel him around. I have to close my eyes and concentrate a little bit. Hello. My name is Munga, and I come from India. I'm here now. Now I'm speaking. And-- Not to be disrespectful, and not to focus on Munga's accent, but I just didn't find this as believable as my mom's channeling. Still, though, there's my dad, standing there at the sink in a bright green bathrobe, his glasses on and shaving cream all over his face, channeling. Already, this was turning into one my favorite memories of my dad ever. Munga, this is Davy. And can I ask you-- Davy is number two son, born April 11, 1975. 5 foot 11, 152, I believe, 142. I have these feelings about your physical appearance. Munga was like one of those carnival barkers that try and guess your exact height and weight, or you win a giant pencil. Why didn't Aaron ever entertain like this? I have no more to say. And peace to all human beings on planet Earth, you call it. I never really realized my dad was so cool with the whole spirit world thing. He was always a gracious host at all the meditation classes and channeling sessions. But sometimes he also seemed to resent how wrapped up in Aaron and her work my mom had become. She was always going out of town to lead meditation retreats and workshops around the country. And I don't think he liked being home alone so much of the time. And sometimes my dad would get annoyed by all the students constantly coming in and out of the house. Honestly, I thought Aaron was just something he tolerated. But listening to him and Munga, I felt moved. Really, what could be a sweeter way for him to show acceptance of my mom's work than for him to channel his own spirit? Is Aaron just a part of you? I have no idea. I don't experience him as a part of me. There were still a couple of questions I had left for my mom. I know Aaron has dictated entire books to her, interpretations of ancient Buddhist writings. Scholars who've read them have been impressed. With Aaron's teachings, she's become a widely known and respected meditation teacher. Even the most established Buddhist bigwigs admit that the depth of her knowledge is astounding. But then there's sketchy things, too. Like one time, when Aaron said the thing he missed most about being an actual human being was the taste of cognac. Aaron's last lifetime was supposedly more than 500 years ago. And I checked it out. Cognac was barely invented then. And the only people drinking it were a few dudes in France, not Buddhist monks in Thailand. And then there's the fact that Aaron says he can read minds and see the future, but then refuses to demonstrate these powers. Why won't he just prove himself? It's so easy. I have a number between 1 and 100. He says he won't play that game. So he's not real. That's for you to decide. Does he know the number? He doesn't have to say it. I just want him to know the number. Does he know it? He says he is averting his eyes. He is choosing not to look at it. I'm begging him, please, I just want to know. And then, I know it doesn't matter. His teachings are pretty cool. It doesn't matter if he's real or not. But I just want to know. So just look. Aaron, I'm asking you for one second, just look. If you want to understand what having Aaron in our lives has really done for my family, here's something that happened while I was home to work on this story. We went out to dinner on Valentine's Day. My dad met us at the restaurant, and when he walked in, he said, Happy Valentine's Day to my mom. But she had just turned away and didn't see him say it. My dad got kind of agitated, as though she was ignoring him by choice. He still hasn't fully gotten over her deafness. A minute later, he said something else to her, but now he was sore at her, and he didn't use sign language, and barely moved his lips. My mom said, I can't understand you. And my dad, getting more upset, repeated himself even faster, way too fast to lip-read. This used to be how it would all start with them. My dad's anger at my mom's deafness would bring out her unhappiness over it. Soon they'd be shouting at each other. But Aaron's influence has changed everything. On Valentine's Day, when my dad started freaking out, my mom just smiled at him and shrugged, like, this is your problem, not mine. Things don't escalate the way they did before Aaron came around. He's helped my mom discover a total sense of calm. Aaron came in peace, and that's what he brought us. Now if Aaron hadn't come along-- I think Dad and I would have been divorced. I'm not sure. Maybe not. I'm not sure. I understand why my mom believes in Aaron. As for me, I think believing in Aaron is a lot like believing in God. I have a hard time having an unswerving faith in something you can't see or prove exists. But I do have that kind of faith in my mom. That's why I believe in Aaron. You, you'll have to make your own decision. Davy Rothbart is the creator of foundmagazine.com. You can see video clips of his mom channeling Aaron and his dad channeling Munga at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Now here's Davy's dad, using his improvisatory powers. Hey Pete, hurry down. Dad's going to sing. [SINGING] If you're a God-fearing man, and you're trying to answer all the personal questions that you can, I suggest you call A-A-R-O-N. Aaron is the man that can solve your problems. Do you have any today? It's the way to live in the world today. Can you solve your problems? If you can't, let me remind you, there's a wonderful spirit in the world. And his sayings are good as gold. Some are modern, and some are pretty old. So my response to you-- Coming up, the difficult task of running for Congress against someone with your exact same name. And a seven-year-old explains a few things to a grown-ass man, in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. And he said, have you heard the news? Have you heard the news? I said, no, what's the news? He said, at 11:59, the last minute of filing for Congress in the second district of Illinois, you now have another Jesse L. Jackson running against you. I think at first, people were questioning whether there really was such a person. Oh, I didn't realize that, that there was an actual question of if he even existed. Yes. Mike Brown covered all this for the Chicago Sun-Times. He says that the other Jesse L. Jackson turned out to be a retired truck driver who lived in a suburb called Robbins, 68 years old, no previous political experience. At first, we couldn't even find him. He was ducking everybody. And then they produced him for a little dog and pony show, where he came out in front of the microphones and read a statement that said he really does exist. Indeed, he was a real person. And he was just a regular guy, who clearly had somehow been recruited to get into this race. But recruited by whom? Well, nobody was admitting anything. But for weeks, news reports were featuring gleeful quotes from two local politicians, Robert and William Shaw. They're twin brothers, old-school operators who came up through the rank and file of the black Democratic organization, who reportedly resent the relative ease with which Jesse, Jr., became a congressman. After all, he started at the top. It was his first elected office. They call him a brat and a crybaby. And as soon as this other Jesse L. Jackson appeared on the ballot, they were merrily telling reporters and anyone who would listen that it only seemed fair that Congressman Jackson realized that he wasn't the only one who could run for office on his father's name. THE only way he got in public office is through his daddy's name. But this other Jackson has had the name long before this young boy had it, the congressman. Senator William Shaw talked to me from his office. You know, I'm so happy, looking back at history, that Andrew Jackson didn't come along in this time. He never would have been the president, if it had been left up to this guy. Wait, wait, Andrew Jackson? Explain what you mean. You know Andrew Jackson? Yeah, of course. He was one of the presidents. Right, right, of course. He's on the money. But listening to Congressman Jackson, anybody with the Jackson name, he feels as though they shouldn't run. This guy's out of his mind. He thinks he has a patent on the Jackson name. From the congressman's point of view, this is all pretty much exactly what you do not want people talking about in the newspapers and on television. Again, imagine you have spent your whole life trying to get out from under the shadow of that other Jesse Jackson, your father, and now there is yet another Jesse Jackson. And the main story about your reelection is not what you've accomplished for your district, or what you hope to accomplish, but once again, did you get your job on your daddy's name. You know, and for someone who takes the process very seriously, it has been annoying. In the last six years, I have had eight press conferences. Two of them have been on this subject. To give you some idea that I don't run to the media, to show you some difference between me and my father, my dad might have had eight yesterday. I'm not anti-press. I'm prepared to do press. But when I do press, I want it to be about issues of concern to my constituents. And so rather than running a race on a third airport in Peotone, or discussing O'Hare expansion, or how to get more jobs, I'm caught in a fight with people who aren't even running for Congress in my race. The people he refers to, of course, are the Shaw brothers. They deny having anything to do with Jesse Jackson of Robbins, the truck driver. But Congressman Jackson started investigating the petition drive that put Jesse Jackson of Robbins onto the ballot. He found that many people who signed the petitions had been told specifically that they were signing for the congressman, who enjoys a 90% approval rating in the district. Further investigation showed that those petitions were notarized by a political ally of the Shaws. The 4,400 signatures were gathered by men who came from a homeless shelter, one of whom has testified that they got the jobs gathering signatures one day when Senator Shaw's chief of staff came by and took them to the Shaws' office at 144th street. In an affidavit, this man said that both William and Robert Shaw were there in the room, and sent them out to get the signatures. Not only there and sent them out, but there eating catfish and sent them out. And specifically said, "Go help the congressman. We don't get along with the congressman. We don't care much for the congressman. But we're going to help him get back on the ballot." Now, the congressman is saying that he's got affidavits from people who went around and got signatures to get this other Jesse Jackson-- the one from Robbins-- onto the ballot. He says he has got affidavits from some of those people, saying that they met, they were organized, in Shaw headquarters. What do you all say to that? I don't say anything. You know, anything might have happened. I have hundreds of people in my headquarters coming in and out. We're involved in a campaign here. And to my knowledge, I don't know anything about that. And I think that the congressman, he's drinking some water probably out of DC. We have better water than that in Chicago. Wait, wait, and what does the water from DC do to you? The water is making him delirious. That's what I think. For a while, there were not only two Jesse L. Jacksons on the ballot. The Shaw brothers officially supported a candidate in the primary named Yvonne Williams. And at some point, another Williams turned up on the ballot as well, Anthony Williams. And of course, this happens on ballots all over the country. If you're running against an Irish politician, you get another Irish name on the ballot. If you're running against a woman, you get another woman. If you're running against Jesse Jackson, you get another Jesse Jackson. Again, William Shaw. Yeah, that has happened many, many times. And people just take it with a grain of salt. It's not such a big deal. Yeah, I was wondering if you think we should think it's tragic or just funny. Well, I don't know. I guess it's funny to everybody but the congressman. Well, it is kind of funny. Again, Congressman Jackson. But there are political forces in my congressional district that are notorious for election shenanigans, for deceiving voters, and even having the reputation of stealing voters. And after deploying seven lawyers, two private eyes, and $150,000 to investigate how Jesse L. Jackson of Robbins got onto the ballot, the congressman is pursuing legal action. And if he can prove that the Shaw brothers intentionally deceived voters, intentionally tried to convince voters that they were signing petitions for the congressman, when in fact they were signing for the other Jesse L. Jackson, then this entire incident will move out of the category of political prank, and into the rather more serious category of political fraud, a criminal offense. The Shaw brothers could end up out of office, or far worse. Rabbit hunting is fun until the rabbit gets the gun. And so what happens when you come up against another big bear in politics, who has the resources and the capability of pursuing it to the nth degree of the law, and starts demanding justice? And I saw the same Eddie Murphy movie that they saw, and I'm determined not to let it happen in our district. The Eddie Murphy movie being? The Distinguished Gentleman. A gentleman who gets elected to Congress by the name of Jefferson Johnson. After the congressman dies-- his name is Jeff Johnson-- he runs for Congress, and he gets elected. He's a felon, by the way. You think that actually they saw the movie? I'm pretty sure someone saw it. And I think what's also becoming clear is that many people forgot how the movie ended, and that is that some people went to jail. After several weeks on the ballot, Jesse L. Jackson of Robbins dropped out of the race after his wife died. In the March primary, the congressman took 85% of the vote. Hearings, depositions, and testimony continue to wind their way through the courts. I was 20 years old when Arizona was born. I thought I could just put her in a little suitcase, and that would be her bed. I figured now that I had given birth, the hard part was over. I moved into a big building over a laundromat, where they didn't ask for any references. People left their apartment doors open and waved to you from their couches when you walked down the hall. The apartment was our own cozy little universe of porcelain dolls, posters of Hong Kong, and tiny, colorful paper umbrellas. It was a universe of two plates, two cups, and two toothbrushes, until I met Johnny. I was introduced to Heather by some friends over drinks. I was impressed by how fast she drank her beer. And she was impressed by the fact that there was only one arm on my eyeglasses. From the side, you look like a cartoon doctor, she said. She looked like she was from some bygone era, where women worked with their hair tied up in kerchiefs on assembly lines, to help the war effort. By all of this, I mean to say that I was smitten by her. I knew that Heather had a little girl. And I also knew that I wasn't very good with children. Ironically, my job at the time was teaching after-school magic classes to kids in elementary schools. I wasn't that great a magician to begin with, and kids made me nervous. My hands were always sweaty, and I was always dropping coins all over the place. One time, I was really losing the attention of a classroom of sixth graders while teaching them the jumping rubber band. So I told them that if they listened quietly, at the end of the class, I would walk through a wall. Immediately, they all shut up. At the end of the class, I took about two full minutes where I just stared at the wall at the back of the classroom. If any of them said a word, I would reprimand them for breaking my concentration and start all over again. Finally, I slowly started walking towards the wall. The way the kids were looking at me, all open-mouthed and expectant, I almost felt like I could actually pull this off. When I smacked into the wall, I turned to them and said, "You didn't really think I could walk through a wall, did you?" They all looked at the wall, then they looked at me. Then slowly, reluctantly, they all shook their heads no. I hoped I would have better luck with Heather's daughter. Over drinks, I had told Johnny that Arizona had shoved our TV set off the coffee table. And now-- surprise, surprise-- here he was, carefully winding his way up the staircase to our house, with an old RCA in his arms, the old-fashioned antenna still attached and dragging behind him on the floor. When he came in, Arizona was over at the neighbors', a Greek family who liked to give her a good bath every now and then. It was a family event for them, with shish kabobs, and an uncle who played accordion on the closed lid of the toilet. As me and Johnny sat on the couch, Arizona walked into the apartment, freshly scrubbed, smelling of baby powder and Greek food, with four bows in her hair. Johnny kept clapping his hands together and going on about how she looked just like Shirley Temple. She stopped dead in her tracks and gave me a confused look. Before he left, he asked me if I wanted to come to his house for dinner that weekend, and I said, sure. I called my sister and asked if she would babysit. She begged me not to have another boyfriend. In other words, no babysitting. So I took Arizona along on my date with Johnny. I stood on my front steps waiting for her to get there. And when I saw her coming down the street, pushing a stroller, I wondered if I had any juice in the house. We sat down at my kitchen table, and I brought out a big pot of curried vegetables and rice. Arizona climbed up on the table, opened the lid, and wrinkled her nose. I picked her up and put her back down in her chair. But as soon as I did, she would get right back up and roll around all over the plate, most of the time while pointing at me with an angry look on her face. She wasn't like Shirley Temple at all. She was like the Muppet Baby Joe Pesci. After dinner, Johnny walked into his living room and saw the word "Arizona" written in pen with a backwards R on his desk. At first, I was sort of delighted. It was the first time she had ever written her name without me coaching her. But I kind of felt for Johnny, whose apartment was all full of neatly arranged furniture and superhero figurines that stayed exactly where they had been placed. Johnny walked around the apartment with his head down and an expression on his face like he was a seven-year-old reviewing times tables in his head. He tried to ease into our lives with grace. After the first time he slept over, he got up in the morning, before Arizona woke. He put on his jacket and went outside into the hallway and knocked on the front door, pretending he had just arrived. "We don't want to damage the child's psyche," Johnny said. Arizona's bedroom was closest to the front door, so she got up and let him in. "Hi," he said. "I was just in the neighborhood." He walked in without shoes and his belt undone. He dropped onto the couch and fell back asleep. Arizona looked at him. "Why do you even come by," she said angrily, "if all you're going to do is go to sleep." Johnny and I had very different ideas about the environment in which one should raise a kid. "The stove needs to be fixed," he complained. "You can't cook meals over a hot plate. Ratso Rizzo cooks meals over a hot plate. And who, in God's name, puts laundry out on the line at midnight?" "Children need discipline. They like it," was a favorite banner of project Goldstein. Heather called all of my domestic tips "bourgeois." "How is cleaning the crisper bourgeois?" I asked. "How in the world is keeping your child from running naked through the halls of the apartment building wearing my boots a symptom of the bourgeoisie?" Arizona could tell that Johnny was trying to change things, and everything between them became a battle of wills. She would reach over and squeeze the Indiglo button on his watch. And he would chastise her, telling her that Indiglo was used only in emergency situations, like if you were in a blackout, or stuck in a cave. But as soon as his head was turned, she pushed the button again. In what I considered a bit of cultural exchange, I had her sit on the couch and listen to the soundtrack from Fiddler on the Roof. Arizona, all of six years old, turned to me in the middle of "If I Was a Rich Man" and said, "That's what you do all day long. You biddy biddy bum." She paused for a moment, and then, just to make sure the point wasn't being lost on me, she added, "That means you're lazy." When the three of us walked down the street, Arizona would say, "My mom's shadow is longer than yours. That means you're short." She was starting to like him less and less. One day, he made her list all the people that she loved most in order. "And who do you love next best?" he would ask, hopefully. "And the next? And the next?" He came in at number 19. He actually ranked below the neighbor's dog, and the plumber who drank two-gallon bottles of Pepsi while he worked, and let Arizona hand him wrenches. Every time I tried to kiss Arizona, she would pull back, insisting that my beard was too scratchy. It got so that I was shaving twice a day. But still, she would wave me off. I would stand in front of the mirror like an obsessive compulsive, desperately scraping the blade across my cheeks, the word "scratchy" ringing in my head like the raven's nevermore. One time, we had some friends over at Heather's, and someone started playing the guitar, and Arizona started to dance. It struck me as one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Everyone stood around and clapped their hands while Arizona spun around with her arms over her head. Before I knew it, I was walking over and taking her hands to dance with her. I wasn't the type to dance with kids, or to even dance at all, for that matter. But I just couldn't help myself. When I touched her, she whipped her hands away and stopped cold. I retreated back to my seat as the music continued to play. All the while, Arizona stared me down like her prison bitch. He tried buying her love with really inappropriate gifts, things that he liked that he thought she might learn to like. He bought them matching wallets and a mood ring that wouldn't fit her for at least another five years. He got her a pop-up book of nightmare analysis that included a chapter on giving birth to aliens. In the best of times, she treated him as something that made me happy, and she quietly tolerated him, like the way she sat through a Hitchcock documentary at the museum. But then sometimes, she would just explode. One day at Burger King, he refused to let me bring her hamburger back to the counter for a third time to ask for even more pickles. And she started screaming. She pounded the hamburger with her fists. "I can't stand him," she said. "Why did we have to go out with him today? Tell me why." "He's my friend," I said, "and you have to pretend to like him." She had a little friend who would come over and bite his own toes while they watched TV, and I never said a thing. I figured it was the least she could do for me. One day, I was trying to finish my dad's income tax, and Arizona was bored. She was whacking the wind chimes with the broom. She was all out of ideas when Johnny asked her if she wanted to take a walk with him. She sighed and got her jacket. Before they left, he explained that the plan was to walk to a bank to cash his check, and then find a barber that would cut his hair for a reasonable price. We were walking along when Arizona came to an abrupt stop, and so I stopped, too. She looked up at me, and in this tone that I had never heard her use before, she said, "This isn't what you do to have a good time." It was like she had summoned up every little bit of maturity she had, and some she didn't even have. And she used her words to let me know something that she felt was really important for me to know, that I just wasn't any fun. And she told it to me in this way that was like, maybe it just wasn't something I knew, and that maybe I just had to be told, and then everything would be OK. Like maybe it could all be that easy. We went back to the apartment and got our bathing suits. Arizona wanted to go to the beach. Arizona treated me like I had never been to a beach before. "This is sand," she said, "and people like to dig in it. Beside the sand is the water, but it's not the drinking kind." She treated me like she was nursing me back to health. For my part, I tried my best to live up to what a six-year-old's vision of fun would be. I bought every single thing the vendors had to offer. I even got us these overcooked, mushy corn cobs on a stick that were smothered in butter and mayonnaise. Mayonnaise. And when she went into the water past her knees, I bit my fist and kept my panic to myself. At the end of the day, Arizona persuaded me to buy a watermelon that some men were selling off the back of a truck. As we rode the bus back home, tired, looking out the windows in silence, Arizona suddenly turned to me and said, "Why did I ever marry you?" I sat there, completely tongue-tied on so many levels. "Tell me why," she demanded, over and over, getting louder and louder, until the six or seven people on the bus turned to hear how I was going to defend myself. "Why did I ever marry you?" All the way home, the question just sat there, big and awkward, like the watermelon on my lap that we would have for dessert that night. Around that time, Johnny and Arizona invented this game where they pretend to be two old-time vaudeville partners who can't get along. She is always the wiser, burnt-out one. And he is always the mincing boot lick who wants to please the producers and the audience. They pretend they're backstage, yelling at each other, as the audience hollers for them to come out. "Let's get out there," Johnny yells. "They're waiting for us. They paid a lot of money for those seats. We'll be sued, damn it. We'll be finished in this town." "This is my last show," Arizona says every time, shaking her weary head, "and then I'm through. I can't do this anymore." They come out into the hallway nervously. They stand in front of the record player, Arizona on top of a Webster's dictionary, to be taller. Johnny starts singing "A Bicycle Built for Two." And Arizona is supposed to be the bicycle bell and sing "Ding, ding." But she doesn't. Johnny starts the song over again. Still Arizona ignores her cue, staring blankly ahead in the throes of a showbiz meltdown. The audience starts throwing tomatoes, and Arizona ducks behind Johnny. He holds out his arms to protect her from the crowd. She crouches in back of him, laughing her head off, as the angry mob covers him from head to toe in imaginary rotten fruit. Heather O'Neill is the author of Two Eyes Are You Sleeping, a book of poetry. Jonathan Goldstein is one of the producers of our program, and the author of the funny and surprising novel Lenny Bruce is Dead. 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 Maria Schell. Don't forget, videos of Aaron, and Munga, and Davy on the website this week, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who describes what it was like the first few years hearing us talk about him like we do at the end of our program. I think one way to characterize it would be, just to show how tough it was, it was-- [SCREAMING] Torey [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. 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. One day, when I was 14, coming home from junior high school, I saw my across-the-street neighbor, [? Mark Nasdor, ?] and he was riding his 10-speed down this big hill near our school. I was near the bottom of the hill. And I had one of those-- you know those three-ring binders that you use when you're in school, those loose leaf binders? I had one of those, with all my school papers in it. And as [? Mark Nasdor ?] sped down the sidewalk of this very steep hill, I got this idea. And to explain this, I need you to picture for a second what a loose leaf binder looks like when you lay it on the ground. it looks like a little ramp, right, with the highest point of the ramp being the fatter side, the side with the rings. And I thought, I could throw my loose leaf notebook in front of Mark's moving bicycle, positioning it perfectly so his wheels would roll up the ramp. And it would serve as a ramp. He would fly in the air like Evel Knievel. Now, I want to say [UNINTELLIGIBLE] about speed. This idea popped into my head. And then in a second, too fast to actually think this through-- if there were time to think about this, I don't think I would have done it-- the idea pops into my head, and then there is [? Mark Nasdor, ?] moving fast down this hill. And I threw the binder in front of him. Now, in case you're wondering what the actual aerodynamics are when a moving bicycle meets a junior high school binder, and how high the bike flies, and how far it goes, I can tell you, because I was there, I saw this. What happens to a bicycle in this situation is it flips on its side at a very high speed, throwing the bicyclist off and bruising the bicyclist. The bicyclist then gets up, curses at you, and asks this question, "Why did you do that?" It's a good question. It's a really good question. And I had no answer at the time. I do now, because I heard some things lately that shed some light. I was seven years old when this happened. All of my life, my family would go to this campground for the whole summer. This is Wendy. In this campground, all of the teen-- my sister was a teenager at the time. She was 17 at the time. All the teenagers at this campground, on Friday nights, before they would go out, they would go up to this place, this barn. It had video games in it, and there was a little place where you could buy penny candy. And one of these Friday nights, I went with my sister up to the barn. And she had this one friend. And I don't remember her name, but I remember what she looked like. I remember she had this blonde, feathered hair. And she was really pretty. And she had eye shadow and makeup on, and that was kind of fascinating to me. And she was wearing this orange jumpsuit. And it had the zipper down the front. And it was really-- it just stood out to me. And at some point, I went over, and I was talking to her. And I don't know why I did it. But I just, I had this impulse. And I just said to her, "Close your eyes." And she did. And when she closed her eyes, I reached out, and I grabbed the zipper. And I unzipped her jumpsuit all the way down to the belly button. And when I did that, her breasts popped out of the jumpsuit. And I don't know what I was expecting, but I didn't expect them to pop out like they did. She wasn't wearing a bra or anything. And she screamed. And she was completely freaked out. And I just ran away. I just ran. I ran back to the camper. Her sister was furious. Her parents were furious. And they kept asking her, over and over, one simple question. Why would you do such a thing? Why would you do this? And I remember crying and saying, I don't know why I did it. I don't know why I did it. I don't know why I did it. And they kept pushing me, like, why would you do this? Why would you do this? And I had no idea. But I remember being really tortured by it afterwards, thinking, why would I do it? Why did I do that? That doesn't make any sense. Most of us have an idea of what the devil's supposed to be like, red skin, horns, a tail. Sometimes he disguises himself as a dapper gentleman. Often, he loves to sing. And the way that he actually gets you into hell, in the movies, and in operas, and stuff, is that he actually shows up in person. He makes a personal appearance with you, and he tries to talk you into it. He tempts you with stuff that you want. Well, there's a way more interesting version of the devil out there in this book by C. S. Lewis called The Screwtape Letters. And the idea of the book is that it's a series of letters from this older, very experienced demon named Screwtape to a much younger demon. And he's giving him advice. And at one point, Screwtape says to the younger demon, if you want to commit somebody's soul to hell for eternity, don't try to reason with them. You don't want to be arguing with somebody about what's good for them or bad for them, because you could lose an argument. What's better, what works way, way better, is to simply banish reason from the room. Screwtape tells this story to the young demon about this atheist who one day is in the library. And in the library, the atheist starts mulling over some godly thoughts, very threatening for Screwtape. But rather than engage this guy in an argument over God and goodness and all that sort of stuff, Screwtape simply plants the thought in his head, "It's time for lunch." The guy heads outside. The battle's won. If you want to lead people into darkness, you don't want reason to even come into play. I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. This is Dave. One night, he was walking home late from campus down a quiet street, an ordinary night. All of a sudden, I saw a car approaching several blocks away. And it occurred to me that what I should do would be to kneel in the street and be hit by the car. It seemed to make perfect sense to me. And so that's what I did. Wait, you actually went out into the street, and you knelt? Yes, in the street. And I waited for the car to run over me. What happened? Well, the car drove up, screeched to a stop just in front of me. An older man jumped out of the car and demanded to know what I was doing. A very good question, I should say. Well, and I didn't know. I looked at him, and I said, I don't know. I had no idea. I had no explanation for him. Now, up until that moment that you made the decision, had you been kind of depressed? No, I had not. I had never, ever considered suicide. I don't remember being sad, depressed, scared. The thought simply occurred to me. It came out of nowhere. It was a blip. I still today-- what, 25 years later-- don't understand what that was and why I did that. Sometimes these stories are about big, life-changing things, sometimes about the tiniest things. [? Jonifer ?] was sitting on her couch in Madison, Wisconsin, as her neighbors from across the street walked by outside. Now, ?] I don't know them. They've never said anything. I don't know their names or anything. I turned my head, and I just screamed out the window, "Pigs!" And when I realized what I had done, I couldn't think of why I'd done it. Lisa had just learned the Heimlich maneuver from a pamphlet, and was visiting her boyfriend. I just went up behind him. And he probably thought I was going to give him a hug. But I just did the whole Heimlich maneuver on him, although he was not choking. He must have asked, why'd you do that, right? Yeah. Well, he screamed, because it hurts. And he was just confounded. And I had no answer. It's hard to believe that there are demons and devils urging us to do wrong. But how many of us have done something bad or wrong or just random, totally random, and have no good explanation for it at all? Well, today on our program, with Halloween approaching, the Devil on Your Shoulder, stories of people who are trying to convince you that the devil is there, and stories of people trying to deny that he's there, against, I have to say in these cases, some heavy evidence. Act One of our show, It's Fun to Make Hell on Earth. In that act, the story of a Christian youth group in Texas that, for three weeks every year, acts out the worst, the meanest, the most despicable behavior possible, all in the name of saving people from hell. Act Two, Sixteen Candles Can Lead to a Lot of Fire. A young Amish man explains why it is that, after being set free to drink and drive and party at the age of 16, most of his friends choose to go back to the church and back to the Amish lifestyle. Act Three, Devil in Angel's Clothing, or Is It the Other Way Around? the story of a man who did something terrible as a teenager, and then tried to pretend that it never happened for 20 years, and then tried to do something about it, or people tell him he tried to do something about it. He can't remember himself. Stay with us. I showed up at Hell House with my cinematographer friend, Jawad Metni. We were herded around the place with a group of 40 teenagers clinging to each other and laughing nervously. A large man dressed in a black hooded robe and a skeleton mask was assigned to our group as our tour guide. There's a lot of people here. You're going to step as much to the front of the line as you can. Follow me. We'd line up against the back wall of the Columbine School scene, which is basically just a room with a card table stacked with books and a few school desks scattered around. Among a dozen or so student actors, two squeaky clean church girls sit at the card table, talking. Behind them, an angry demon, also dressed in a black robe and mask, paces back and forth, wringing his hands. Man, I hate this Shakespeare stuff. Are you having a hard time with that? I don't know-- Their conversation about Shakespeare turns to Carrie's recent conversion to Christianity. She says she used to hate her parents and especially hated God. "I'm a Christian now," she says. "That's why I'm always so happy." Yeah, I'm a Christian now. That's why I'm so happy. Well, let's see how happy you are now. Two teenage boys in black trench coats explode into the room, followed by another demon. To my surprise, the boys are waving real handguns and real shotguns as they charge through the scene, kicking over tables and chairs. The whole scene is so violent that you forget about everything that reminds you of a bad high school play. And what makes it scary is the look of real teen angst on the shooters' faces as they cock and aim their guns at the heads of all the cowering students. You can see how they love waving around their firearms. And part of what's so shocking is you wonder, who are the good churchgoing adults who came up with this idea and helped the kids finance and organize and stage this? Remember, we're filming just six months after the real Columbine killings. One of the trench coat boys grabs Carrie, the Christian girl, by the hair. Do you believe in God? Yes. I said, do you believe in God? Yes, I believe in God. Why? After the boys shoot Carrie in the head, the demons perform their final task, egging the boys on to kill themselves. Then, the lights turn to strobes, the music swells, and a teenager in a white choir robe enters. It's Jesus. He's come for Carrie, the Christian girl. The shooters are dragged off to hell, kicking and screaming, and pleading to Jesus for a second chance. But he doesn't give it. Please come back! Then, our tour guide reappears. He shuffles us off to the next room, the family violence scene, as another group of 40 shuffle in. Two days later, Jawad and I went home to New York and watched what we'd filmed. We were both a bit shaken up by what we had seen. I grew up in Amarillo, Texas, where one of the only ways to meet girls was to go to Christian youth meetings. And there were so many. There was Young Life and K-Life and Campus Crusade and Fellowship of Christian Athletes, not to mention that every one of the hundreds of churches had their own youth groups, hustling out to schools to compete for an ever-decreasing number of unsaved souls. I honestly thought I had heard every evangelical Christian trick in the book. But Hell House was different. The special effects, and the music, and the real guns, and the crowds and crowds of people lined up to get in, I'd never seen anything like it. So in August of 2000, we went back to Cedar Hill. There's 30 people in the room, and you are in hell. And you're burning. So let's have some [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Two months before Hell House opens each year, they have auditions at the church. The casting directors sit at a long table in front of a stage. One after another, nervous kids read for the drug dealer, the satanic worshipper, the school shooter, or the abusive father. It's your own fault. And what if you were pregnant? Do you really want to be your own sister's mother? The girls all want to be the suicide girl or the abortion girl, because those are the roles where you get to scream and cry and emote the most. I should have gotten away from you the second that you started drinking. This is all your fault. Oh, wow. That was phenomenal. Nearly everyone wants to play a sinner. Nobody wants to play a saint. Not one person auditioned to play Jesus or an angel role. Maybe it's just more fun to be evil on stage than good. Maybe playing a churchgoing, god-fearing Christian is just not that interesting if you are a churchgoing, god-fearing Christian. The organizers usually have to go out and recruit some hapless kids to play the good Christian roles. Every day for six weeks, as many as 75 volunteers will show up to help build Hell House. It's an enormous construction site that they have to tear down and rebuild every year. There are people everywhere carrying wood, swinging hammers, and painting signs. An enthusiastic volunteer named Thad Trober took us on a quick tour during construction. We'll come back in here. The crucifixion is going to be right here. Coffins are going in right here. And the people who are watching are going to be looking right down in, seeing people trapped, and give them a sense of entrapment themselves. I really want to emphasize that more than anything in here, like there's absolutely no escape. And then we arrive at the room that's Thad's baby. This is the rave-slash-suicide scene. Thad, who wears a goatee and techno clothes, has seen what goes on in raves firsthand, the sex, the drugs, the alcohol, back in the old days, before he was a Christian. Thad told us that he'd only gone to raves to hear the music. But then it became too hard for him to ignore what was going on around him. So he had to stop raving. But now, every October, Thad gets to create his own rave at Hell House. It's going to look pretty cool. Just like all the other scenes, we're going to have some plastic down each wall. But there will be a DJ, which I've played the last couple years. We'll have a makeshift turntable area. I don't know if I'll use these lights yet. I'll probably stick some black lights up, and that'll be great. And I'm actually thinking about renting a water tank. And I'll have someone underwater dance. There's something neat every year. It's not within the nature of man to lose. God created us to win. Before Hell House opens in early October, Tim Ferguson brings everyone together for a pep talk. Tim has an intensity about him that reminds you more of a football coach than a minister. He squeezes the microphone and stares at a roomful of church kids. Behind him, three young men are noodling backup music on their electric guitars. And there's a war, and there's a battle, and there's a competition. And there's a serious game where life and death is at stake. It's not just you lose and you go home. We're competing for lost souls. And we're going to win. We're in this to win. We're not in this just to go through it, just for something else to do. I don't need something else to do. OK? And just when everyone's getting really worked up, they start speaking in tongues. Trinity Church is an Assembly of God church, which is a branch of the Pentecostals. Pentecostals are known as the church that speaks in tongues, and they're the fastest-growing Christian church in the world. They started less than 100 years ago in Los Angeles. And they've always been able to put on a good production for large audiences. They were the first church to use electric guitars, one of the first to break into TV evangelism, and the first to think up Hell House. Hundreds of teenagers are lined up to go into Hell House. It's a pretty diverse crowd, large groups of Hispanic and African-American kids mixed in with the suburban white crowd, all paying $7 each for a ticket. It looks to be the same demographic as at Six Flags. But in fact, most of these kids have been bused here by youth leaders from the area. Once they get inside, they see kids committing suicide, being killed by drunk drivers, and being sacrificed to the devil. In the hospital scene, the abortion girl sits in a pool of fake blood. She's wearing white sweat pants, and her crotch is completely soaked in red. Next to her, a gay teenager dies over and over from AIDS. He dies every 7 to 10 minutes, every night, for three weeks straight. This is Steve. He thought his homosexual lifestyle was everything a real man could want. But now, he's dying of AIDS. Steve, I'm right here. I'm not going to leave. Why does this happen to me? Why can't it just be over? Outside the house, in an area visitors don't have access to, I ran into a group of performers that had just knocked off from their shift at being tortured in hell. It's obvious they've been having a good time. I asked them what was the most fun scene in Hell House. School shooting. Yeah, school shooting's the best. No, it's not. Yes it is. It's the rave. The rave scene's the best, because you get to dance. Hey, what's up? What's your name? I'm Jessica. Jessica, I'm Chad. Even though you get to dance, the rave scene does not end well. The girl in it sips her spiked drink, freaks out, gets gang-raped, and ends up killing herself, after admitting that her dad had molested her as a child. How do you like it? Whoo. Good stuff, isn't it? So once a group of visitors makes it all the way through the gory scenes, they come to what is called the "decision room." How y'all doing? Can I get you to line up over here, please? Yeah, straight line as possible. OK, as you saw in each scene, someone died. They went to either heaven or hell. If you were to die tonight, do you know where you will go? Or do you think that you know? If this is you, I want to ask you to step through the door. There are people in the next room waiting to pray with you now. You've got six seconds. Five seconds. Of the 40 people in this group, about 10 go to pray with the counselors. The 30 others are held back a minute, and then they're marched to the exit. But it turns out that the damned have to exit through the same door as the saved. There's only one exit, and it's on the other side of the room of crying and praying Christians and counselors. The 30 shuffle through guiltily, with their heads down, trying not to catch anyone's eye. Do you believe in God? About 13,000 people went through Hell House this year alone. Trinity Church claims that as many as one out of five people that go through Hell House become Christians or recommit themselves to the church. When we die, we can go to heaven and be with Jesus. It's so awesome. It's radical, yeah. If you ask the teenagers at Hell House straight up if they have fun pretending to shoot their classmates or do drugs at a rave, they're all good Christian kids and know better than to admit that they enjoyed themselves. "Our goal is to save souls and make money for the church," they'll tell you. And they'll mean it. But Hell House is the biggest event of the year for Trinity Church. After three weeks of performances, after Halloween comes and goes, the kids all get dressed up to the nines for an event that is the equivalent of prom night for them. They call it the Hell House Oscars. On stage at a podium, in front of a table of Oscar-like trophies, presenters banter and give awards for best tour guide, best abortion girl, best drunk driver, best gremlin, and best archangel. Remember, three to six teenagers play each part in the house. This year's suicide award goes to Liz Simmons! Come on out. Liz Simmons, in a floor-length gown, pluckily hops out of her seat, hugging friends, waving to photographers, and makes her way to the stage. Well, I couldn't have done it without my rapers, so thank you, Brent and David. And I just want to say, it was really an honor to do this part. At first, I was real uncomfortable with it, you know, when I heard that I was going to have to be raped. And I was like, OK, what's that going to be like? But it ended up being a lot of fun, and-- OK, wait, I didn't say that right. No, I just really got to meet a lot of people that I didn't know, and I had a-- OK, this is only getting worse. She lifts her fake Oscar and walks off stage. In the dozen years since Trinity Church invented Hell House, the idea has spread all over the country. No one knows how many Hell Houses are out there now, but a church in Colorado has sold over 500 Hell House franchise kits with layout designs, scripts, and a video, for $200 each. Let's give a big hand to Mr. Jonathan Parker, the winner of the school violence director's award. These church kids aren't supposed to drink. They aren't supposed to party or sleep together. But tonight, they glitter like sinners. Unlike the real Oscars, no one complains that this ceremony lasts too long. I had a great time with all of my suicide girls. I got to act with every single one of you almost every night. George Ratliff, you can find his movie Hell House online at hellhousemovie.com. The church George mentions in Colorado has now sold over 800 Hell House starter kits to churches in every state and in 24 countries, as well as to secular theater companies in New York and Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, Bill Maher played the devil. Act Two, Sixteen Candles Can Lead to a Lot of Fire. Faron Yoder lives in Amish country, in Indiana. And I interviewed him from his parents' house, where he lives. For this to happen, somebody had to go there with a cell phone. And he talked to me from his room. I was in our radio studio. Faron lives differently from everybody in his family. And his room is different from the rest of the house. The rest of the house is very Amish. Well, the whole house is actually very Amish, no electricity, gas lighting. In my room, I've got a TV. I've got a stereo. I've got a PlayStation 2. A lot of my friends come over here. We play PlayStation and just hang out, drink beer. How do you have electricity if the rest of the house doesn't? Well, actually, I've got an electrical cord. This is kind of funny, probably. But I've got an electrical cord that runs up to my TV and to everything. And then I've got it going out my window. And I run the cord out to my car. And so I just go out , start up the car, and plug in the electrical cord. And I spend the whole night up here and don't have to worry about it. We heard about Faron through a movie called Devil's Playground, which is about the Amish rite of rumspringa. Rumspringa has been in the news a bit lately, partly, I think, because all of us regular Americans like stories where the Amish sink as low as we do. In case you've never heard of it, rumspringa works like this. At 16, Amish teenagers are told they can drive, they can drink, they can use modern electronics. They can try all the things the outside world has to offer. And then, after a few years, at 19 or 20 or 21, they will be in a position to decide what they want to do with their lives. If they want to live like regular Americans, they are free to go. If they want to commit to the church and the Amish way of life, they get baptized. And they're expected to stay in the Amish community until they die. In short, they're asked to make a decision that most of us make gradually every day about how we're going to live our lives in these few years, when they're teenagers. Faron is 21, and after his rumspringa, he has not chosen the church. During that time, as the film Devil's Playground shows, he got into a lot of trouble. Not only did he develop a $100-a-day crystal meth habit, he sold drugs. He got in trouble with the law. Right now, he's facing 14 months in prison for all that. He says that before he turned 16, back before his rumspringa began, he had a whole list of things that he knew he wanted to do. I wanted, well, pretty much everything. I just wanted to be a normal kid and have a normal life. Everybody else was coming to school with Walkmans and going home and playing PlayStation. It was just everything, from going shopping to just-- I was envious of everything that everybody else had. When you're sheltered all your life, you consider pretty much everybody else as, "Aw, man. They're lucky as hell, because they've got all this stuff." And I just wanted to have that. I wanted to be that. What was the first thing you did on the first day after you turned 16, and you had the freedom to do what you wanted? On the first day, I went and got rid of my Amish haircut, went and got rid of my Amish clothes, bought regular clothes. And it was a Friday or Saturday night. It was on a weekend. And I got drunk and just, I thought I was the coolest thing in the world. One of the teenage girls in the movie, Velda, says, "God talks to me in one ear, Satan in the other. Part of me wants to be like my parents, but the other part wants the jeans, the haircut, to do what I want." Is that your experience, too? Or was it your experience, this feeling of, OK, God's in one ear, and Satan is in the other? Well, actually, I ignored God for a long time. And for a long time, I told everybody that I was atheist. I think I've really searched a lot and struggled to listen to God. And was there any part of you where you were afraid that if you didn't return to the Amish lifestyle, that you would be punished, that you would go to hell? Yeah, definitely. There was always that fear. And there still is sometimes. I guess not anymore, but there used to be, until just lately. It was always at the back of my mind, always nagging me. There was this fear that, hey, you're going to hell, because you're not living a Christian life, and you're not Amish. I don't know. It was just, I don't feel that one has to be Amish to get into heaven, of course, but I feel that that is probably the easiest way, or one of the easiest ways to attain that. Do you think hell exists? According to the Bible, yes. And do you believe it? I don't know exactly what I believe right now. We're doing another story in this week's radio show about these teenagers outside Dallas. And there's a church youth group that they're part of that does something called a Hell House, where every Halloween, they stage all the ways that somebody can end up in hell. And the idea is to scare people so bad, and young people especially, that they'll never try anything. They'll never try to drink. They'll never try to do drugs. They'll never try to do anything bad. And the idea of this church group is that that will bring teenagers to God. And you were raised with exactly the opposite philosophy, where, once you become a teenager, the church elders are saying to you, "OK, go out. Try everything, and then you'll discover actually choosing God is the right choice." Which do you think might be better? I think the Amish approach is definitely better. Whereas in the Hell House there, I feel that you should be scared of God, yes, but that shouldn't be the reason that you follow Jesus. One should make that choice because he wants to and he feels that that's the best way to live, not just because, oh, I'll go to hell if I don't. Do you think it's an advantage to their way to try to protect their kids? I think there are people all over this country who are trying to protect their kids from all the bad things that your elders sort of pushed you towards, partying, and you know. I don't know. But just my own opinion, I think it will do more harm than good. Why? Well, just for myself, if somebody tells me, "Hey, you can't do this, or you're going to get punished," I'm going to say, "Watch me get away with it." I wondered, are the church elders in your church counting on the fact that, when you go out and you see what the rest of the world is like, it won't seem so great? Well, yeah, I think that's kind of the point. Because you get out, and you see that there are so many unhappy people in the world. And I'm not saying that there aren't any unhappy Amish people. But still, I think the larger percentage of Amish people, really happy and content with what they have, even if they don't have that much. I think in the film it says something, about 85% of Amish kids go back to the Amish way of life. 90%, they said. 90%. OK. Most people go back. Because really, the Amish way of life is an attractive lifestyle. You don't have all the modern things, or whatever, but as far as peace, tranquility, and have a calm life, it's beautiful. 90% of the people go back. And so how are you different? Well, I got into drugs. And I, well, just to tell the truth, I lost most of my Amish friends, and had to go out and find others. Yeah. Oh, I see. So you actually had to make a life outside of the Amish community. So then it was easier just to stay out. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Once you have a life outside the Amish community, it's kind of hard to get back in. How are you doing? Are you as happy, do you think, as your friends who went back to the Amish way of life? I think so. I'm-- I don't know. I always have a-- I don't know about happy. I'm just more relaxed now. And do you have moments where you actually find yourself still wondering, "Oh, I wonder if I would have been better off if I had gone back"? Yeah, yeah, I do. Not very often, but there are times. I wonder where I'd be, or who I'd be, if I would have made the choice just to stay Amish and be this responsible young man. Faron Yoder, the film he's in is called Devil's Playground. You can find copies of it online. Coming up, if you do good, but you do not remember it, and maybe you did not even intend to do good in the first place, does it count? 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, Devil on My Shoulder, stories of people who believe that the Devil is talking in their ear, and of people who deny that, despite massive evidence to the contrary. We have arrived at Act Three of our program, Act Three, Devil in Angel's Clothing, Or Is It the Other Way Around? This is the story of what it means to have a conscience. A man kills another man on the street and then tries to pretend that it never happened for 20 years. And it's a story about what that does to him. Sarah Koenig reports from Baltimore. Sterling Randolph Willis told me his story over the phone from prison. As you'll hear, the phone line is terrible, but it was the only way to get him on tape. The prison doesn't allow recording equipment inside the facility. When he was 17 years old, Randy lived with his mother and did construction work. He'd been kicked out of school for fighting. He was tall and quiet. And like a lot of kids from his neighborhood, he carried a serious knife. His girlfriend, who was 16, lived miles across town, and Randy liked to walk to her house, rather than take the bus or a cab. It gave him time to be alone, he says, and to think about things. He was on his way there on Christmas night in 1982. He cut through a back way in the dark and stopped at some bushes to pee. I saw this guy coming towards me. And I was like, "What do you want?" And he was mumbling something. I didn't know what he was saying. And I saw him rubbing on the front of his pants. And I tell him, "Stop, back away from me." And he's still coming towards me. And he's mumbling and giggling. He's looking like, "Aha, I got one." That scared me a bit. And when he came close to me again, I hit him. And when I hit him, he fell back. That's when I jumped on him. And that's when I stabbed him. He didn't know whether the guy was dead or alive. He just took off running to his girlfriend's house. I went in the back doorway, because I knew that my girlfriend would be in the kitchen waiting for me to get there. Because she really wasn't a party person, either. I had a little blood on me. I washed it off. And I was really shooken up. It took about a half an hour before I could tell her what happened. And she thought I was joking around at first. Randy had killed Arnette Hubbard, a 44-year-old man who had no fixed address. Police had a hard time notifying his relatives. His wallet revealed to detectives that he was a military veteran. Did the detectives ever question you, or question anyone you had told? They didn't question me, because I didn't live around there. I didn't go back around there for a little while. I was really, really scared. You could see it in my face that I was pretty much terrified. I didn't want the police looking at me like "Oh, look at him, he [UNINTELLIGIBLE] guilty." Because a couple of questions, and I would have been like putty in their hands. Eventually, Hubbard's murder fell into the department's cold case files. In that sense, Randy had gotten away with it. But in his mind, he carried the stabbing with him. Different times throughout my life, over the years, I've had nightmares about it. One time, he pulled me in the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] in my dream. And he was shaking me, laughing real hard. And I woke up screaming out of my sleep. And sometimes, I would see it happen all over again, like on the wall, just like a film projector, like a dream, only wide awake. Randy felt guilty about what happened, and says that if he had to do it over again, he wouldn't have killed Arnette Hubbard. But he didn't feel that guilty. He was molested as a child, he says, and he thinks the guy he killed was a pervert waiting for a victim. What if someone else had taken that shortcut, a girl who couldn't protect herself, say? After the stabbing, Randy tried to get on with his life. He and his girlfriend got married. He worked at different jobs, and they started having children. But he was still tormented by that night. He would break out crying sometimes. He was terrified people would find out what he had done. The scene would play over and over in his mind. He went to psychiatrists, who gave him medication, but he never confessed the source of his anxiety. Pretty soon, he started taking harder drugs, mostly heroin. When I told my wife about it, she was disappointed in me. I told her that I was getting high. I needed her help to stop. I just couldn't figure out at that point what move to make in my life. I didn't want to be high. I didn't want the medication. I wanted the dreams to stop, the visions I was having. I wanted that all to just go away. While he was going through all this, his wife was changing. She had found the church and become passionate about it. Randy wasn't interested. I'd usually just basically turn on The Three Stooges on Sunday and sit back and, you know, laughing at the TV. And by that time, my wife was already in church. And she'd just run around the house, "Hallelujah, hallelujah." I thought, to me, this is funny, right? Because I'd never seen this side of her. I thought it was hilarious. I didn't take it seriously until we had a little sit-down about it one day. And I knew she was serious, then, because she was welling up with tears. And I really felt bad. So that made me want to start going, see what this Jesus thing was all about. And the first time I went, I basically didn't stay for the whole service, because it made me feel kind of strange. I wasn't used to being in contact with my emotions like that. And I'm sitting, and I'm feeling my eyes well up with tears, and my heart is bumping kind of fast. I feel butterflies in my stomach. And this is not a feeling that I like. So I left. I waited outside. I didn't tell her the truth about how I felt. The truth was, I just couldn't handle it. I just couldn't sit there through the whole thing. I felt like everything the preacher was saying was stabbing me right in the heart. It was like he was directing it right to me. Do you remember what he was saying? Like, what were the things that he was saying that you felt were directed at you? You know, sin and you're going to hell. And once you come to the Lord, you bring all your kids, and start your life on the path of righteousness. I'm like, "What, did somebody tell him about me or something?" Because every time I turn around, he's saying the stuff, and he's looking right at me. And I'm like, maybe somebody has been talking about me or something. Randy was so bothered by what happened that on his third trip to church, he did something sort of crazy. He actually decided to rob the place during the service. He didn't so much want the money, he said. He just wanted to control the people who were making him feel so strangely. He tucked a gun in the waistband of his pants and waited for the moment he could grab the collection plate. But a deacon figured out Randy's plan and confronted him. He leaned over my head while he was praying. And he was like, "Just give it to me. Give me the gun, son. You're not going to hurt anybody, and nobody knows what you want to do. So I had a warm feeling of emotions flushing over me. And all of a sudden, I started crying and whatnot. My nose is running. I'm falling all out on the floor. When I came to, I didn't have the gun on me anymore. My wife is crying and clapping and whatnot. My kids are looking at me like, "What's the matter with Dad?" That's what really started my walk in the church. He started attending regularly. He opened up services by leading songs, assisted the ministers, and eventually became president of the church's Brotherhood Association. The church even made him lose his craving for drugs, he says. He quit cold, and stayed sober for about eight years. He describes that time as good and clean, among the best years of his life. He started his own landscaping business called Sterling Service. His brother-in-law was one of the church leaders, and they became close. As Randy began to worry about his own salvation, he actually told him and a church deacon about murdering Arnette Hubbard. They said he'd be forgiven, which relieved him. The visions and nightmares eased, and he appeared to be conquering his past. But toward the end of that period, his father died. Then he lost a lot of his landscaping equipment in a fire. Winter came, and his clients fell away. He needed money, so he started selling drugs, and then taking them. Pretty soon, he was addicted to heroin again. I was living a double life, you might say. On one hand, I was going to church, being an assistant to the pastor and security and whatnot. And on the other hand, I was on the street selling cocaine and heroin. And for a while, it worked out, until my wife drove past me one day on the corner. And it was a [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] me. And she saw me, actually. And I didn't see her, but she saw me. The kids saw me. My in-laws saw me. What kind of car were they in? Oh they were in the van. Like, the church van. Yeah. And my brother-in-law was driving, and he had to drive past. And they all saw me. And they saw me with a crowd of people in front of me. And I'm telling them, shut up and get in line and be quiet. I got a bunch of money in one hand, and I got the bag of drugs in the other hand. They drove by and saw me stand there, and I never knew it. His wife threatened to leave him if he didn't clean himself up. I'm reading my morning paper, and I'm seeing circles drawn around houses and whatnot. Like she's looking for houses. Yeah. But I didn't believe her, being together almost 20 years. And basically, I came in the house one day. And everything was gone, except my stuff. My stuff was not packed up. So I go to go around my sister-in-laws, my brother-in-laws, to see if they've seen her, because they lived right around the corner. And my wife was there with a big U-Haul truck in front of the house. And I was like, you could have pushed me over with a spoon, and I'd have fell all out in the street. That's how weak in the knees I felt. Were you selling drugs that day? Yeah, I was. And I had a crowd of people waiting for me, actually. Crowd of people meaning customers. Yeah. And a guy came running up the street, he was like, man, [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. You ain't going to somebody else. I asked my wife, "Won't you let him sit here with you for a minute? I'll be right back. I've got to see about something." And she was like, "Go." And she knew where I was going at that point. She was like, "Go. It doesn't matter. Go ahead." I was like, "now, look, hold this money for me." That was my plan, to get her to hold the money so she couldn't leave. And she was like, "I don't want your money. I don't want anything from you." She was like, "I just want a clean, sober husband." She was like, "You'll be all right. Just do anything, you'll be all right." He ran off to his customers. And when he came back, the U-Haul truck was gone. He asked his brother-in-law if she went to the store or something. He said, no. She had gone to South Carolina. I was crying, and falling [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Because I really loved my wife. And that's really hard. That really messed me up a lot, realizing that she was really going. That took out all the reasons that I had for doing what I was doing. That took it away. I didn't want to sell drugs anymore. I didn't want to get high anymore. And at that time, things just fell apart. Everything just fell apart. Very soon after that, you get arrested. Yeah. Just describe what happened that day. Well, that's what I don't remember, exactly. I remember being bombed out of my skull. I was looking at the court files, reviewing your court file. And I found the statement of probable cause from the police. And I just want to read it to you to see if it sounds familiar. "On 14, June 2000, at 1:40 AM, this officer was in the 4900 block of Cordelia Avenue. We were inside our vehicle. The defendant approached this officer and inquired if he may talk to this officer. This officer responded in the affirmative. At this time, the defendant made a voluntary, uncoerced statement that he would like to turn himself in for possessing the illegal narcotic, cocaine. The defendant further stated that he had this substance in his possession in the right breast pocket of his jacket. The defendant then removed from his right breast jacket pocket 12 blue Ziploc baggies containing white rock substance. The defendant surrendered these items to this officer. At this time, the defendant was placed under arrest. The defendant additionally began to state that he had also committed other serious offenses that he wished to confess." None of that sounds familiar at all. On June 14, 2000, handcuffed to a steel table in an interrogation room, and throwing up into a garbage pail as the heroin left his system, Randy confessed to the murder of Arnette Hubbard. A detective taking notes during the conversation wrote, "Has been selling coke and dope, selling for anyone he could, tired of game. Feels guilty about doing murder." Randy described the killing down to the smallest detail, the checkered shirt Hubbard had been wearing, the knife that was six or seven inches long. He does not remember telling them a word of this. Not long after, in district court, he waited for his case to come up. They call your number and your name to stand up for a particular case. And they called my name. And I stood up. When they said first-degree murder, well, I sat back down. Because I was like, "Oh, no, no, that's not my charge." They said, "Yeah, stand up. It is your charge." I'm like, "No, no. I know I may be a bad drug dealer, but I'm not a murderer or something. What are they talking about?" At what moment did you realize you had been charged with this murder that you'd committed 20 years before? It was when I was in the courtroom. You knew it was that, you knew it was Arnette Hubbard. They said his name, and I still didn't know who it was, because I had never known his name. Randy initially fought the charges, but ended up pleading guilty to second-degree murder. Baltimore Circuit Judge William D. Quarles sentenced him to 12 years in prison. At the hearing, he said to Randy, "I guess you reassure me, in a sense, of my belief in human nature, because you are obviously someone who developed a sense of conscience. Because you had actually gotten away with it." But if you come clean, never intending to come clean, and not remembering afterwards you've come clean, does that really count as an act of conscience? You must think about your own subconscious, the mystery of what made you open your mouth. Yeah, all the time. And have you come to any conclusion? No. That's not something that I've really come to grips with. I just don't know how to feel, really. It isn't like, "Oh, yeah, confession is good and clean for the soul." No, it feels like, "What a dummy. I should have kept my mouth closed." Don't want to mess up the next 20 years of my life. So you regret telling them. Yeah, of course. It wasn't a relief to tell police, he says. He didn't feel like he'd gotten something off his chest. That feeling came when he told the people who meant something to him, his wife, the members of his church. That feeling came when he squared it with God. But somehow the decision to tell police about that night wasn't exactly his. With heroin as its unwitting ally, Randy's conscience, the angel on his shoulder he remembers from childhood cartoons, commandeered the interview, flooring everyone involved. In prison, he's still hearing that voice, and another voice, too. It's kind of hard to explain. I used to sit back and I would hear voices saying-- well, on one hand, it's like, "How do you feel now, dumbass? And look what you got yourself into. Go to trial. Fight it. You can beat this." And then my other shoulder's like, "Don't worry. The Lord is going to be [UNINTELLIGIBLE] sooner than you think. You did the right thing. You can leave here with a clean slate and start your life over." Which side is winning? Well, currently, clean slate side. You know, "You can leave here with a clean slate now. And things'll get better." And in a way, I believe it. But in a way, I don't. There's another way to see this whole story, that it wasn't his conscience that made him confess to the police. Randy's sisters see it more as a suicidal act. His wife had left him. He was back on drugs. He had sunk so low that some part of him, and not the angel part, wanted to do something self-destructive. So he told the police. What's odd is that Randy himself hasn't figured out whether he's a good person who needed to clear his conscience once and for all, or just a drug addict who gave up and ratted himself out. After thinking about it every day for two years in prison, Randy still can't decide. Sarah Koenig. Production help today from Flawn Williams and the charming Jorge Just and Aaron Scott. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. He's feeling so good ever since he came back from the hairstylist at the mall. Here's why. I went and got rid of my Amish haircut, went and got rid of my Amish clothes. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International. international
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Tom are you there? Yeah Ray, are you there? Yes, indeed. OK. So repeat after me, from WBEZ Chicago. From WBEZ Chicago. And Public Radio International. And Public Radio International. It's This American Life. We'll do that in unison. It's This American Life. What pros you are. OK, here's the set up. In a studio in Boston, the host of NPR's Car Talk, Tom and Ray Maggliozi, experts in car repair and owners of their own car repair garage in Cambridge. In the This American Life studio in Chicago, me. And in a studio in New York City, a former employee of the Car Guys radio show, Joe Richman. Who once turned to these national experts for help with his own car. But as we all know, sometimes the experts screw up. Joe, what was your exact job at Car Talk? I edited the show. They would do the show live in Boston, and then I would kind of package it for the national show. I do remember-- I have this image of you, Joe, sitting there on the other side of the glass, looking very studied. Like you were concentrating on the parts that you have to cut out. Making mental notes as you went along. That won't do. No, that's going to have to go too. When I was living in Boston I had this '72 Plymouth Valiant. Slant-6 engine. It was red with a black top. Now, Joe, your mother had a special feeling about this particular car. Well. OK. I guess the thing was, my mom kept saying that I wasn't going to find a girlfriend until I got rid of the car. I'm not sure. I think she felt that there was a little too much obsession with the car. The car was just too big a part of my life. Now, what does that mean, too big a part of your life? You were spending too much time thinking about the car? Loving the car? Fixing the car? At this point I didn't have a lot of friends. I drove the car around a lot. I paid attention to the car. was kind of-- I wrote a song about the car. It was that kind of a thing. Wait, you wrote a song about the car? Yeah, I wrote a song about it. I actually, I looked for the lyrics. Well, can we hear it? I looked for the lyrics, I couldn't find them. Oh, you're a liar. You're a liar. I'm not lying. I loved the car. Joe, do you remember any of the song at all? You must remember the chorus. Yeah. Give us a line or two. You don't have to sing it, maybe you could just recite the words. Come on. You can't leave us like this. Basically, the song was sort of about this issue. Can I have a girlfriend if I've got the car? Ah. In fact, I know from talking to Joe that at the time, Tom and Ray knew what Joe's mother thought about this, and agreed with her. As long as he had the car, he would never get a girl. And then, the car started to have big troubles. Just to let you know what time period this was, everyone has started to call it the Plymouth Valdez. That's around the time-- Around 1989, 1990. Thank you. Well, I asked Ray about the car. And I said, you know, it was burning a lot of oil. And basically he said, we'll do a ring job. I don't know if we can fix it. And it was that kind of thing where, you know, am I throwing money away? Should I just put money into a new car? But, of course, you don't do that when you have a '72 Plymouth Valiant, right? So I decided to take a chance. So anyway I got the car back and that-- I guess that was about-- Ray, what would you-- was that about $600 back then would you say? Not only-- it didn't really fix the problem and, in fact, that kind of initiated the steep decline of the car where it kind of never recovered. Oh, that was the beginning of the end. It was the beginning of the end. We did a valve job. And I am sure I warned you in advance that it might not work. You did. You said, this might not do it. And you could be throwing your money away. And that's what-- Not really throwing it away. You were giving it to my brother. And my kids were in college at the time, and these things happen. Let's just call it a cash transfer. So Ray sent this car spiraling toward its grave. It only took a few weeks, Joe says. It's like the car slowly dissolved into dust. Like a vampire stake through the heart. And, just a few weeks after the car died, Joe started dating. And if you ask Ray today if he killed Joe's car intentionally, knowing that Joe would end up with a girlfriend if he did that, Ray will only say that that is something that he is certainly capable of doing. Which is the way it goes when you go to an expert. Sometimes they will ignore what you want, and do whatever they want to do. And then sometimes they just fail. Maybe that's what happened. Ray says that when you go to a mechanic, the chances that they will give you solid, honest advice, real advice, and not try to rip you off, and not accidentally screw things up in some way, he says the odds of that are actually pretty bad. Oh I think you're way below 50% in that regard. No seriously. I think even well-intentioned mechanics are going to give you the wrong advice half the time. Gee, I don't think it's like that. I would think more by accident than by mal intent. I would guess way higher than that. You haven't been around the shop much lately. Experts give bad advice all the time. And so we devote our radio program today to stories of people getting terrible advice from specialists who supposedly know better. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in two acts. Act One, "An Epidemic Created by Doctors." In that act, the story of how thousands of people went to psychotherapists who, with the best of intentions, administered a kind of therapy that just made these people worse, not better. Act Two, "Not Stella Adler, just Stellllaaah." In that act, a glimpse of Marlon Brando's series of instructional videos about acting called Lying for a Living. They have yet to be released, we get a sneak preview. Does being a great actor make you a great acting teacher? I bet if you had guessed the answer to that question right now, you would guess right. But stay with us. Act one, "An Epidemic Created by Doctors." In the early 1990s, people across America turned to experts in psychology for help. And many people were told that the source of their problems could be traced to traumatic events that they could not even remember. To memories that had to be recovered through special techniques. This was the recovered memory movement. These days, this whole approach to psychology has fallen out of favor. There were a series of well-publicized cases, and multimillion dollar lawsuits against therapists by patients who had been led to remember instances of child abuse and satanic worship that simply never had occurred. At this point, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association have both concluded that buried memories like this are rare. And treatment to recover these memories should be viewed with skepticism. Testimony based on recovered memories is now difficult to enter in court cases. Malpractice insurance often doesn't protect therapists if they do this kind of therapy. And, in retrospect, it feels like therapists accidentally unleashed a kind of epidemic. Doing people more harm than good. So what happened? That so many experts came to believe in a treatment that turned out to make so many other patients worse? And what happened when the patients and the therapists figured it all out? Alix Spiegel put together this story. A warning to listeners with small children that it mentions sex and child abuse. Alix's story begins with one patient, and a simple question. How did it happen? In a simple, practical way, how could an expert lead a patient to believe all sorts of horrible things about his or her own life which never happened at all? Here's how it happened to Beth Rutherford. She was 19. A student nurse working on a cancer ward. Surrounded by men who bled through every opening on their bodies. By old women who died alone in the middle of the night. She found herself struggling with depression. This feeling that life was somehow thin and flat. Her parents were concerned. They suggested that she talk to a therapist. There was one at their church they thought might be good. Beth's father actually made the call. This first visit was productive. The woman allowed Beth to talk about her experiences in a way that made Beth feel better. She seemed kind, sensible. Beth emerged after an hour feeling calmer, but was told to schedule a follow-up appointment, just to be safe. Four weeks later, when Beth returned, she was doing fine. In fact, she was doing so well that after half an hour she actually ran out of cancer ward material. And then, it's kind of like we had nothing left to talk about. But we had some time left over on my appointment time with her. So she asked me, is there anything else that you want to talk about? And I said, no, no. That's kind of it. I can't think of anything. And so she said, well, you know are you sure? This is kind of your time. So if you can think of something. And I said, well, you know, I kind of do have these funny dreams sometimes. And she said, well, what do you dream about? And so I said, I always have these dreams, these horrific dreams where my dad's coming after me and sending bears after me, and we're just hollering at each other. Beth explained that she and her father had a good relationship. Which is why these dreams always puzzled her. In her waking life, they rarely fought. She then stopped me and she said to me, has anything ever happened to you? As a child? And she said by way of, like a sexual nature, where you were touched inappropriately or those kind of things. And I said, oh no. Absolutely not. And she said, well, usually people who have been abused by somebody-- these kind of dreams that you're having are indicative of having been abused. Of course, then that's when we hit our 15-minute time limit, or whatever we had left. And she says, well, I want you to go home and I want you to think. And see if you can remember anything. So I went home. And, again, I don't remember anything. I was 100% confident. I knew nothing had happened to me. And my concern was, I didn't want to leave any doubt in her mind-- because she knew my mom and dad-- wondering if they had done something to me. So, anyway, we make the third appointment. And I go in. I said, I've thought about this stuff and I can't think of anything. And again, she started, well, are you sure? And then she explained to me that it is possible to have things happen to you and forget about them. And that you can have these horrific things done to you, and be a part of things and that you don't remember it. That's your body's way of coping. This therapist, Beth reasoned, was a professional. Someone with training. Perhaps she knew something about Beth that Beth did not know herself. Her therapist, by the way, declined to be interviewed for this story. But anyway, I should tell you that it took a long time-- 18 months-- for Beth to believe that she'd been sexually abused. This process began simply, with a detailed review of her childhood. And it was during these conversations that Beth's therapist would offer new interpretations of the ordinary facts of Beth's life. When Beth told her therapist, for example, that her parents had encouraged her to do well in school, her therapist suggested that perhaps this was done out of guilt. Was it possible they were trying to cover for some harm they'd done her? The therapist didn't know either, she was just asking. Beth, who was living at home to save money, began to avoid her family. She spent more time in her room. And then I was given books to read about stories of people that had been abused. And she'd actually pick out certain chapters for me to read. And it began obviously to preoccupy a lot of my time, thinking about this. Trying so hard to remember if something had happened. And I couldn't remember, and I'd try to think even more. And anyway, reading this material, reading these books, I began to dream a lot. So part of our therapy sessions then would be, I would go in and tell her what I had dreamed. Well, then I was told, no Beth, those aren't dreams. They are flashbacks of what happened. This idea, that dreams were not simply dreams, but could actually represent accurate memories, was an article of faith in repressed memory therapy. Now therapists are cautioned against it, but at the time it was one of a series of beliefs and techniques used to interpret and access buried trauma. A series of beliefs and techniques which hinged on a single psychiatric idea. Namely, that it was possible to experience profound trauma-- rape, sodomy, forced cannibalism-- and to erase all memory of those events from the conscious mind. When I called the American Psychological Association to ask for an expert who could explain how psychologists viewed the recovered memory movement today, I was referred to Michael Yapko, a practicing clinician who wrote a book about recovered memory therapy. He describes what went wrong this way. What this whole repressed memory controversy was fueled by were those clinicians who would have a client come to them in some form of distress. And it was the therapist who presupposed a history of abuse, and would literally say to the patient, I believe that you've been abused as a child and that's what explains your symptoms. Then the patient would say, well, that never happened to me. And then the therapist would nod his or her head and smile knowingly and say, well, you know, that's how repression works. You're obviously repressing those memories of abuse. We need to use these techniques, like guided imagery, hypnosis, whatever, to get at those memories and bring them forth. And that's the only way that you will recover. The problem with these techniques, Yapko says, is that they didn't bring back accurate memories. Memory is vulnerable to suggestion. And not only could benign questions from a therapist contaminate the memories, the simple act of telling someone to try to remember could lead them to create details which simply weren't real. But these techniques were taught anyway in schools of psychiatry and psychology, in continuing education programs. There was massage to unleash body memories, hypnosis, and also guided imagery where patients like Beth were told to relax, to imagine themselves as a child. I can remember, I'd kind of bend my head down a little bit. And I'm thinking and she'd talk to me. OK, now, think about where you were as a child. OK, think about sitting on your bed. So I'm thinking, thinking. OK, now what are you wearing? So I'm thinking, thinking. What's an outfit I can remember wearing as a child? And then you just build on that, and build on it. And what did that feel like. You know, it's kind of like you have a little half teaspoon of memory, so to speak. That little half teaspoon turns into a whole three tiered cake. It was during these guided imagery sessions that Beth began to blank out. To lose conscious memory of portions of her therapy sessions. Concentrating so hard on the images she was conjuring that she worked herself into a kind of hypnotic state. I remember the first time it happened, it scared me to death, because I kind of looked up to her. And she said to me, do you know what just happened? I said, no, what? And she said, you just recounted for me a story of what had happened to. What your dad had done. And she has a piece of paper. And she's told me she wrote down everything I said. And then she started, and she began to read back to me. I can hardly describe the horror, to sit there and listen to that. She's saying I said it. She's reading it to me, as I described an event where my dad had brought me to my mom and his bedroom and laid down next to me. She's describing, and it was so horrifying. I can't hardly describe for somebody what it's like to believe that you have been loved as a child, and you grew up in a wonderful home. And to sit there and listen. And it's literally like the foundation of your life is coming apart. I became a therapist because I wanted to help people. Linda Ross graduated with a master's in counseling in 1986, but most of her training in recovered memory therapy took place after that, in the continuing education seminars she took to keep current. These classes provided long list of possible symptoms. Gave tutorials in guided imagery, in dreams, body memories. All the modern thinking. Because Linda felt she was in a field of study that was scientifically based, she assumed these ideas had been properly researched and tested. That her responsibility was simply to follow them faithfully, which Linda did. After graduation, she began working for an agency near her home. She dealt with a variety of issues, but developed a sub-specialty in sexual abuse. And soon she was fielding referrals from half a dozen churches and social service centers in her area. The vast majority of these patients were women who remembered their abuse. But in the early 90s, Linda had a series of clients who uncovered repressed memories. Some of these memories were deeply troubling. There were stories of child pornography rings and satanic rituals. And then there was a woman whose guided imagery session revealed that she had witnessed a murder. Her father had taken his preteen daughter to the woods, where he slaughtered a man and his son in cold blood while his daughter looked on. As she was taking you through this scene, what were you thinking? I was thinking how horrible. What an awful thing for a little girl to have to go through. You know, I had no doubt in my mind that this had happened. Partially, Linda believed because she's been trained to believe. Had been told that in these delicate matters, the therapist was not supposed to question. This above all was an unbreachable rule. And of course it's completely reinforced by the depth of her pain. It's completely reinforced by the sharpness and acuity of her memory. Even if I had a doubt, I wasn't going to doubt, because her memory was so sharp, her emotions were so genuine. And so, she reinforced my idea in the belief of it. And then, of course, I responded by being horrified and comforting. Which reinforced her idea that I believed it. And so I didn't see how we were a feedback loop. I didn't get that. But it was more than that. Linda believed not only because she'd been trained to believe, but because on some deep level it appealed to a romantic ideal. This notion she had, that she was a healer. This part of me that wants to be the hero, felt like, I'm going to believe you, and I'm going to be here for you, and I'm going to be on your side, and I'm going to help you heal. It really was appealing to sort of the best in me. As time went on, Beth Rutherford's memories got more and more bizarre. She remembered curling irons and steak forks. And a pregnancy which her father tried to abort with a coat hanger. Years later, she went to a doctor who confirmed, after a 15-minute examination, that Beth was actually a virgin. That none of this could be true. But at the time these memories were so vivid that Beth could recall the most intimate details. The feel of the curling iron. The rope around her ankles. And like many patients who faced memories of this kind, Beth began to deteriorate. The psychological strain taking a physical toll. She stopped eating and dropped to 80 pounds. And had trouble sleeping through the night. She began to take pills. Rather than interpret Beth's sickness as a sign that the therapy wasn't working, her therapist saw the deterioration as evidence that they simply needed to work harder. In other words, the failure of recovered memory therapy to restore Beth's mental health led her therapist to pressure Beth for more memories, which undermined Beth's health further, and led to the creation of even more. It basically became this thing that, well, you're deteriorating because you haven't been bringing up any more memories. Because there's still something there and it's bothering you. And until you get it all out, and we get to the bottom of this, you're never going to get better. You are always going to be like this until you get to the bottom. Like most therapists trained in recovered memory, Linda Ross had been taught to expect deterioration. But then several of Linda's patients seemed to go into free fall. It was around this time that Linda first heard of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, an organization founded in 1992, which had become a resource for accused parents who thought that their children had been led into false beliefs through therapy. The parents of one of Linda's patients had come across the organization after their daughter's memories led to a police investigation. And they sent Linda some brochures. I said thank you very much. I took the information. And I said, you know, this is a place for people who have perpetrated these horrible crimes to just now hideout and pretend like these things didn't really happen. And when I when I look at my culpability in all of this, I really count that as the place where-- you know, prior to that I had really been acting on good faith out of ignorance. But really based on what I thought was sound counseling from the people that had trained me. But I had a moment there to begin to just say, well, let me look at it from another angle. And I very willfully chose not to. Why do you think you chose not to? Because if I chose to believe something different then it was going to mean that I had been doing something very wrong to a number of families, and I was going to have to face myself. In fact, during the early 90s, therapists found themselves believing all kinds of stories. Stories which, on their face, now seem outrageous. Well-appointed, middle-class women would walk into suburban offices, close their eyes for guided imagery, and talk about being forced to watch dozens of people sacrificed in satanic rituals. Or being sodomized by whole police departments. And the therapists, trained clinicians, would nod their heads in sympathy and horror. As Michael Yapko points out, therapists were laboring under the assumption that if something truly horrible had happened, it would be repressed. And so their acceptance of these stories makes a certain sense. And here's where a little bit of history helps. Literally up until the late 1970s, the viewpoint that predominated the field was that when somebody came in and reported a history of sexual abuse as a child, that this was dismissed as a psychological fantasy. And that started with Freud and it continued all the way, literally, up until the 1970s. And then finally, in the 1970s, riding the wave of feminism, researchers came in and said, you know, all these women say that they were abused as children, and everybody's discounting it. Before we discount it, how about if we find out whether it's really true or not. And then they started doing research on the prevalence of child abuse, and guess what they discovered? That females were being abused and in very large numbers. And so, with the best of intentions, the experts came to see abuse everywhere. Even in people who hadn't been abused. And their conviction, their sense of righteousness, helped convince patients like Beth Rutherford. And this is one of the most disturbing aspects of these cases. That in the hands of even the most mild-mannered experts, people like Beth, normal people with normal relationships with their parents, could come to believe horrible things about the people they loved most. I didn't want to believe that that had happened to me. It's something that came from the therapy and it was-- and I was told I had to do this or I was never going to get better. If I didn't do this, I was going to do it to my own children. And I remember her, so to speak, complimenting me and congratulating me on being the person that's breaking this cycle in my family. After two and a half years of breaking the cycle, Beth's therapist began to pressure Beth to go public. To formally accuse her father, who was then working as an administrator at the Assembly of God headquarters, the same church where Beth's therapist worked as a counselor. For weeks, Beth resisted. She'd never confronted her parents, had simply emotionally withdrawn from the family. But Beth's therapist wouldn't give up. And so one Wednesday in October, three years after her therapy began, Beth arrived at her session and was presented with a document and a choice. She could either sign a formal accusation of her father, which would be submitted to the denominational authority, or all the files in Beth's case would be given to the local district attorney, a man who would prosecute her father to the full extent of the law. Given these options, Beth signed the paper. And several weeks later, her dad lost his job, and was ordered to appear at a church hearing. And we sit down. And they greet us. We greet them. And probably three minutes passed, and he is reading a statement to me. This is Tom Rutherford, Beth's father. "Tom, it has been brought to our attention"-- I have a copy of it-- "that one of your daughters is alleging that she has been sexually molested as a child growing up in your home." There's actually a long and sad story to tell about these proceedings and the meetings which followed. It's a story of public humiliation and pain, the kind of narrative most likely familiar to anyone who's followed the coverage of false memory incidents over the last 10 years. In this case, Tom and his wife Joyce were subjected to a series of hearings. Hearings which tried to determine whether or not they were pedophiles. They didn't know who believe. So they asked Joyce and I to submit ourselves to going to a professional clinic, of their choosing, to be psychologically and emotionally and all evaluated to see if we could be child molesters. And asking me to go to be psychologically evaluated would be no different to me than asking me to go to the hospital to have a hysterectomy. That is as much sense as that meant to me. By the end, this thing had gone public. It went public in this community, it went public everywhere. We even went to the mall, and there were good friends that would see us coming and they would raise their hands up, and just shake their head and turn and go the other way. After the story went public, Tom couldn't find work. He was turned away by over 100 potential employers. He and Joyce were forbidden to contact Beth, who had moved to Oklahoma City, and were cautioned not to contact their other daughters as well. Tom had lost his family, his position, his name. Quite understandably, he struggled with thoughts of suicide, an act he believed was a sin. There were times when my head hit the pillow at night-- I pleaded that God would be more merciful to me if he would just allow me not to awaken in the morning. And there were times when I would be home, and I'm unemployed, and I'd turn on music. And I played music-- tapes and records and things-- and I played it so loud so I couldn't hear myself think. Just to save my sanity. And try to make it another 24 hours. Again, Linda Ross, the therapist in Arizona. So finally this client comes to me and she tells me that she has a memory of a woman in the neighborhood had miscarried, and her mother had been there helping this neighbor. And her mother took the fetus, brought it home, heated up some oil, boiled the fetus in oil and made her eat the arm of the fried baby. And it was at that point that I said, you know what? I don't think this happened. I don't believe that. I was in a panic. Because the thing that I had been trained-- you do not disbelieve your clients. If you do, you're Satan. And I didn't believe her. After several sleepless nights, Linda decided to confront her patient directly. That was one of the hardest, scariest moments in my life. And at that point it wasn't like I've had this moment of clarity. You know, I need to tell you and I-- you have to understand, I had never heard that there was any possibility that repressed memories could be false. I'd never heard that thought. I had no context other than my own self which said, I don't believe this. So I felt like a failure. I felt like I was failing this client. I was failing myself. But I could not overcome my own doubt. And so I, you know, I just told her, I have a hard time believing this particular memory. And you have a right to be in therapy with someone who's going to believe you. And to my discredit, I sent her on to someone who was a specialist in working with satanic ritual abuse and multiple personalities. And then she got much worse. Beth Rutherford was living in Oklahoma City with her sister, Lynette, who dropped out of college after her father's disgrace. It was a terrible time. They're completely alone, they had no jobs, no acquaintances, and very little money. Beth spent nights on the bathroom floor crying. But then Beth stopped talking to her therapist. And, miraculously, she began to feel better. She got a job, put on weight. Things seemed to be returning to normal. And then came the bombing at the Federal Building, and the tearful message on the answering machine from Beth's mother, who called, despite warnings from the church authorities that she and her husband could be prosecuted for harassment, simply to say that she loved Beth, she missed Beth, and she wanted to know if Beth was OK. This call was followed by another, and then another. Beth says it wasn't a certain moment, it was a series of moments. A collection of calls and gentle suggestions from her sisters, from family members, which finally produced the meetings. First with her mother, a shopping trip at a local mall. And then later, her father, whom she saw for the first time in the kitchen of her aunt's house in Tulsa. At that point she still believed and had only reluctantly agreed to stand in the same room as her father at all. And so this meeting took her by surprise. I come down the stairs and I come into the kitchen, and I am scared to death. In walks Beth to go over to get a cup of coffee. And out of the corner of my eye, I see my dad walking across the kitchen. I thought, he's coming over here to hit me. And here she was, and I didn't know what to say, what I should do, what would be proper? How do you break the ice? All I knew was to go over there. And I see him walk across the kitchen, and he comes over and he stands right next to me and he just started crying. And I didn't know what to say. And she starts to cry. And I said, if it's all right with you, can I say your name? She kind of nodded her head. And I said, Beth. I love you, Beth. I remember thinking, in my mind, as I'm driving, this does not line up. That man that was just in the kitchen does not match who I have in my head of who he is. As for Linda Ross, the breaking point came shortly after a confrontation with a client. Came in the form of a letter, sent by one of her old patients, a woman who'd come to believe that the memory she'd recovered in therapy with Linda had been false. This letter included an invitation. The woman wanted Linda to attend an event sponsored by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. A meeting for parents who had felt they'd been falsely accused. So I walk into this room with all these parents. Now, you know, I had been dealing with the daughters of-- not these particular folks-- but these folks, so to speak. And I really hadn't seen this from what this is like on their side. You know, what this looks like. And I walk in, and here are these sad, depressed, anxious parents who have been accused of horrible things. Horrible. Just so ridiculous. And when you have it isolated, you have one little client sitting in front of you and they're making this accusation, it feels like, OK, well this is possible. This could happen. But then when you multiply it with the hundreds and thousands and thousands of people in therapy, and the number of people who have been murdered, and the number of people who've been sacrificed, and the number of people who've eaten the pizza boy, and the number of people who have been locked in basements. You know, you just begin to realize the magnitude of what I had been a little tiny microcosm. Shortly after this, the former patient invited Linda to yet another meeting. This one with the patient's parents, a sweet suburban couple who had had their home dismantled by a crew of local police officers, eager to uncover evidence of the dead bodies their daughter had remembered through therapy. So we're all sitting together in this room, and she's beginning to tell them about how she came to believe this and all of this. And here I am, you know, I've played a part in this. So I had a chance to tell them the part that I played. And to tell them that I completely understood that they would find it difficult, for the rest of their lives, to be able to find a place to forgive me. But that I was certainly aware that I was in need of their forgiveness. And do you know what they did? What did they do? They forgave me. And it's because of them, I told them at that point that if I could ever speak up and talk about this issue in a way that would prevent other families from going through this, that I would. And I'm talking to you because of that promise that I made to them. It was after this meeting that Linda decided to contact the rest of her patients. She wanted to apologize, and also to explain. To meet face-to-face and tell them the memories they'd recovered together might not be real. It was a painful process. A few of her patients had had explosive confrontations with their parents, and flat out rejected the idea that their members could be false. Some were angry, others simply devastated. The Sunday after Beth Rutherford met her father, she went to see the pastor of her church. She told this man what she'd been going through, and asked if she could spend some time alone in the chapel. She said she needed to think. Her pastor agreed. And after the evening service, cleared everyone out, locking the doors of the chapel from the outside. Beth stayed alone in the building for hours. And it's like things came into my thinking and I'm thinking, you know, I didn't have any of this before I went into therapy. I didn't have any of these memories, nothing was there. I believed I had a wonderful childhood. And by the time I left that night-- and I can't really explain, because it wasn't a certain minute, but it was like a process in those couple hours. By the time I left, I'd come to the point that I believed, OK, I don't think any of this happened to me. Today, the consensus among mainstream psychiatrists and psychologists is that it is possible to experience great trauma and repress to it so deeply that you can't remember it. But that this kind of massive repression is rare. It's also generally agreed that therapists can inadvertently lead patients to create false memories with techniques like hypnosis and guided meditation. They need to be very cautious. Of course, there are still therapists who use these techniques improperly. And there's no real way to police them. One psychologist in Philadelphia was sued by dozens of patients who came to remember satanic abuse under her care, but continues to practice today. She lost her psychology license. She calls herself a psychotherapist, which in many states is entirely legal. I went to college in the early 90s, at the height of the recovered memory movement. And, like most people my age, I can name, off the top of my head, three or four people who recovered memories. Who came to believe that they'd been horribly violated by those closest to them. Unlike Beth Rutherford, none of the people I know broke off contact with their families. There were no public hearings, no newspaper articles, no million dollar settlements. Their parents didn't write anguished letters to the False Memory Foundation. Nothing so spectacular. Instead, quietly, painfully, this idea that they were victims was simply integrated into their notion of themselves, and then they moved on, and carried this idea, real or false, with them. According to a recent study, a survey of over 1,000 families whose children recovered memories during the early 90s, almost 50% of the men and women who recovered memories during that time have returned to their families, after a long period of estrangement, and are now attempting some kind of reconciliation. Many continue to believe that they were victimized by their families, and only a small portion, 10% or 12% have retracted and now believe that their memories were false. On the other hand, there are almost no people like Linda Ross, practicing therapists, who have come forward to talk publicly about their experience. To admit culpability or try to figure out how this happened. The experts for once are strangely quiet. Alix Spiegel, in New York. Coming up, it's one thing to do a little improv in front of your acting class. It's another to do it in front of Marlon Brando. The scariest acting class in the world, in a minute, from Public Radio International and Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. It's This America Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, we choose some theme. Bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, "Ask an expert." Stories about experts giving terrible, terrible advice. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act two, "Not Stella Adler, just still Stellllaaah." I don't know if it's true that those who can't do teach-- you know that saying. I want to know more about those who can do. Can they teach? Recently, one of the greatest actors of the last century, somebody who is reclusive, and who doesn't usually speak about his own work in public, decided to make a set of instructional videos about acting. The actor is Marlon Brando. His instructional videos are called Lying for a Living. They aren't on the market just yet. Jod Kaftan visited Brando's compound in Beverly Hills while they were being put together. The scariest thing about Marlon Brando is his phone. I ask if I can call New York from his office. But I'm warned by his staff that someone may listen in. I'm foolishly curious and call anyway. Indeed, in the middle of my conversation, I faintly detect a third party's breathing, and a receiver fumbling in someone's hands. I say, hello? More breathing. I hear what sounds like the crunch of a potato chip. I end the call and hang up. The office at Brando's estate is shrouded in a bamboo thicket off the driveway. Any minute he could beep on the phone, to indicate that he'd like to walk over and see the first footage from his new project on acting called Lying for a Living. The staff seems anxious. Someone is feverishly collecting empty soda cans. Another usually chatty staffer is suddenly mute and typing dutifully. Immediately I scan the office for strange cuckoo clocks, or oil paintings with roving eyes. Beep. Everyone stops and looks at the phone. There's a mumble. A raspy, congested voice says, "Coming down." I'm sitting on the couch with my legs crossed, fighting the urge to look over my shoulder. I know I shouldn't since he once told me that he hates being stared at, especially by men. Marlon Brando steps through the sliding glass door in a tropical terry cloth robe. Without a word, he drops himself on the couch next to me. Coughs, stretches out his bare, pallid legs and pans the room as if to root out anything unfamiliar. I can feel his eyes stop at me. The editor asked Brando if he's ready to view the tapes. "What do you think?" asked Brando. The tapes start rolling with a closeup of Brando's still-handsome 77-year-old profile. I'm nervous that he hasn't yet acknowledged my presence. While still watching the tape, he sticks out his arm and extends a pinkie. It's a special Brando handshake. I respond and our pinkies entwine. The first time he offered this handshake, I thought he was afraid I had germs. But I soon learned it was a sign of affection. I existed. I met Brando when I was a teenager. I had dated his daughter Rebecca for about half an hour, but maintained a friendship. We were sitting in his den watching MTV when she said, "Turn it down, I think my dad's coming." "How do you know?" I asked. "I just do." I did notice that the tropical fish were no longer swimming, but idling. The door creaked open. He sat down between us, mostly naked in a Japanese robe. I stared. I couldn't help it. It was Marlon Brando. After a few minutes of listening to him rip into MTV, he turned to me and said, "You know, you have a very wide antenna, a large antenna. Most people hide their antennas, but yours is very active, very open." What could I say but "thanks." Only he wasn't through. "I'm not really sure, but my gut feeling is that you're a homosexual. Am I right?" I wasn't. But I found myself answering, "yes." He nodded and left the room. The second time I met him, almost 10 years later, he offered me a job. He said he thought of me because I didn't seem to be overly neurotic. Thanks, I said. He said, "Now the job could involve things like building a dog house for my mastiff, Tim. Or I might walk up to you and ask you to take apart a radio and put it back together again. The job will have various benefits. Like trips to my house in Tahiti. I might ask you to mount a surveillance on the island. Or to run down to Casa Vega and pick up a dozen tacos." Things went south after a month when Marlon's porno-watching Argentinian house man cornered me with a violent, pointing finger and said, "Marlon say you work for me now." I'd been demoted. It was an order that could only come from the top. What was once an exquisite paycheck for merely being myself had become a hackneyed, proletariat job of attrition. I was fired after a month when I refused to cut down all the sick, 40-foot high bamboo trees. They were loaded with bugs and I was, let's face it, just a dandy. Brando's memory runs short. In late 2001, he called me via one of his employees, and asked me if I'd be interested in writing an article about his new project on acting, Lying for a Living. Knowing full well that my last job with Brando was a fiasco, I deliberated. The next day I was laid off and the prospect became interesting. Besides, I was honored that he'd asked me, essentially a nobody. Actually, that's probably why he did ask me. Over lunch, I ask Brando why he decided to call his project Lying for a Living. He insists that the title isn't meant to be cute. If you can lie, he says, you can act. His intention is to turn out better liars onstage or off. Lying, he explains, is a social lubricant we can't live without. "I've been lying all my life," he tells me. "Everybody does." I ask him whether he thinks he's a good liar. "Jesus," he says. "I'm fabulous at it." The classes are a little weird. In the tapes, Brando, the master, sits at the head of the class in a massive leather armchair adorned like a throne. His two bare feet dangling languidly off an ottoman. A lamp with ram's horns flanks his right. A large, tropical plant stands behind him. Throw in the flamboyant pink scarf flung around his neck, and Brando looks like a frightening combination of Liberace and Freud. The classes are, to say the least, star-studded. With Brando's guest list including the likes of Sean Penn, Jon Voight, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nick Nolte, Edward James Olmos, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and even Michael Jackson, sitting among the dozen or so aspiring actors. It's interesting to see these familiar faces undirected and candid. Only Sean Penn looks bored throughout the tapes, smirking as if there's an inside joke to get. Everyone else, from Jon Voight to Nick Nolte looks utterly studious. They have good reason. Brando hardly ever discusses his craft, and for the first time in years, he's talking about acting as if it matters. He talks a lot about being willing to make an ass of yourself. With this in mind, on the third day of class, he turns himself into a bosomy English woman. He saunters onto the sound stage wearing lipstick, blush, Chinese silk pajamas, and a cobalt blue scarf knotted coquettishly around his neck. A sultry makeup girls kneels at his feet, applying fire-red nail polish to his hands, while two students labor through an improv. "If you're not willing to fall on your face," he says. "If you're not willing to do something that's really stupid, embarrassing, then you're not going to do it." When I ask Brando why he's making the tapes, he says, "One word. Money." But watching him, it's clear that he's making an effort to be a good teacher. He's usually sensitive and positive with his students. Even when their improvs are bad. Like one in which a woman pretends to be a crazy person in a mental institution, talking in a little girl's voice for a good 20 minutes, he's supportive. His trademark comment after most scenes is "good, damn good." Of course, Brando's eccentricities do show up on the tapes. Like when he declares he wants to sing the actor's national anthem, and then puts his hand over his heart and sings, "Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. You." Or when he asks a very beautiful female student-- a competitive runner and model, despite having lost her legs-- to come to the front of the class and tell her story of healing and accomplishment. The high point of her story comes when she says she realized that she could run faster if she fashioned her prosthetic limbs after those of a cheetah. Perhaps this wouldn't be so strange if Brando weren't sitting behind her on his throne, totally poker faced, like the facilitator of an AA meeting. After her story, as she returns to her chair, Brando chimes in. "And she looks pretty good going away." Occasionally the tapes show Brando with a coger's unwitting political naivete. Ironic for a man once known as a staunch activist for Native Americans and other causes. On the first day of class he proudly introduces a man he found rummaging through the dumpsters outside, and recruited to join the class. A special surprise, he calls it. The camera swirls to Jim, a bearded black man looking cleaned up and nervous. "Jim was outside here, monkeying with the trash containers. What do you do, Jim?" Brando ask. "Recycling," he says. On day 14, Brando has two dwarfs and a giant Samoan do an improv. At one point, the dwarfs start punching each other and the Samoan separates them like two unleashed puppies. At the end of the scene, Brando lavishly praises the performance. "When something's good, it hits you. I get chicken skin when something's really right." There may be a remote chance that someone in the class was engaged with the improv. But to the viewer, the scene comes off as nothing more than a bad bar joke. Brando wants to be a good teacher, but what the tapes prove is that he simply doesn't have a clue how. I think that acting comes so naturally to him that he doesn't know how he does it. Brando assumes that because everyone lies, everyone can act. In one of the tapes, he explains how he created the character of Don Corleone for The Godfather. He'd never played an Italian, he says, and he was scared of doing the part with big Italian gestures. So he put some cotton into his cheeks and imitated an Italian he knew, producer Dino De Laurentiis, who, according to Brando, took a shot in the throat and had that raspy, whispery voice. From the voice apparently came the rest of the character. It's an interesting story. But if you were a young actor wanting to create a personality on screen as complicated and compelling as Brando's character in The Godfather, it wouldn't help you very much. All the things that make his performance great, he doesn't say anything about. I don't think he'd be able to, even if he wanted. Even if you paid him, which he hopes you will. Two weeks later, we're watching the tapes in Brando's office. "I look like Grandma Moses," jokes Brando. "Can you crop it? Jesus, I look pregnant." The next thing I know, Brando's hand is groping my knee. It's not a sexual advance, but a curious one, as if you were examining a rottweiler for purchase. "You've got big, strong legs," he says. The footage continues, and I feel his hand move on to my humble bicep. "You're solid, man." At that point, the camera shows DiCaprio improvising on a phone. "He looks like a girl," says Brando. It's possible that none of this footage will ever be released. The videos are supposed to come out in the fall, but a certain amount of chaos has surrounded the whole production from the start. He scrutinizes the screen and then asks, to no one in particular, "Who wants to see a fat, 80-year-old man pontificate?" Jod Kaftan. A version of his story appeared in Rolling Stone. Our program was produced today by Wendy Dorr and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jonathan Goldstein, and Starlee Kine. Senior producer, Julie Snyder. Our story on recovered memory was part of a series called The America Project, which gets funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 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 explained my job to me this way back when I was hired-- Now the job could involve things like building a doghouse for my mastiff, Tim. Or I might walk up to you, and ask you to take apart a radio and put it back together. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Marlon say you work for me now. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. All right, you're going to flip your collar up. All right, that's going to look real nice, don't you think? Going to look nice? Looks good. Looking sharp. The groom's ready. The bride's ready. They have never kissed, not even one time. She only asked him to marry her two weeks ago. In they march-- flower girls, three bridesmaids, three groomsmen, the grey-haired pastor who's done this dozens of times, the groom, who has known the bride since fifth grade, and finally the bride. They both just graduated from high school this month. We're in Davenport, Iowa. Our guests may be seated. A truly blessed, happy occasion brings us here. I hope that your hearts are happy. All of this is fake. Absolutely, completely fake, every single part of it. We're in a home for elderly people with Alzheimer's and the staff is staging a phony wedding because, well, it makes the residents feel good. They enjoy picking out hats and jewelry to wear. They enjoy talking about their own weddings, those who still remember them. They have all sorts of confusions and perceptual problems and they cannot tell that it is fake. --At a wedding. We all love a wedding, don't we? Ashley William Poust-- Over on the side, two old women whisper excitedly about the bride's dress. A woman in the first row cries. There are three men who stare straight ahead in space, not registering anything. But nearly everybody else is much more bright-eyed and engaged than unusual, the caretakers all say. This is Judy Rader. It's amazing. All these people are patients and usually can't focus on the same thing at the same time. Do you solemnly declare-- They're looking at the minister which again, they're focusing on the person that's delivering the speech, which oftentimes isn't. In fact, it all looks real enough-- the pastor's homily, the vows, the rings. The only signs that this is a complete sham are that the bride barely looks at the groom. When she delivers her vows, she fixes her eyes on the pastor. The couple does not hold hands. You may now kiss the bride and there's no limits. And when they kiss, these two friends-- just friends-- from high school, go in once for a quick peck and then, suspecting that that was not convincing enough, they quickly kiss a second time. We don't consider it lying. We consider it organizing special moments for them. Because Alzheimer residents have short-term memory loss. So their special moments are sometimes all they have. This is Judy Dejong who organized the fake wedding. It is her fourth one for Alzheimers patients. Could you do this wedding again next week and most of them wouldn't remember that it had happened this week? We could do it tonight even and they wouldn't-- may not have remembered that. Absolutely. So we have planned a special moment, a moment in time for them. It must be so odd for you to work creating moments for them that are instantly gone. Well, so many people say, why do you go to all that trouble when you know they're not going to remember? And I just think, as a caregiver, that is our role for them is to provide these special moments. Today on our program, giving the people what they want, we bring you five stories of people who went to extraordinary lengths to give people what they wanted. It's interesting what people want and what they would do for those who will give it to them. Act One, Let Them Eat Cake, Wedding Cake. You've probably already gotten a sense of what that act is going to be about. Act Two, God Shed His Grace on Thee. In that act, the astonishing story of how an entire country-- a big country, a country that you have heard of-- got named after somebody who was a fraud, but the kind of fraud that people love, the kind of fraud who knows how to please a crowd. Act Three, Have Paint Will Travel, a man who does murals for hire on the living room walls inside Chicago public housing units reveals what it is that people want on their walls now that black and gold panthers are sort of played out. Act Four, Handing People Their Dreams, a clerk at a humble midwestern video shop tells all about handing people adult videos for a living. Act Five, What Daddy Wants. In that act, a family tries to give Daddy what he wants, even if he does not seem to want it sometimes. Stay with us. Act One, Let Them Eat Wedding Cake. It turns out, the hardest part of staging a fake wedding at the Country House Residence in Davenport was finding a groom. The bride's real life boyfriend did not own a suit. And they're kind of on-again, off-again anyway. So he was out. He spent the day fishing. Somebody suggested the bride's brother play the groom but even the thought of that gave the bride the willies. I'm not kissing him, she told her mother. For a while it looked like one of the certified nurse's assistant, Jason Allender would step in. But as fate would have it, he had another wedding-- a real one-- in which he would also be the groom, planned for the week after the fake wedding. And his real fiance had a few thoughts about him going through the motions in a separate ceremony with a cute high school girl. She didn't like it. She did not like it at all. What did she say? No. No. I understand. It kind of takes the shine off the other wedding if you're doing a wedding the week before. Yeah, a little bit. And she said, they want you to kiss her? And I was like well, yeah, probably on the cheek. And she said, no you're not. The groom they got, Ashley, had done a lot of high school plays and was charmingly unflappable. The kiss, he told me, was just another stage kiss. That's what got me, that good-looking guy. The women at the Residence got into the wedding more than the men, as happens even when people are not Alzheimer's patients. I talk with them about the bride's dress, the cake, the presents. These conversations wove in and out of coherence. When I sat down with these two women, they were passing back and forth a pair of eyeglasses, each of them unable to remember if it was hers. This is my glasses. But they don't fit right on my ears, see? It's a whole different pair of glasses. Do you have another pair of glasses that you-- No, these are mine. --Those are yours. Well, I don't know. Are those hers? No, I thought that I was getting-- Are they broken already? I don't-- I hope not. No, they're not broken. So, what did you think of the wedding? Well, it's all right now. But for a while I didn't like it too good at all. Why is that? It was cold and slippery. This is some old memory, not our wedding. This happened a lot. It was a real nice wedding. It really was. I love her dress. I think they're pretty great kids. I don't know them real well. I don't know if she just has one little girl or what, but they stopped up at our house one night, the father and her, and man is she smart. She was really smart. But every so often her mother had to go, psst, [SNIFF SNIFF] on the seat of her pants. If I had to guess, I would say that the one person who is going to remember this day is the bride, 18-year-old Lisa Arret. She was working her regular shift at Country House when Judy Dejong invited her to play the part. It was actually-- I was screaming, I was so excited. I was like, yes, yes. Because in school and stuff like that, I've never been really the center of attention when it comes to-- or being even the main character in a play. And it was just like wow, this is it, this is it and stuff like that. And I, of course, didn't realize how big it would be. Actually, when I had the dress on and I was standing-- after I put it on I was waiting for them to say, you can come out now-- and I was standing in front of the mirror with the veil and everything. And then I sat on the bed, and I see the veil next to me. It's just like, oh my god, I'm in my wedding dress. It's just like, I don't know if I'll ever be in a wedding dress again. There was one resident that-- she kept looking at me in the dress. She kept looking over at me. And she kept looking like she was going to stand up and come over to me so I went over to her. And she had tears in her eyes. And she was like, you look so beautiful. I'm like, thank you so much. And I'm like, you look beautiful too. And times like those, I kind of know that when I change back into my clothes and you go back up to them, they're not going to know it was you in the wedding dress. They're not going to recognize me or not know who I am anymore, but it's still living in the moment, it's still appreciating the moment. To Lisa, the whole experience was one of those things that you don't even know you want until somebody gives it to you, which in a way is what the wedding was for the residents too. Act Two, God Shed His Grace on Thee. In our radio story, 500 years in the making, a fable of giving people what they want in a global scale, the story of-- stay with me here-- how America actually got his name, from Mr. Jack Hitt. I got clocked in the head the first time I ever delved into the mystery of how America got its name. It was third grade, Porter-Gaud, South Carolina. Mrs. Poulnot had just explained that Amerigo Vespucci was a noted explorer. And from the back of the class I observed, "What'd he do that was so great?" After all, who wasn't a noted explorer back then? Mrs. Poulnot had this little trick, turning her enormous wedding ring around on her finger and thumping you in the head. When the pain receded, I stepped into the library on my own. By then I was 30 and lived in New York City. Think about it. A third of planet Earth is named for Amerigo Vespucci. But why? Why aren't we named for the European who first landed here? The United States of Colombia. Try it out. God bless Columbia. Death to Colombia. This Colombian Life. It works. I finally did figure it out. And it comes down to this-- it had nothing to do with exploration but everything to do with salesmanship. Columbus returned to tell us about the New World the way it really was. Vespucci described a different New World altogether, not the one he saw from the railing of his ship but the one he knew the folks back home wanted to believe in, the imaginary world they were certain had to exist somewhere. It's a tabloid rendition of the New World starring the usual cast-- hot naked girls, cannibals, dragons, pygmies and an island of giant women. So, what happened? You ask. First off, get the old Amerigo out of your mind-- the noble map-maker pondering the stars with his astrolabe-- now replace him with a ne'er-do-well rich kid who flunked out of school and whose father landed him a job with another rich guy. Amerigo was born into a family of great prominence in 15th century Florence. Remember Botticelli's painting, The Birth of Venus? The blond on the clamshell, that's Amerigo's cousin, Simonetta. Still, he couldn't master his Latin study so his father got him a position with one of the richest and most powerful people on the earth, Lorenzo de Medici. According to one Spanish historian, a Vespucci enthusiast, Amerigo, quote, "Was in charge of everything, dinner services, silver, the chests of damask, hangings, tapestries--" what we might call an entry level position. Eventually, Lorenzo trusted Amerigo enough to send him as a scout to Spain. There were lots of business opportunities there at the time, mainly because Queen Isabella decided to unify the country by throwing out all the Jews and Arabs in that very busy year, 1492. No one really knows what Amerigo did during this time. But as one writer put it, he "resolved to abandon trade and to aspire to something more praiseworthy and enduring." So he learned astronomy and managed to sail as navigator and map-maker on at least two voyages bound for the New World-- one from Spain and one from Portugal. We still read Amerigo's writings every time we look at a map. In one harbor, Amerigo noticed that the natives elevated their huts on pilings above the water. Amerigo was reminded of Venice and wrote "Little Venice," or in Spanish, "Venezuela." While traveling from Portugal, Amerigo entered a huge river during January, plumbing the shallows of his imagination he wrote in Portuguese, "Rio de Janeiro." At this point in the story, the standard explanation in the grade school textbooks starts to crumble. We all learned that Amerigo's maps launched his fame. But that's not true. It's what accompanied them. Amerigo wrote several long letters home, one to his employer, Lorenzo de Medici. And without them this glorified steward would have disappeared into the vapors of history. So why didn't Mrs. Poulnot mention these letters? You only have to read them. Amerigo's letters are laced with crazy adventures and lewd encounters that are outrageous even by our jaded standards. If your children can understand the prim syntax of the Victorian era, you might want to send them out of the room for a minute. Here's one description of the free-spirited savages of the New World. Quote, "they do not practice marriage. Each man takes all the women he desires. And when he wishes to discard them, he repudiates them without discrediting himself or disgracing the woman. They are excessively libidinous, and the women much more than the men. For I refrain, out of decency, from telling of the art with which they gratify their immoderate lust." Now imagine you are your average Venetian doge in 1505, eager to learn of the New World and you read this, "It was, to us, a matter of astonishment that none was to be seen among them who had a flabby breast. And those who had borne children were not to be distinguished from virgins by the shape and shrinking of the womb. And in the other parts of the body, similar things were seen of which, in the interest of modesty, I make no mention." No mention, except in the very next sentence. "When they had the opportunity of copulating with Christians, urged by excessive lust, they defiled and prostituted themselves." Amerigo wields this time honored literary device constantly, resisting, trying to resist, and then yielding, baby, to more and more descriptions of a paradise of eternally youthful women with timeless breasts and nothing but eyes for a big, strong caballero. These essential themes may ring vaguely familiar because they are, in fact, the very same ones used today to sell Penthouse magazine. Dear Penthouse forum, I never thought it would happen to me. But one day, some explorer buddies and I were hugging the coast of the New World in our caravel when some comely natives signalled to come on board. Me, I don't even believe that Amerigo Vespucci wrote the letters. The originals disappeared long ago. What we have are copies published on a newfangled machine called a printing press. Amerigo's originals, by whatever path, found their way to the new media of the day. These Ur journalists lived during the infancy of this new technology and printing was reshaping the Old World as rapidly as the computer has transformed our own. When Columbus set sail, for instance, there were 268 registered printers working and competing in Venice alone, even though Johann Gutenberg's Bible was not yet 50 years old. At this time there was no First Amendment, no copyright law, and no tradition of authorship. These entrepreneurial printers, I believe, simply re-wrote Amerigo's flat prose and exaggerated his plodding descriptions of the New World, knowing it would sell better. The sloppy hand of the hack journalist is evident everywhere. One transatlantic route Amerigo describes would have plowed him straight across the continent and landed him in Seattle, Washington. But what really gives away the scriveners who edited Amerigo is just how well they knew their audience. The prevailing mythology of 1500 held that beyond the setting sun existed a strange and turbulent world, inhabited not just by exotic beauties, but also by every kind of oddity imaginable. So Amerigo visits an island of giant women, cracks open a huge oyster to find a 130 pearls, and meets the iron man cannibal of all time, a guy who claims to have eaten 300 people. There are many violent adventures and more sexual encounters, including one tribe that possessed a most unusual sex potion, which, in the interest of modesty, I will make no mention. See how nicely that works? Then you read Columbus' letters, which were not rewritten. They are long on descriptions of big leaves and friendly natives. A typical racy passage reads, "There are on the island seven or eight kinds of palm trees, which far excel ours in height and beauty. There are also excellent pine trees, vast plains and meadows. The convenience of the harbors in this island and the remarkable number of rivers contributing to the healthfulness of man exceed belief." Needless to say, that kind of prose didn't quite have the same box office that Amerigo's letters did. One academic study of all the explorer's best-selling publications has Columbus' letters in second place with 22 editions. Amerigo? 60 editions, including a blockbuster in Czech. Strange, none was published in Spain where Amerigo lived. As Amerigo's letters move swiftly across Europe, one copy found its way into the hands of a small group of academics living in France in 1507. They were working on publishing a grand edition of the most respected geography text of the day, Ptolemy's Cosmographia. In this edition is a large map drawn by a cartographer named Martin Waldseemuller. This man's name you should remember. This is the man who named America. Martin Waldseemuller. On this enormous map, stamped across a few continental chunks, it reads-- for the very first time-- America. Beneath it, in the deep blue sea, Waldseemuller added an explanation. "I see no reason why we should not call it America, that is to say, land of Amerigo, its discover, a man of sagacious wit." Apparently, a poet friend intoxicated by Amerigo's prose had talked Waldseemuller into it. Later he changed his mind and never again included the name on any of his maps. But the name began to catch on. And 31 years later, when the great cartographer Gerard Mercator became the first person to write North and South America on a map, the issue was settled. America was a place. Nowadays, historians tell two stories, pro and con, about Amerigo. Some struggle to rewrite his thin resume to make it match up to his name. The others, they just scream. The Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison called Amerigo, quote, "A liar and the stupid boy of his class who flunked Greek and so had to go into business." Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Strange that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle dealer at Seville, who managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name." Amerigo died broke and without ever knowing that a third of the globe would bear his name. But I've come to think it's the perfect name. Columbus may have discovered the New World, but Vespucci sold it to us. How poetic is it that the future home of skywriting, ballyhoo, and P.R. would be named after someone so willing to give folks what they wanted? Hype and spin permeate our every institution, our politics, and our movies. The things we sell and the stock market that underwrites them. Vespucci's letters totally oversold the whole place with a bunch of preposterous lies that became a blockbuster best seller. He really had no idea what he was doing and never earned a doubloon himself from the whole thing. And then dying unawares, had the entire mess rewritten one more time, this time as a stately tale of a great navigator, high up in the crow's nest in every third grade textbook, peering nobly at the stars. The naming of America wasn't a mistake, it was prophecy. Jack Hitt lives in New Haven. Act Three, Have Paint, Will Travel. Well, now we move from giving people what they want on a continental scale to giving them what they want on the most local level possible, namely in their own living rooms. Milton Reid paints murals for his livelihood inside people's apartments in the public housing projects here in Chicago, specifically in the Robert Taylor Homes, which are high-rise buildings on the city's south side. A neighborhood, by the way, where the city has recently been tearing down public housing buildings. Around the neighborhood, Reid is known simply as the artist, as in, hey artist, how much do you charge for a mural? Reid charges between $50 and $200. When he started painting apartment walls, the thing that most people requested were panthers, often in black and gold to match their furniture. But soon, Reid got other requests. And I said, "Uh oh. Another good idea." She said, "I don't want no panthers," she told me, "I want just a sky here with water and trees." I said, "Okay, you want something like a landscape, right? Something like that." "And I want the sun coming off the water, all the shininess." I said, "I understand, I know exactly what you're talking about. Let me try to make you feel good. So all my customers started doing it. Most of the people take pictures of them and their girlfriends standing by the landscape like they're out there. They say, "Oh, it looks so real. Look at the--" I come to their house, they show me a photograph. They say "Don't let nobody else see." I look at it. I say, oh no. Here she is, her and her man standing up naked by the landscape. Or you'll see the man lying down like they're at the lake or something. They say, "It looks so real, doesn't it?" I say, "Yeah." OK, front room. You either want a panther or you want a landscape. In a kid's room it was always a cartoon. In a bathroom, it was always dolphin, fish, or ducks. It couldn't be anything else. I hate to tell you, but some people have some weird imaginations. I'm sitting up here doing some work and this girl had me draw this guy standing by a tree taking a leak, right? Now OK, I did this, right? But the oddest thing happened with this girl. She called me back down the next day. "I want you to draw Jesus Christ on that wall right there. I want that in color. And I'm giving you $50." I said, "Yeah, but can't you understand? You've got a guy right here peeing on a wall and you got Jesus right here." She said, "I'm paying you $50. You going to do it or not?" Let me do what the customer says. So I do it, right? Then I have people come out with, "Ohh, I saw that Jesus Christ you drew on her-- can you draw Jesus for me?" So I start putting Jesus on people's wall. Then they'll say, "Why did you draw my Jesus that dark? I want my Jesus white." Most people want-- most of them wanted Jesus white, right? And I said, "Well really, Jesus really wasn't white. He was a--" "Look, I'm paying you. You do it the way I say to do it. I know how he looked." I said, "OK, I guess you're right." Because see, they probably met Jesus in person, so. I had a guy mention something like-- he told me it really hurt me when I found out. And he said, "Remember you drew me and my wife on the wall?" I said, "Yeah, I remember that." He said, "I want you to draw it again in the other room, me and her and a kid, because we've got a kid now." OK, I've got to drawing it, right? I didn't know until I finished. He told me, "My wife passed. She died." A lot of people started having me do that, of their people that died. You know, around the Robert Taylor there were so many deaths, where young people just shooting each other, killing each other. The oddest request I ever had in my life-- here goes. We're in the Robert Taylor standing up and we're on about the 10th floor. She said, "I want you to paint my whole wall like there's no wall here at all, like you can look right outside. I say, "OK, I understand what you're saying. You want me to draw where it's like a whole wall's been busted out right here, so you can walk in your house-- when you open her door and look in her house it'll be just like you're looking right outside. You'll see the clouds, you'll see the highrises downtown. OK, now, that's not what really makes it odd. It's what she had me do when I came back the next week. And this is what she had me do. "Now, I want you to draw me standing right here on the side. Just draw me, you're going to draw the back of my head, something like this. You're going to draw this part of me doing this." Her right hand is going forward and her right feet, everything is forward, right? It's just like a wrecking crew came along and just tore that part out and she has her arms sticking out there like that outside the window. And I couldn't understand her. Why would you want me to draw you doing like this? Maybe she's dancing. Or maybe she wants me to draw her, making it like she's pushing her hand out there so she can feel the air out there. So I did it and I charged her. And guess what she wanted? She didn't tell me until I finished painting her. She said, "OK, down here, I want you to draw my man. So it should appear that he's further away from me. So you make him small." I said, "I know how to draw. I know about perspective. His feet were sticking up to the sky. And his hands were going down. You could see his mouth open real wide and in perspective, a foreshortening, you'll see one of his feet coming this way in a big shoe. Because he has one leg going way back and the other leg going further, closer to you. That lady-- I actually drew this lady pushing this man out the window. Once they tear all the Robert Taylors down, which they're going to eventually do, it won't decrease my business. It will only increase. I know that. I'm working. I'm doing more work now than I've ever done in homes. Most of them are getting are Section Eight, and I'm going to other new row houses in Milwaukee and Calumet. They have me paint exactly the same thing they had in their house before. They say, "I want the same thing from where you had my house looking. I want it just like that." The real trend that's really going on now-- since they are tearing down the Robert Taylors-- they want me to come to their home and paint the Robert Taylor Homes in their front room. When you first walk in that door-- when you first open the door up, the first thing you'll see is the projects. And you say, "Ah, they've been torn down a long time ago." And the first that comes to your mind, "You used to live in a Robert Taylor." And they want everybody to know this. Milton Reid, he spoke with reporter Alex Kotlowitz whose most recent book is The Other Side of the River. His story was produced by Amy Dorn. Coming up, porn. You heard me. Porn. That's 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, Give the People What They Want, stories of people whose thankless job is to do just that. We have arrived at Act Four of our show-- Act Four, Handing People Their Dreams. For over a year, Ali Davis has been working at a video store for $6.50 an hour, giving people their fantasies. What I mean by that, of course, is that there is a huge porn section downstairs and she helps people get their porn. She watches customers in the security cameras, she has this "Voice of God" microphone she can use to boom her voice down there when she needs to-- and she does sometimes. She has these true tales to tell. A note to listeners, there is nothing explicit in these stories. No sex acts are mentioned at all. Nothing. But it is about porn. We all abuse the hand sanitizer. I know that over-the-counter antibacterial products are bad. I know that they actually give rise to hideous, resistant strains of bacteria. But still, we all abuse the hand sanitizer. We just can't help it. I use it so much that I lose all finger traction and can't open our plastic bags. I've had days when I've used it so much that I can't even make fingerprints on the glass countertop. It freaks me out. But the thought of not using it is worse. Contamination is everywhere. I see people sneezing onto the tape cases. They cough wetly into their palms right before handing me change. But the worst thing is when the tapes come back slippery, or worse yet, sticky. Repeat offenders get a note on their file that says, "Lube Warning." The first time, we discreetly but firmly remind the customer that the tapes need to come back clean. The second time, we hand them the tape, a bottle of Windex, and a paper towel and tell them to clean off the tape in full view of whoever else is at the counter. Other than that, there's not much we can do except acknowledge the destruction of the polite fiction. The polite fiction is something nobody really believes but we all pretend to because it makes life so much easier. An anthropology professor once told me a story about a pygmy couple. Pygmy divorce involves, quite literally, breaking up the home. The couple tears apart their house and once it's down, the union is dissolved. One anthropologist was watching a long-married couple have a fight. It escalated until the wife threatened to leave, and the husband yelled something along the lines of "Fine." And so, there was nothing the wife could do but start tearing down the house. She began tearing off the leaves that made up the roof, clearly miserable. The husband looked wretched too. But at this point, neither could back down without losing face. And by now, the whole village was watching. Finally, the husband called out the Pygmy equivalent of, "You're right, honey, the roof is dirty. It'll look much better once we get those leaves washed." The two of them started carrying leaves down to the river, soon with the help of the whole village, and then washed and rebuilt the roof-- a whole village happily indulging each other. The polite fiction of our village, the porn section village, is that while people do generally use porn for the purpose of self-pleasuring, there is no reason to believe that this particular customer will be doing so. For all we know, he's taking them to a stag party, or watching them as a joke with his girlfriend, or using them for research on his master's thesis. When it becomes graphically, tangibly, clear that that's not the case, we all get uncomfortable. The destruction of the polite fiction is what creeps me out about one of my weekend regulars. He comes in when I open at 9:00, then chooses and rents two movies. He leaves for exactly two movies worth of time, then comes back and returns them. I hate it because there's no way to pretend he's been doing anything else. Even a grad student has to stop the tape to take down notes occasionally. I'm convinced that porn is like alcohol. Some people can stop at just one every now and then. Some people binge on weekends. And some people are genuinely, horribly addicted. Most of my customers skew towards light porn rental. I see maybe half of them enough to sort of know who they are. And of those, maybe half again are heavy renters. A few tip into the danger zone-- six movies, every single day. Even with specials and frequent renter cards they end up spending thousands of dollars a year. On weekends, the store fills up almost immediately. The store opens at 9:00. I usually do about 20 minutes of set up and hit the front door at 9:00 on the dot by the store clock. There is always someone waiting to get to the porn. Twice I've had a problem to deal with and opened the door at, say, 9:02. In both cases, a guy was actually pounding on the door when I got to it, not the same guy either. Both guys almost flipped out when I took the time to slide the sign from "Closed," to "Open" before turning the lock. When I first started at the store, this scared the hell out of me. I assumed that anyone who needed porn before noon was automatically a pervert. That was until I got to know them. If you don't count the porn addiction, they're really not such bad guys. Mr. Orange Hat is a registered nurse and leapt to my defense when another customer pitched a fit at me. Mr. Glasses is always announcing stuff like, "It's that kind of personal service that sets your store apart from Blockbuster." The over-friendliness itself is sort of creepy, as is the way he sort of doesn't blink enough and doesn't know that most business transactions don't really involve sustained eye contact. But I know that he's just trying his hardest, in his own mutant way, to be friendly. Mr. Creaky was old and feeble but would rent a stack of disturbingly violent cartoon porn from Japan at least once a week. He always had the same patter as he came up to the register, "Do you watch that show, The Sopranos?" "No, sir." "I hear it's pretty good." "Yes, sir. That's what I hear too." "I'd like to watch that show but I can't. There's too much cussing." And then, clever ruse in place, he would put in his request for Demon Beast. There is an interesting phenomenon that I've witnessed happen over and over again in the store. I call it the porn trance. We have two rooms of floor to ceiling boxes. People in the porn trance methodically look at every single one in their section. I see people look at box after box for two hours at a stretch all the time, and three hours is not uncommon. They don't hear announcements over the "Voice of God" microphone until you get drastic. "You in the red jacket with the baseball cap, you-- we're closing. Bring up your movies right now or you don't get to rent anything at all." Lone porn renters go into the trance almost immediately and resent being pulled out. Couples do not go into porn trance. There has already been a great deal of negotiating in getting both parties down there together. If either partner gets even a tiny fraction more interested in a porn star body than the other, the delicate balance-- and quite possibly the relationship-- is destroyed. For what it's worth, straight couples are rare in the porn section. Group renters never intend to go into the porn trance. They start out laughing together, pointing at the boxes and reading particularly ludicrous copy out loud. And then one by one they see something that really strikes them. And one by one, they get sucked in until the porn section is quiet again. Our store is deliberately designed to make the porn section hard to get to. We want people to have to pass the register so the clerk can see them. And we make them snake through the shelves a bit so it's hard for kids to get down there. Turns out, though, it was a nearly impossible gauntlet for a wheelchair. The guy in the wheelchair was surprisingly nice about it. This guy had to wait more than an hour for a special cab to pick him up. Then he had to get over our doorstep, which is wheelchair accessible in a theoretical sense at best, and weave his way through two tight aisles and around three corners. The first path he tried ended up being too narrow and he got stuck and had to back up and try another route. And then, after all that, he hit a staircase. Luckily, he could walk a bit. He took the railing with one hand and my arm in the other and we went down. Then I went back and brought the chair down for him. I was torn between sticking around to help and giving the poor guy some privacy. I went with moderate privacy, leaving him alone and checking out the security camera every now and then until it looked like he was done, then going down to help him back up. And then he had to wait over an hour yet again for another taxi, which never showed. We finally hailed him one, and a friend of mine helped me help him into the cab, bringing the total number of people who had helpfully intruded on his porn rental to six. I think the whole trip took him about four hours. Except to return the videos he hasn't been back. And I can't say I blame him. To do what most of our customers do with complete privacy and no thought, took him four humiliating hours. Before he came in, I didn't think of the ability to rent porn with speed and discretion as a basic human right, but now I sort of do. It's stupid, but I do still feel an odd swell of pride about what I'm doing every now and then. Immigrants from repressed nations sign up for memberships, go downstairs, and for the first time in their lives see porn. Elderly gay men suddenly have an outlet. Guys who have had a rough day at the office are going to have a relaxing evening, if not a quiet one. If I make it to the security monitor in time, I can see their faces light up. Ali Davis. When she's not doing her day job, she is in the improv troop, Baby Wants Candy, which does an improvised musical every Friday and Saturday night at the Improv Olympic Theater in Chicago. Act Five, What Daddy Wants. A family is a complicated ecosystem when it comes to giving people what they want. Often, as with any gift, people give each other the things that they would want themselves. Curtis Sittenfeld has seen it all at work in her own family. In January, 1999, under the supervision of doctors, my father began a liquid diet. For five months, he ate no solid food and all he drank were chocolate flavored protein shakes. It was exciting and disorienting to see how rapidly a thinner, quicker, younger-seeming man emerged from inside my father's padding. The diet loomed so large in all our lives that my sister, Tiernan and I dreamt about it regularly. By June, my dad had lost more than 100 pounds and it was time to switch to normal food. Within a year and a half, he gained back all the weight. It seems like my father has tried every weight-loss scheme there is. He's done 12-step programs and hypnosis, and one diet that consisted of eating all bananas one day, all tuna fish the next, and so on. Early last winter, my father called to tell me he was tackling his weight problem once again. After all the diets in the past, I was skeptical. But this plan sounded a little different. He had been referred to a woman known around Cincinnati as "The Diet Nazi." For reasons that are too complicated to go into, this woman has asked me not to use her real name. Or more precisely, she told me if I did, she'd slit my throat. Therefore, I am calling her Doris. As my father explained to me, Doris is not a nutritionist, not a physical trainer, and not a therapist. She's a 68-year-old woman who lost 160 pounds on her own, 35 years ago and ever since then has been helping other people who are seriously overweight. She tells them exactly what they can and can't eat, down to the quantity and brand, and how much they should exercise. She also requires them to call her every night and come to her house to weigh in once a week. Basically, she's a nag for hire. All right, so Paul, you did everything I told you last week? I haven't been exercising twice a day, I've been exercising once a day. That's not good. You've got to give up some of your workload-- My father and Doris are meeting, as they do every week, in the living room of the suburban house she shares with her husband. Doris sees all her clients in individual meetings on Thursdays. So in the morning, she brings out a scale and sets it on a special white square of carpet. Is your choice still the flakes in the morning? Yes, I've been having that. The flakes, some Grape-Nuts, a banana, and skim milk. OK, you could also have oatmeal. I don't like oatmeal. OK, do you like egg whites? With yolks. No, not with the yolks. No. You can have three egg whites with some green pepper and some-- I hate green pepper. It makes me belch. Well, that's too bad. What you hate is good for you. The first time my dad met Doris, she greeted him at the door wearing a Snoopy night shirt and no shoes. At the time, my dad was afraid she'd forgotten he was coming over. Later, he learned that she always wears night shirts when she sees clients. You have your bottles and make sure you get your gallon to gallon and a half of water down a day. That I've been doing. In fact, I may have an accident sitting here. Well, that's OK, I'll help you up. When my dad started seeing Doris, the thing that excited me was the fact that he seemed intimidated by her. Finally, here was someone who would stand up to him. One night, my dad called Doris for his mandatory check-in and he confessed to her that he hadn't had the chance to exercise that day. "Bullshit to that," Dorris cried. "Put on your shoes and go to the gym right now." The amazing part was that my father obeyed her. He changed his clothes and drove to the gym with my sister Josephine and me. In his first month working with Doris, even though it was the holiday season, my father lost 14 pounds. This might be an appropriate place for me to tell you that I don't know exactly how much father weighs, and I don't want to know. What I can tell you is this: he's 5'11" and he said recently that if he lost 150 pounds he would not be excessively thin. In a way, the fact that my dad struggles with his weight is utterly ordinary. It often seems like the majority of Americans are either obese or on a diet or both. But my father's weight problem never feels ordinary to me. Instead, it feels sad and specific and incredibly complicated. The part I feel most confused by is what my role in the situation should be. When I try to get my father to eat better, is it an act of love or is it just nagging? And if it's nagging, isn't it justified when so much is at stake? Not only does my dad face serious health risks like a heart attack or stroke, but he also has trouble with his back, gets cramps in his legs, and is easily winded. He also sleep apnea, which means that to regulate his breathing at night, he uses what looks like a beige scuba mask attached by a tube to an air machine. All of this would be enough to make me worry, but I also am bothered by something else. When people meet my father for the first time, I'm afraid that all they see is a fat man. You know when you're on a plane and you see an obese guy heading down the aisle and you're hoping he isn't coming for the seat next to yours, and then he does stop at your row and he sits down beside you and maybe he needs to ask the flight attendant for a seat belt extension, and you're either cringing or trying not to cringe as he spills over the armrest into your space. I don't like it that the man you're having those feelings about is my father. Here's my dad on a typical evening at home. He's sitting at the kitchen table opening the mail while my mom cooks dinner. Even if my dad weren't big, he'd stand out. He's loud and he likes to tell jokes and stories. He genuinely loves doing things for other people. He'll invite you over for dinner if he suspects you're lonely or take soup to you when you're sick. He's a volunteer on about 15 boards, which is actually fewer than he used to be on. And he works as an investment adviser. He's incredibly busy, which is one reason he eats too much. It's a coping mechanism. And I guess it's when somebody else would take a drink, smoke a cigarette, kick at the cat, whatever kind of not very productive and wholly irrelevant response. This is nothing that I pre-plan. My family members deal with my dad's weight in different ways. The one person who never nags him is my mother, who is perpetually optimistic. My father appreciates this. If I've been dieting, she'll say-- within the first three or four hours-- I think you're already beginning to look a little bit thinner. My two sisters ask about my dad's diets and exercise, but they don't push it. My brother P.G. and I are considered the confrontational ones. It especially gets under our skin when my dad kids himself about what he's eating. You can't knock someone when they believe something's true. It's kind of like, well, OK, I'm not going to have rib roast for lunch. I'm having lobster. It came from the sea. And it's this natural food. But when you dip it in a mayonnaise sauce, it's like, I'm having lobster and half a jar of mayonnaise. And that's not so healthy anymore. Recently, we went out for breakfast and P.G. and my dad got into it. Here is a 55-year-old man in his own kitchen. I go to get something out of the ice box and P.G.-- what is he, 17 years old-- says, I'm going to call Curtis. He calls his 26-year-old sister in Iowa to tell her that I've been eating-- it's like I've been stealing money or snorting cocaine. All right. Let me put this story in context. The way things went down is that this was after he'd just gotten home from dinner and he decided he wanted to have some Parmesan walnut spread. Right after dinner. It's none of your business. Actually, I feel like it is our business, like my father has made it our business for my whole life. I remember going to the track with my dad and my sister Tiernan when I was six or seven, to walk with him in the morning. Even then I knew two things: that the goal was for him to lose weight and that I was part of a larger family campaign to make it happen. And where are we going for lunch? What do you want to eat? You want to go to the Cactus Pear? I feel like Cactus Pear might-- Taste delicious? It might-- would you get that cheese and shrimp thing? Sure. My dad and I are driving around doing errands when the subject of lunch comes up. In my family, the cheese and shrimp dish at Cactus Pear is somewhat legendary. And I'm not sure if I was asking my father if he would get it because it's oily and I didn't want him to, or because it tastes wonderful and I was hoping he'd share it with me. This is the major conflict I feel about my dad's weight. I hate the fact that he's so heavy and I love eating with him. In situations like this one, I try to put us on the right track. But maybe I don't try as hard as I could. Actually, I wonder if there's a Bob Evans. There's a delicious salad I had at Bob Evans. If it's a truly healthy salad, I'll go. But if it's a fake healthy salad with like-- It has red onions, fresh pineapple, fresh strawberries, grilled chicken, different kind of salad greens, blue cheese, did I say that? What ended up happening was a worst case scenario. We went to an Indian buffet. You know the phrase, all you can eat? Well, my family takes it literally. Recently, I told my brother P.G. that I thought the definition of a good meal was when you had to unbutton your pants afterward. P.G. said he thought it was when your pants unbutton themselves. And this is my family's dirty little secret. For us, eating is practically a sport. We bribe each other with food, and we definitely compete over food. Here's my brother, PG. Sometimes-- and I feel like this is where Daddy is not necessarily far and away the most guilty-- sometimes Mommy will bring over a salad dressed and there will be a lot of avocado sitting on top and blue cheese. And there'll be this sixth sense among maybe-- let's just say you, me and daddy-- of like I need to get to that salad first so I can get all of the avocado. And when you're actually having a conversation with another family member, out of the eye in the back of your head you'll be checking out the salad bowl as another member of the family takes salad from it, to make sure they're not taking too much avocado. And if they do, you'll definitely call them on it. When we're not consuming a meal, we're probably planning when we next will or holding a postmortem on a meal we just finished, deconstructing it course by course. Which brings us to the really tough question about my father's weight: how can our favorite activity, the thing that truly brings us together as a family, be so wrong? Sometimes I think we should just give in to what makes my father happy. I do. I had a good day and I ate carefully all the way through. I had a little bit of turkey for lunch. I had cereal for breakfast and a banana. I had lots of water. I exercised. And I had salad for dinner. Before bed, my dad makes his nightly call to Doris. When he first met Doris, she told him if he missed a night she'd call him first thing the next morning and wake up the whole family. The market? You pay too much attention. Just get me thin and stop worrying. I know. We'll talk tomorrow. Take care. Bye. So I think a good starting place might be the fact that I feel like you just totally glossed over what you ate today. Like when you said that you had a salad for dinner, it had blue cheese in it, or that it was what I would describe as generously dressed. Well, I didn't do the dressing. Yeah, I would say it was not a particularly dietetic salad. But what I think probably-- and that's of course, part of the issue-- that I am not altogether realistic about portions. But I would guess, essentially to think about it, that I think I had less than one ounce of blue cheese. Now that's more than no blue cheese. But it's not like eating-- which I could also have done-- eight ounces of blue cheese. Of course, I also didn't mention what I had at the reception I went to at 5 o'clock today. I hadn't thought about that. They had really quite big, delicious shrimp. And it was a fellow's retirement party, so I figured he wouldn't be retiring again probably. So I had several shrimp. But again, I didn't have any mayonnaise or anything like that, I just used cocktail sauce, which is basically ketchup and horseradish. See, I've got a whole ability to rationalize, to deal with any-- I probably ate about 12 large shrimp. I mean, they weren't as big as your fist. But they were certainly-- they were not shrimpy shrimp. And maybe there were a few more than 12. Maybe it was 14 or 16. My dad has been meeting with Doris for seven months now. And these days, even she's showing signs of discouragement. She must know he's not following her recommendations. And I'm guessing she knows he doesn't tell her the whole truth about what he eats. After losing and gaining several times, my father is down a total of 12 pounds, which is two pounds less than he'd lost in the first month with her. Recently, she told my father that because she attracts clients through word of mouth, the fact that he's lost so little weight makes him a bad advertisement for her services. The situation is basically impossible because all of us want such contradictory things. My dad wants us to leave him alone and he wants to please us. My siblings and I want him to be healthy and we want him to enjoy the food he loves. At every level, our wishes conflict. No wonder he continues to pay Doris, even though she gives him advice that he doesn't take. She's a kind of inoculation against the rest of us. He can point to her and say, look I'm trying, now leave me alone. By seeing Doris, he's giving us what we want. And I think that's what he wants most of all, maybe even more than he wants to lose weight. Curtis Sittenfeld. Our production manager, Todd Bachmann, invited me to the Alzheimer's wedding and did some of the interviews there. You know 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 by Torey Malatia, who wants you to remember just one thing from today's program. Please, just one thing. Martin Waldseemuller. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. P R I, Public Radio International.
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Nothing prepares you for what the border between Israel and the West Bank can look like. In the town of [UNINTELLIGIBLE] on the Israeli side, there's a bedroom community that looks like it was airlifted from Scottsdale, Arizona. Rows of houses with white stucco walls and red roofs and yards where you could see plastic slides and other kids' toys. And then a perfectly paved street, and then on the other side of the street, a wire fence and some no man's land, then an electrified fence, then more no man's land, and then a tall, concrete wall with sentry posts and armed Israeli soldiers. An 18 year old who lives on the street told me that even here, where she sees the barricades that protect her every day, she tries to ignore what's on the other side. I don't think I think about it very much of it. When I hear things in the news, yeah, it worries me and all that. But I live my life. What's the point of thinking about it? There's a bumper sticker a Tel Aviv advertising writer made up a few months after the current wave of violence began in Israel. It says [SPEAKING HEBREW]. Which has the same sad double meaning in Hebrew that it does in English. Roughly, give it to them, and there will be peace in Israel. That is, give up the Territories to the Palestinians and there will be peace in Israel. And then also-- The other meaning, give them back is like, show them that we're the best, so we're stronger. Like, we'll give it to them. Well, yes. Hit them back. That's a complete contradiction. Either you give it back or you hit them back. It is, it is. But we suffer from some kind of schizophrenia, I think, nowadays. And it's not just Israelis who are feeling schizophrenic nowadays. Sitting in a cafe in Ramallah, Rula Hamadani goes back and forth, trying to make sense of what to feel about the collapse of the peace process. I never thought Oslo was right. And then I decided, like, come on, Rula, it's a chance to dream. It's not good enough, but it might work. When I was younger, I never met an Israeli in my life. I never had an Israeli friend. But it's between the two intifadas, like, I had to leave Israeli friends. I don't know. The peace process gave us something, but it seems the peace process also took back everything. Took back the friends, took back, like, the good days they had together. And it's gone. Tom Segev, an Israeli journalist and historian, says people are confused because for nearly a decade, Israelis, at least, thought there would be peace. Israelis thought this more than Palestinians. And then peace evaporated. And their confusion even shows up in the polls. Their entries are completely contradictory. You ask people, do you support the establishment of a Palestinian state? Yes, I do. Do you support the reoccupation of the West Bank? Yes, I do. Do you support the dismantlement of the settlements? Yes, I do that support that also. So this is very strange situation where Israel doesn't know what to do. We are doing things which don't make much sense. We let a 16 year old suicide bomber dictate the whole agenda of the Middle East. He blows himself up in Tel Aviv, we go and occupy Ramallah. Is it good for us to occupy Ramallah? It's probably not. But we do it, because what else should we do? Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, stories from Israel and the West Bank. We all hear the ongoing, never-ending news reports from the region, which just seem to get worse and worse, and we wanted to take a moment and step back. It's been nearly two years since the peace process collapsed-- two years in which each side has done terrible things together. And we wanted to understand what that's done to people, and if anybody's feeling any hope. I was in Israel with two of our regular contributors, Nancy Updike and Adam Davidson. Nancy did our stories from the West Bank. Adam and I traveled around Israel. And we begin our program with Nancy. Curfew is how Palestinians live now. The Israeli army is in the streets, and if you go outside, day or night, you can be shot. Indoors it's just boring, and debilitating in a way I hadn't expected. In the middle of a Tuesday afternoon in Ramallah, I needed to get off the street, and ended up at a TV studio. There were mattresses all over the floor, maybe 10 people living there. Because of curfew, they couldn't get home. We were all stuck. Everyone sat around in the kitchen smoking, and then at some point, one of the guys asked me, "You want to watch Riverdance?" I wasn't sure I'd heard right. --the land. They carry us over the ocean in dance and song. For half an hour, we watched Riverdance. Outside, the streets were empty and silent. No cars, no people. It looked like the carcass of a city. I'd come into Ramallah that morning from Jerusalem, a normal, bustling city, and it was like leaving earth and stepping onto a planet where gravity was working differently. Everyone was moving very slowly. I could feel my energy and purposefulness draining out of me. There is nowhere to go and no way to get there. Qasem Ali runs the television production company where I ended up. For ten days I have been in these offices. Actually doing nothing. Watching television. And even the newspaper, you don't get it. A little bit degrading. Myself, I'm, just like now, I'm feeling [? withdrawing. ?] Spending so much time in the room by myself, doing nothing. You are not in the mood even to read. You don't want to talk to people. And you don't want, you know, to socialize. Qasem smoked Camel after Camel as we talked. He was handsome, with dark hair and a beard going gray. He leaned his head on his hand as he talked. He seemed exhausted. You know, first day, second day, you can adapt and do something. But then, you feel like your life is worthless, and your time is worthless. And you get to the point, like, you started hating the life. What do you want to do for tomorrrow, or after tomorrow? The days become the same. Without taste. You know, you're fighting this kind of mood. Sometimes you are not capable of fighting it, because you don't see the signs of it. And this is how, like, really, curfew as punishment. It's collective punishment. This phrase, "collective punishment," was uttered by every Palestinian I talked to. I figured it was some description that had just caught on. I didn't realize until I got back that "collective punishment" is a legal term the UN uses. It means punishing a group for the crimes of individuals, and it's illegal under the Geneva Convention. Palestinians are trying to make the case in the foreign press that curfew, even though it's mostly nonviolent, is still a crime, punishing all of them for the actions of suicide bombers. Before I came to Ramallah, I pictured a bombed-out place with crude buildings and occasional gunfire in the streets. But it's not like that at all. It's a middle-class city with cafes, and car dealerships, and women in tight shirts, and signs in English for ice cream and internet service. Now Ramallah's 40,000 residents are trapped in their homes and offices, waiting. Curfew is lifted arbitrarily, without notice, and reimposed a few hours later, also without notice. Days go by when it's not lifted at all. Cooped up, not knowing when they'll be let out, people get on each other's nerves. Adults bicker. Kids get restless and cranky. Yeah. Sometimes I feel like it's just too much to survive it here. I miss to see movies. I miss to go for dinner with my friends, with my wife, to [UNINTELLIGIBLE], to see theater, I miss, you know, like just to walk in the park, and to go have a beer in bars and coffee shops. I love coffee shops. To go in and read. And I miss every detail for me. But then I think, my place is here. I think there's a law that every story about Palestinian has to include a scene at a checkpoint, usually with a woman crying and a 15-year-old kid who says at the end, if this keeps up, I might become a suicide bomber, too. We're not going to do that scene. Though it is true that lots of Palestinians would like to see the end of Israel. A poll this June said that 51% of Palestinians believe the goal of the current intifada is to liberate all of historic Palestine. Meaning not just the West Bank and Gaza, but all of Israel. That same poll showed 68% of Palestinians support suicide bombings. Back during the peace process, support for suicide bombings was around 20%. Most of us watching this conflict from the United States want to believe that moderate Palestinian voices are out there. US policy is banking on it. So we decided to go out and find those people. I should say I'm very disappointed because there's no sound. This is a construction site. We shouldn't be able to talk and hear each other right now. Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American who is building the largest shopping center in the West Bank, a $10 million project that's just about finished. But for weeks, almost no workers have been able to get to the site. Sam is trying not to dwell on that. This is the main entrance to the building. People would walk into here. And to the left, they have the option of going up the escalator and going to the first floor of the building, or walking into the lobby towards the panoramic elevator, or they would walk straight ahead into our supermarket that we will run and operate, or they can walk into the right, which will be a fast food restaurant. This building is just like Sam-- big and ambitious. When the front of the building is put on-- and here's a sign of confidence in a city occupied by an army-- it's going to be a giant wall of glass, two stories high, arched. Sam grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, and came to the West Bank with his family for the first time when he was 10 years old. He returned every summer after that, taught himself Arabic, was president of the Palestinian Students Group in college. He was always looking for a way to move to the West Bank. He finally did in 1995 at the start of the Oslo peace process. He believes in two states-- one Israeli, one Palestinian, side by side. For the last three years, he's been overseeing the construction of this building. With the recent siege, of course, that's become a little complicated. This actually created an unusual business problem for Sam. What you find is people who are coming to try to rent now, because they know that they'll be able to get a better deal. Prospective tenants are angling for a better deal on the rent, because as one guy pointed out, there are tanks in the streets, and no one knows what disaster is going to come next. I mean, I was telling him that this is going to be the hottest spot in Ramallah, and he was saying that it's too close to the tanks that are next to-- about half a kilometer from us. So it's up to us now to just delay as much as possible until we're able to negotiate and better leverage our excellent building. Sam estimates he's only two months of solid work away from finishing the building. He speaks confidently as we walk around the scaffolding, boxes of tile and light fixtures, and wooden pallets. But in his hand, he's working a set of worry beads. We go down to his office in the basement of the building and one of his staff brings us coffee. Wherever you go in the West Bank, people are going to bring you coffee, usually in these little cups on a tray. I don't drink coffee, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that I should just take it when it's offered and have a polite sip. I take my sip, and Sam tells me how he moved here to help create the first Palestinian-owned private phone company in the West Bank and Gaza, and why, after moving halfway around the world and throwing his heart and soul into it, he quit. I resigned after seeing that the Palestinian Authority was dealing with this company, in my terms, as a little heavy-handed. So like what would they do that was heavy-handed? Well, one thing that happened after I got the company, if I can mention it, is they, for example, moved the entire cellular business into a separate subsidiary. Without shareholder knowledge, without shareholder approval. And to me, this was not creating confidence. When he says "this was not creating confidence," Sam is way underplaying what happened. Which is that the bigwigs at his company, with the help of the Palestinian Authority, looted the company so they could make a pile of money, leaving smaller shareholders in the dust. They did this by splitting off the most lucrative part of the company secretly and out of the blue, and putting it into a separate company, whose only shareholders were the bigwigs and the Palestinian Authority. The Authority did this, Sam says, at the same time that it was crossing its heart in front of the UN, saying it was giving up its private investments so Palestinians would be able to trust that their leaders were more focused on public service than on making a buck. But even though Sam was incensed to the point of quitting by the maneuvers of the Palestinian Authority, he describes the experience in the most charitable way possible. It's not something that's out of the ordinary. Most third-world countries that privatize a sector have a hard time removing the government's role in that sector. Anywhere in the world. I mean, in Jordan as well. The Palestinian community has been led, since the Oslo accords, by an institution that never had experience or training on state-building. Like the majority of the citizens of the world never dealt in building a state. Neither have we. They had experience and training on resisting Israel's occupation. So when they were put into the chair of having to do both, I think that they were not able to deal with the latter. And that was frustrating. Having said that, I'm one of the maybe few Palestinians who actually read Oslo, every part of Oslo, before I came. So when I came, I knew that there was a tremendous amount of complication built into the framework that was coming to live in. Putting above that the continuation of Israeli aggressions, whether it's the expansion of settlements and creation of new settlements, and constraining our population's movement, which required resistance. I tend to understand why this set of leadership was not able to do both tasks at the same time. There's an energy about Sam that I saw in few other Palestinians I talked to, that I've seen in few people, period. A cheerful relentlessness. Things that would sap other people's strength and will-- corruption, curfew, a tank outside his house for days-- seemed only to inconvenience him. Bad news is just additional information. Abruptly we have to leave. Curfew is being reimposed in ten minutes, an hour earlier than anyone had expected. As Sam is driving us through the city, cars are doing crazy moves to get home faster. U-turns in the middle of the street, signaling to each other who should go first with little honks, because the traffic lights are all destroyed and the streets in some places are such a chewed-up mess that people have to go around the chunks of concrete, or go over them very slowly so they don't break an axle. All of a sudden, two Israeli jeeps with loudspeakers on them are heading toward us. One on our side of the street, going against traffic, and another one on the other side. They will shoot. They will shoot if you don't abide by the curfew right now, they're going to shoot. That's what he's saying in Arabic. As we drive by, my adrenaline floods, and I think, we could die here, right here in Sam's olive green Hyundai. If Israelis walk through their lives now, thinking, is this the cafe where I'll get blown up? How about this? This bus? Is it OK, or should I just walk? This moment in Ramallah, with curfew coming down, may be the Palestinian equivalent to that feeling. What ordinary activity will I be doing when I'm killed? There's no time to talk about it. Sam can't take me all the way to the checkpoint. He apologizes. He has to get home. He flags me a taxi and speeds off. Act Two. Here and There in the Land of Israel. I traveled through Israel with Adam Davidson, a regular contributor to our show, who is half-Israeli. Growing up, he'd visit Israel every summer. He speaks Hebrew. He's been 19 times. And to get a sense of what it's like these days for Israelis, how things have changed recently with the end of the peace process, we talked to strangers and to people who Adam is known for years. And driving from place to place, we ended up talking a lot about his grandmother, who moved to Palestine in the '30s, was part of that pioneer generation that created the state. My grandmother was an old-school Zionist, and when I was a teenager, that seemed like the greatest thing in the world to be. She told me being a Zionist been having a grand dream and putting that above petty daily concerns. It meant redeeming not only the Jewish people, but the entire world, by becoming the planet's first truly enlightened nation. She described people back in the '30s and '40s who worked on farms, or they built banks and schools, and put everything they had into this collective dream of a proud new state. We just spent two weeks in Israel, and as you might expect, we could not find a single person who still lives that way. Take Adam's best friend in Israel, Liat. She and her friends are pretty typical of people who live in Tel Aviv. Ira and I go out with Liat and some of her friends one night. They agree to speak English for our microphones. It is an utterly familiar kind of evening. Liat's boyfriend is a musician, and he tells me about his home recording setup. Everyone chats about their vacations. Ayelah tries to convince Liat, for the hundredth time, to dump her cosmetologist, Klara, whom Ayelah used to go to herself. She made me feel bad! I told her, listen. I don't want to pay you more. I don't care if I neglect my face. So are you going to break up with her? I don't know yet. It's difficult for her! It's difficult. I hear them every week, they talk about that, that Klara. And they always say, yeah, we're going to leave her, we're going to leave her. That's never happened. I manage. They want more than anything for Israel to be just another boring country like Norway or Belgium. My grandmother would think this was a repudiation of everything she ever believed in, though she would have been very polite about it. Of course all these people know that they are in a country at war. When you live here, you split yourself in two. You have knowledge of violence, and you decide at some level that it is not going to touch your life. Even when the conflict strikes close to home. For instance, a few weeks ago, Liat and her boyfriend Afir were about to leave for a movie when a bomb went off a block away. We heard an explosion, and they said on the news that it happened in Biyalik Coffee Shop, which is a place that I usually sit with my friends. I started shaking, I think, for a few minutes, and then I was very afraid. I felt like something crawled into my house. I happened to call Liat right after that happened, and she told me that she completely came apart. She was crying and she couldn't breathe and she fell to the floor. And then the news reported that the explosion hadn't been at Biyalik Coffee Shop, but at the cafe directly next door, a place Liat and her friends don't go to. And when it just moved two meters aside, I felt, OK. They still missed me. They still don't blow up places that I like to go to. I'm safe, in a way. But it's stupid. When I tell you this, I see it's stupid. In a way, you try to find anything you can rely on, just to give yourself any kind of security, because you want to live your life. What's happened since my grandmother's time is that more and more Israelis just want to live their lives. This is a huge change. And to understand Israel today, you have to understand this change. Back in the '60s when pollsters asked Israelis about their hopes for themselves and for the state, most people said that their personal lives were very restricted, but they had huge hopes for the state of Israel. It was doing great. Today it's the exact reverse. This is Asher Arian, a pollster at the Israel Democracy Institute. The exact reverse. The state is in bad shape. Personally, however, I'm doing all right. So this is a measure of where are your hopes, where are your dreams? And the dreams are clearly in personal achievement. The state is no longer the vehicle with which you feel good about yourself or the future. Most Israelis over 30 can tick off the reasons this changed. American consumerism swept through Israel just like it swept through every other country on earth, and Israel started doing things that seemed less noble and heroic. There was the 1973 war, which Israel nearly lost because of government bungling. There was the invasion of Lebanon, which turned into a kind of protracted Vietnam for them, which spanned two decades. And for some people, though definitely not all, there was the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which began in 1967. Even to Israelis, Israel seemed less heroic. Politics, which used to be a source of a sense of meaning and coherence for us, so long as we felt that we were morally in the right-- were just dragged from under our feet. In his book The Hunched Over Generation, a young writer named Gadi Taub argued that this was why he and other people who grew up after the 1967 war turned to their private lives. Because politics no longer gave them a feeling that they were part of a great, noble mission. What happened is that a whole generation had to turn a blind eye to politics. And so we sort of built a shield, saying, politics is something that happens over there. We are going to, you know, have earrings and pierce our belly buttons and have tattoos and just ignore politics altogether. Listen, I have to stop you. I need something to eat. I have to eat-- Yeah, can we order coffee and a lot of cakes? Which brings us back to Liat and her friends. After dinner came dessert. Chocolate mousse, Bavarian tart, cheesecake. If anything, the hopelessness and violence of the last few years since the peace process collapsed has pushed Liat and her friends even further away from politics. You read the newspaper? I don't read the newspaper every day. It's like six months ago, the economic crisis and the bombs and everything-- me personally, I decided not to read the newspaper, not to read interviews, not watching TV, nothing. I go to the beach. I make meditation. I left my shrink, because when you go to shrink, you always talk about problems. We should be clear that when Iran says this, it means something different here than it does in the United States. At the same time that Israelis are withdrawing into their own lives, it's still just taken for granted that they have a special obligation to their country. For a month every year, Iran gives up his medication, puts on a uniform, and does reserve service, like most Israeli men. In fact, since the Second Intifada began, reservists have shown up in record numbers. Thousands showed up who weren't even called. Back in America, we had heard about refuseniks, who won't fight in the West Bank and Gaza. But once we get to Israel, it became clear that they are very few-- in the hundreds. Still very marginal. This might sound crazy, given the news this week, but it's safer in Israel than you think. Several Israelis made a point of telling us that more people die in car accidents than die in suicide bombings or other attacks. And many people told us they try to ignore the danger and go about their lives. Still, it's been 42 suicide bombings plus other fatal attacks for two years. Something every few days. And many people, especially parents, are more freaked out. It's also changed Israeli politics. Imagine if bombs went off in American cities every few days, what that would do to our politics. A block east of my grandmother's 1930s apartment, we came across one of the oldest cafes in Tel Aviv. [UNINTELLIGIBLE], coffee, tamar. Tamal? Tamar. Tamar Cafe has been a left-wing hangout for more than 70 years, since my grandmother lived on the street. The Labor Party newspaper used to be next door. Today the place is like a shrine to Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel during the start of the Oslo peace process, who was slain by a right-wing Israeli Jew. There are huge posters and paintings and drawings of him inside the cafe, and in the windows facing the street. And then that poster over there, lo what? [SPEAKING HEBREW], we won't forget. But [SPEAKING HEBREW]-- We won't forgive. Wow. That is intense. We won't forgive Netanyahu. That is amazing. Many left-wingers privately accuse Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the leader of the right-wing Likud Party, of creating the angry anti-peace atmosphere that led to Rabin's assassination. But I've never seen a poster or anything so clearly and publicly blaming Netanyahu for Rabin's death. When we go inside, we're told that the place used to be filled, surprise, with left-wingers. Now the cafe is empty, except for three men in the corner playing backgammon, who say that we'd be hard-pressed to find even one leftist these days who would stand by his old peacenik believes. I was a member of the Labor Party for many years. Very big supporter of the peace process. And today, I'm more close to the most extreme right that to the left. This is Sa'ar Arit, 36, a lawyer. With him is Yugal Saraf, a 58-year-old with lively eyes and a kind face, the perennial winner of backgammon games here. One of the biggest ways the two years of intifada have changed Israel is now nearly everyone agrees on one important point. Everyone blames Arafat and the Palestinians for the collapse of peace process. There are nuances to this. Like leftists will remind you how Israel kept doing lousy things to ruin the peace process during the '90s, like building new Jewish settlements in the West Bank. And people on the right will say that Israel did nothing wrong, were simply prudent in the face of Palestinian violations of the Oslo accords. But everyone agrees on how the peace process ended. At Camp David in 2000, Arafat looked at the Israeli proposals, said no, and offered no counter-proposals. Then the bombings came. But as a result, Israelis have a kind of moral certitude that they are in the right. They're united on this in a way that perhaps they have never been united in their history. The attitude is, we tried everything. We were reasonable. We were generous. In the end, they didn't want peace. Even Yugal, who wants to give the Palestinians every benefit of the doubt, shakes his head when he talks about how the peace process ended. And on that point, I blame the Palestinians or Arafat, which he was the leader, not to grab the opportunity. He could have said "no, but" something. But he said just "no." No means no. He just walked away. Walked away. So he brought this political situation to be hopeless. Today only 20% of Israelis believe that Palestinians want peace, according to polls. At the height of the Oslo peace process, two-thirds believed it. The Palestinians doesn't want peace. They want to destroy Israel. So you had some sympathy for the Palestinians before. I have sympathy. I have sympathy today. Everybody had sympathy. They lost all their support within Israel. And that's their tragedy, because they won't get it back. For a month every year, Sa'ar is an infantry man in the reserves, and he patrols in Ramallah, and Jenin, and Hebron, and other towns in the West Bank. He says he lost hope that the Palestinians want peace in October 2000, when two Israeli soldiers, older guys, reservists like him, got lost in Ramallah and were attacked by a mob in one of the most notorious incidents in the intifada. And about 100 to 200 Palestinians tore them apart. And I felt that that was the breaking point for me. I thought that the Palestinians are animals. Ah. I want to say something. It is a bit simple-minded. But it's true, what he says in Ramallah. This is where we saw the photos of them holding their hands out the window, their bloody hands. But the main question you should ask yourself is, how do people get that way? There's no people who are animals, and some are not animals. So they got this way by constantly being brainwashed that we are vicious and cruel and Satanic and God knows what. They get affected. And they could be good boys. This is not their nature. It's propaganda. It's brainwashing. This can be changed. I mean, they're animals. But three years ago, you didn't believe that. They didn't become animals in three years. Yeah. But what they did in the last year and a half broke everything. Yugal points at a man sitting in the cafe's outdoor table. There is an Arab Israeli sitting there. You might want to talk to him. He a friend of yours? Akram, yes. You know him, too? Yeah, I know him. He an animal? No. He's not an animal. I'll tell you why. He doesn't have the power. Oh, he could be an animal if he had the power. I'm telling you. If tomorrow the Arab countries will conquer Israel, it will change him in a minute. And I'm sorry to say this, but-- a leftist. Sure, I'm a leftist. That's the leftists of Israel today. This is where the leftists come to. No longer advancing a peace process, they were arguing over whether the Arabs were born animals or were taught to be animals. This is my cousin David. He's standing in a hallway of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, talking on one cell phone, when his other cell phone rings. He answers it. David runs the office and political operations for a conservative member of parliament. And while the left might feel history has passed it by, David and his party, the Likud, are totally energized right now. They always opposed the peace process, and now it's dead. Their man Ariel Sharon is the prime minister, with the highest approval ratings in Israeli history. Finally, the army has struck decisively in the territories. And at last, Israelis agree that Arafat can't be trusted. This is all perfect for David, who got into politics in 1993 because he was alarmed at the newly-signed Oslo treaty. You feel good, because you know that after ten years, what you said would happen, happened. Meaning that the whole Oslo accord will collapse, that the violence will return. And after ten years of the other side, the media, the public figures, and all of the left said that you don't know what you're talking about, and suddenly, the reality comes and you see that it is true-- that gives you a good feeling. Because you will know that you were right. We spent a day at the Knesset. Every time we tried to set up an interview with a member of a left wing party, we'd open the door, and there would be some older woman who looked like she'd been there since 1948, sitting alone, phones quiet. Then we'd head back to the right, to David, where there would be phones ringing, people visiting, a gaggle of clean-cut members of the Likudnik Young Guard, happy and excited and busy. David is constantly pulling one after another up to our microphones and cheerfully announcing, Here is somebody who would want an interview. He's very interesting. His name is Shimi ben David. He's assistant of the head of the Coalition, Mr. Ze'ev Boim. What's most surprising about watching them work is just how much of their attention, here in Israel's legislature, is focused on the United States. Of a staff of only four people, one of them is a specialist on the US Congress. On the desk of this member of Knesset, Yuval Steinitz, sits a business card from one US Congressman and a personal letter from another. On the day we visit, a delegation of a dozen US congressional aides drops by, as does former Republican presidential candidate, Gary Bauer. David orders Steinitz to put on a jacket for that one. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] jacket. Hi. How are you? Gary Bauer. Nice to meet you. Thank you for coming to us in such a difficult time. Very encouraging. My pleasure. I've been a strong supporter of Israel, but my week here makes my feelings on behalf of Israel even stronger. So I can't wait to get back to Washington and-- During their meeting, Steinitz urges Bauer to lobby Congress against advanced arms sales to Egypt and Syria. This is more involvement in u s affairs than the average Knesset member has. And part of it is simple political ambition-- to get press attention, to get ahead in national politics here. It's helpful to be seen as a player in US-Israeli relations. So it will be extremely important if you will succeed to encourage some of our, at least in friends, to visit us and [INAUDIBLE]. If you want to understand why the right-wing and Ariel Sharon are so popular right now, and if you want to hear just how angry Israelis are, just visit a bus stop in Jerusalem. More bombs have exploded in Jerusalem than any other Israeli city. This 15-year-old in braces with pink rubber bands and one of the long skirts worn by the religious was waiting for a bus to the settlement her parents moved to from the US and was more or less typical of everyone we talked to at the bus stop. First of all, I would kill Arafat. And we are not the ones who have to suffer. This is our country. We don't have to give it up for them. If they want to live with us, they have to accept our conditions. We don't have to be suckers, and like, get down on our knees for us. Because the fact is that before this whole peace agreement started, they were afraid of us. OK? They were afraid of us. No one threw stones. Everyone was afraid to walk in the street. And since this started, you know, we give them, like you know, there's a saying. You're give them one finger and they want the whole hand. Do you think that eventually there should be two states, or do you think Israel shouldn't give up the Territories? Israel shouldn't give up one inch of territory. This is our country. We fought for it. We won. That's it! You know? Stop being babies. Or do you want New York to be given back to the English or something? You know? It's stupid. It's just that they hate us so badly, they want to do anything to kill us. Like the kids. They learn how to shoot guns. They learn in school how to hate Jews. I mean, my parents didn't bring me up that way. I wasn't brought up hate Arabs. But you do hate them. I hate the people who want to kill me, yes. If there's one single person in [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and Ramallah, which I highly doubt there is. But if there's one single person there who is truly pro-Israel and pro-Jewish, then sure, I have nothing against them. But the fact is that the majority of all these people, they're murderers, you know? When we first arrived in Israel, an American TV cameraman told us that when you're in the Mideast, you constantly find yourself in social situations with people who are thoughtful, and funny, and incredibly gracious, and you hang out with them for hours-- the nicest people in the world-- and then they come out with some hateful comment that leaves you sort of stunned. This happens all the time, he says. At a party with Adam's Sephardic relatives, that is more or less what happened. One person after another tells us we have to kill the Arabs. We have to smack them down. The Arabs do not understand anything else. Then we ate cake and sang happy birthday to a one-year-old. Surprisingly, the one person at the party who is at all sympathetic to the Palestinians is Egal, the father of the one-year-old birthday girl. He just returned from his reserve service in the West Bank in an elite combat unit. He was one of the Israeli soldiers you saw on TV, fighting at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He tells me he thinks Israel is to blame for the anger Palestinians feel against them. We didn't treat them well enough, so we drove them to the First Intifada. And that's led to the other events. I know the West Bank and Gaza Strip since I first came in in the First Intifada. And we know the ordinary civilians, they don't have high demands. They want to provide their family. That's all. To feel secure. I believe there will be someday a Palestinian country. I think it's going to be a democratic country. The first democratic Arab country. In fact, every Israeli we talked to who served in the West Bank or Gaza tells us the same thing Egal says-- that their military service convinced them that Israel should eventually give up the territories. Even lots of hawks, right-wingers like Adam's cousin David, now say that Israel should someday get out of the territories. 80% of Israelis support some form of separation. 50% are still in favor of an independent Palestinian state. Ten years ago, this would have been seen as nearly traitorous by most Israelis. There was a fundamental change of opinion caused by the peace process. So at the same time that Israel has become so much more hawkish towards the Palestinians, it's as if the hawk has ingested a dove. Still, nobody expects peace to arrive anytime soon. Even if a peace treaty were signed, only 22% of the country believes it would actually end the conflict. So now, instead of readying themselves for peace, Israelis are adjusting themselves to the lack of it. Here's my friend Liat. Every year I say, oh my God. How I thought life could be different. And I see it's not. And I am losing something. I'm more mature, I'm more strong, maybe. But I'm losing something. Maybe I could keep it in a difference life. Losing what? I don't know. Something naive. Something with hope. In a way, I'm getting tough. Each year I'm tougher. And it's not always good for you to be tough. Lots of people told us they didn't expect peace in their lifetime. Us Americans have to say, this is the main thing that we really did not understand before we got to Israel-- that Israelis are prepared for the idea that it will continue like this for years. They'd rather have peace, but they'll settle for what they have now. A war that produces fewer casualties than car accidents. A war where they dominate and control their enemy. A war, they'll tell you, that's unlike the wars of 1948 and '67 and '73 because it does not threaten Israel's existence. We came to Israel thinking what a lot of foreigners think-- that there's this great middle ground between the Israelis and the Palestinians, that the majority of reasonable people on both sides could work out a deal, and that the only problem is the small percentage of extremists on either side. After this trip, we don't feel so hopeful. The two sides are still far apart. The most generous Israeli offer is still short of the minimum demands of most Palestinians. And as the violence continues, the people in the middle are becoming more like the extremists. Coming up. Palestinian moderates and Palestinian moderation. A guide for the perplexed in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. At the beginning of June, before President Bush's speech, Palestinians were asked the following question in a poll. Which Palestinian personality do you trust the most? Yasser Arafat was number one, with 25%. Next was the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, with 8%. And then there was 24% who said they didn't trust anybody. That "trust nobody" group was too small to be measured at the beginning of Oslo, but it's grown ever since, until finally it's caught up to Arafat. In other words, there's a space opening in Palestinian politics. Arafat has always warned that any space he doesn't fill will be filled by Hamas. But what if there were a third choice? Not the corrupt autocracy of the Palestinian Authority and not the suicide bombing fundamentalism of Hamas? Since I arrived, I'd been hearing a lot about a man named Mustafa Barghouti, a doctor who heads one of the biggest medical relief organizations in the occupied territories, and who's been speaking out a lot lately on political issues. I went to Ramallah to meet him. I went with Rula Halawani, a Palestinian photojournalist who signed on to be my guide and translator. At the checkpoint, she asked people if they'd heard of Mr. Barghouti. Of course, everybody knows him. Who doesn't know him? [SPEAKING ARABIC] He's the best, he's just the best. [SPEAKING ARABIC] He's a very good guy. [SPEAKING ARABIC] [SPEAKING ARABIC] He's a good man. Very good man. Politically, Barghouti has two advantages that can also be disadvantages. First, he's been doing medical relief for over 20 years, and many people know him through that and love him for it. The downside is that many see him as a doctor, not a political figure. They don't even necessarily know what he believes in politically. Second, his distant cousin is Marwan Barghouti, a popular leader in Arafat's Fatah Movement who's in an Israeli jail now, charged with ordering suicide bombings. So the Barghouti name is one that people know and respect, but sometimes people confuse Mustafa with Marwan, or simply don't see any difference between the two, even though Mustafa preaches nonviolence while Marwan is more of a Malcolm X figure-- by any means necessary. All the Palestinians like Mustafa Barghouti and think he's a great guy. He does so much for the society. And also Marwan Barghouti. He's the same. The two of them. Which one does he agree with more? Which one--? [SPEAKING ARABIC] Believe in every guy who's honest and is straight and works for the Palestinians. Vitamin E, 600 milligrams. Mustafa Barghouti is on the phone when we get there. His organization, the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, gets medicine and basic care to people who can't make it to a hospital or clinic. They've been very busy under curfew. Barghouti is hard to keep up with. In one day he had two meetings, did five interviews, went to a demonstration, gave medicine to several people, and did more than one impromptu medical examination in the hallway on the way to his meetings. Which doctor saw her? This doctor. He doesn't know his name. And now he's showing the X-ray of the child. A father has stopped Barghouti in the hallway to show him his six-year-old daughter. She has terrible headaches, and she's had them for four months, he says. She cries a lot and sometimes she throws up. She's wearing a pink sweater and white sandals. He told him, you must have this test for her. It's urgent. And he wrote down MRI, CT scan of the brain. Yes. Yasser Arafat, in his recent scrambling to seem like a reformer, offered Barghouti a ministry. Barghouti turned him down. He has something bigger in mind. Six weeks ago, Barghouti and a few other community leaders launched what they called the Palestinian National Initiative. That rather bland name conceals a radical proposition. They want to create the first new political movement among Palestinians since Hamas emerged in the late 1980s. The First Intifada brought Hamas. Barghouti is trying to make the second bring real democracy. The National Initiative calls for immediate elections, run by somebody other than Arafat's election commission. Supervised by international observers, it calls for an end to suicide bombings and other attacks on Israeli civilians. Curfew's been lifted for a few hours, and Barghouti and some other representatives of nongovernmental organizations are staging a demonstration in Ramallah's main square. They're protesting curfews, closures, and the occupation. Maybe you can tell from how thin the chant is that there are only about 30 people at the demonstration, including Barghouti. Why do you think more people aren't joining the demonstration? Well, first of all, the timing is not very good. And as I told you, because many of them are busy. And also it needs better organization. But with time, this is our stand. This is like a beginning. It makes a position. It shows that civil society is against this oppression. It shows that there is nonviolent approach to struggle. And it will build up gradually. This gives people the impression that something can be done, and it is doable. Something can be done other than suicide bombings? Exactly. That there is a place, there is a space, and there is an effective nonviolence present, yes. Barghouti stands in the middle of the demonstrators, dressed simply in dark gray pants and a blue shirt with white pinstripes. He wears glasses. He's almost 50 and his face has the lines of a person who squints a lot, smiles a lot, and worries a lot. It's strange, but if you see him in a crowd of 30 people, even if he's not doing anything, you can tell he's the leader. He has that easy strength that makes people feel excited and relieved to see him. Oh, thank God he's here. He seems important. Too important, frankly, to be at an anemic rally in the middle of the day. He seems out of place. "Moderate" can mean a lot of things here. Among Palestinians, what it usually means is that they accept the premise of Oslo-- that someday there will be two states, side by side, with peace. And if you press these moderates-- and you don't have to press hard-- a lot of them will say, yeah, of course two states. And then in 20 or 30 years of peace, who knows? Maybe the balance of power will change. Maybe the two states will become one big democracy. A democracy, as any Israeli would quickly point out, where Jews would be in the minority. It would be the end of the Jewish state. Here's Barghouti's position. Two states. International presence. A complete Israeli withdrawal from West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Allowing Palestinians to have a sovereign state that is demilitarized. I want to demilitarize before the Israelis. I don't want to see weapons in our country. We've seen enough weapons in our life. That is a solution. That is a vision that is doable and achievable. And I even have a bigger vision I don't know if it would work, but it's a dream, maybe. I believe that one day, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine could be like a unified Benelux country. Benelux-- the loose federation of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The three countries, I mean, they need each other. They will have, the three together, bigger space. This will be the best solution of solving water problems. This will solve immediately the issue of refugees, because it will be free movement for everybody. And they will have a shared future and a shared vision. If the Israelis wanted to view this Benelux scheme in a glass half full sort of way, they could see it as similar to a plan former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres has floated in the past. On the other hand, they could choose to see it as a Trojan horse with the goal of eroding borders and flooding Israel with Palestinian refugees. A way of sneaking the destruction of Israel into the conversation rather than openly calling for it. Barghouti is in a meeting, so Rula and I are hanging out the window at his office, watching people hurry home before curfew. We're reading graffiti on the buildings across the street. The graffiti says-- OK. Put your ten fingers on the button that fires the gun. I don't know what you call it. The trigger The trigger, yeah. Put your ten fingers on the trigger. Hamas is more popular now than it's ever been. The latest polls show it running neck and neck with Arafat's Fatah movement. Both get around 25%. Hamas leaders are seen as incorruptible-- driven by commitment to Islam, not a desire for personal gain. Hamas also helps people rebuild homes that have been demolished by the Israelis, gives money to start small businesses, runs schools and youth centers. Hamas gained support for its suicide missions by making people's lives better. Barghouti believes he can take on Hamas and win, because his strengths are Hamas' strengths. He and the network of nongovernmental aid organizations he's part of. He's on the ground, helping people, every day, with medical care and other social services. He's also seen as not corrupt, as clean. His medical relief organization is nonprofit, all-volunteer, and gets audited regularly. a computer technician I met told me, you can tell he's claimed by the car he drives. A 1989 Opel Cadet. Palestinian Authority ministers drive Mercedes and BMWs. His Achilles' heel with Hamas is that they're religious. He's secular. He won't say whether he'll run for president or some other office in the January elections Arafat has promised. But Rula and I do a small survey anyway. At the checkpoint, we ask people who say they think Barghouti is a good man whether they would vote for him in an election. Their answers surprised us. Of course. What does he think of Arafat? Arafat is our father, Arafat is our symbol, and I would vote for Arafat if he runs for election again. If he was running and Mustafa Barghouti was running against him, who would he vote for? Arafat. Why? Nobody can do the job besides Yasser Arafat. Arafat is the symbol. He is the father of the Palestinian people. [SPEAKING ARABIC] Hamas? It's a good movement. If it was a choice between a Hamas person and Mustafa Barghouti, who would he pick? Hamas. Hamas? Why? [SPEAKING ARABIC] Because they believe in our religion, and everything they do is based on our religion. Barghouti ran for office before, in 1996, for a seat on the legislative council. He lost by a very narrow margin to Marwan Barghouti. The results were contested and widely seen as fixed. The time between now and January is an eternity, politically speaking. It's even possible that Arafat won't run. Almost anything can happen. Nancy Updike. He's the assistant of the head of the coalition, Mr. Ze'ev Boim. 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. I'm Ira Glass. OK, here is something that we did not expect. Check this out. This was recorded on a stage in Brooklyn, St. Francis College. To be or not to be, that is the question. Same month in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. To be or not to be, that is the question-- whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them. Same month, a professional company in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Public Theater. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them. In Colorado, at Camp Shakespeare, you can actually hear the sneakers of the teenaged Hamlet squeaking. Why do you go about to recover the wind of me? Oh my lord, if my duty be too bold-- And at the Bay Area Shakespeare Camp, presented by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, the kids put on a production that they have concocted that is made up entirely of death scenes from different Shakespeare plays. That seems because, um, kids love death scenes. No, no! The drink, the drink! O, my dear Hamlet, the drink, the drink! I am poisoned! [GAGGING] Eight-year-old Marissa Graham grabs her throat like a cat in a violent cartoon. Everyone in the production is eight, except for Polonius, who's six. The rest is silence. There's actually no way to tell how many productions of Hamlet are up in any given month. In summer 2002, when we first broadcast today's show and when we made these recordings, the American Theatre website listed 12 theaters doing Shakespeare's Hamlet, 11 productions of the play I Hate Hamlet, one production of something called Hamlet Dreams, and one theater doing the dreadful and feared Hamletmachine. Of course, Hamlet itself is kind of a weird play. The central character is in a situation that very few of us are ever going to find ourselves in. His uncle killed his father and then married his mother in order to become the king. The play is four hours long. The main conflict of the play is a guy debating, in long, complicated monologues, whether or not he should kill somebody. What is there in that for most of us to relate to? Unless, of course, we happen to be murderers. And what would the play be like if it were actually performed by murderers and other violent criminals? What would they see that the rest of us do not? Well, today on our program we answer that question. And the answer is, a lot. Over the course of six months, reporter Jack Hitt visited prisoners at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center-- which is a high-security prison-- from their first rehearsal to their last performance of Act V of Shakespeare's Hamlet. We're devoting our entire program today to the drama that he found there. Our program today, "Act V." We bring you what we believe is one of the most evocative productions of Shakespeare done anywhere in 2002, one you would have had a hard time getting tickets to-- it was only performed in prison. Here's Jack Hitt. The first thing they hand me when I pass through the thick iron doors is a tiny black box called a screamer. Pull the cord attached, and a phalanx of armed guards will sweep from all points of the prison and try to rescue me. I keep it in my pocket as I enter a huge yard with more than 1,000 prisoners wandering around. Some of the guys are playing handball against walls, some are lifting weights as I walk across, most are friendly. A couple of the skinheads, their arms dense with spider tattoos, narrow their eyes as I pass. Across the yard, there's a big building. A long corridor leads to a door marked Education Annex. Inside, there's room D-168, where a small, white-haired woman, Agnes Wilcox, is holding auditions for Hamlet. Let me see. If you're not Hamlet, Horatio, Laertes, Claudius, or Fortinbras, would you write down roles that interest you? Those roles are Clown 1 and 2, we've got Priest, we've got Osric. Dressed in loose prison uniforms, the actors sit around tables in the cinder block classroom beneath inspirational slogans-- believe in yourself, think positively. The aspiring cast is half black, half white, and ranges from young lifers in their 20s to old timers in their 50s. Because it's against the rules to congregate an audience of felons for the four hours it would take to perform the whole play, Agnes has staged one act every six months, starting in December, 1999. Tonight is the first read through for Act V, the final bloody climax. Many of the inmates here never finished high school, and all they had known of Shakespeare was the phrase "To be or not to be." Tonight they are hearing some of the other famous speeches for the first time. A pestilence on him, for a mad rouge. Rogue. Rogue. He poured a flax-- Flagon. Flagon of-- Rhenish. Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was sure Yorick's skull, the king's jester. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back 1,000 times-- Most read-throughs with any cast are terrible. This one is terrible too. The actors know it. But they plow on through the script. An inmate named Paul, who serves as Agnes' assistant director, explains why. The first two or three acts I thought, oh no, there's no way. There's no way we're going to get this thing down and go and do a live performance and-- doing a soliloquy that's two pages long, I thought there's-- no, no. This is impossible. But what we're learning here, I guess, from performing it and hearing it done time again, was the "It'll be OK. It'll work out." The local critics agreed with Paul. The Act IV performance earned a review in the St. Louis paper. The actors were said to be commanding and compelling. With the entire performance, the reviewer wrote, "A 400-year-old text is restored to freshness." It seemed hard to imagine. I've seen Hamlet a dozen times. I've seen Kevin Kline do it at the Public Theater. I saw the famous Diane Venora version three nights in a row. I even saw Ingmar Bergman's production done in Brooklyn, performed entirely in Swedish. What else is there to learn from watching another Hamlet? But the truth is, this production was different. Because this is a play about a man pondering a violent crime and its consequences performed by violent criminals living out those consequences. After hanging out with this group of convicted actors for six months, I did discover something. I didn't know anything about Hamlet. Remember how it starts. Hamlet sees his father's ghost, who explains he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet's uncle. The ghost commands Hamlet to avenge his death by killing Claudius. The play is basically Hamlet pondering this single horrific action, and whether he can be the man to do it. "To be or not to be." These days, when people say the name Hamlet, it's usually just a metaphor, shorthand for somebody who is afraid to act, who dithers and thinks too much. We almost forget just what action Hamlet was contemplating. These actors haven't forgotten. My name is Manuel Johnson, and I'm 36 years old. I'm here for two first degree assaults. I play Hamlet. When you're onstage doing Hamlet, what do you draw upon in your own experience to make the character come to life? The idea of wanting to hurt someone. I have experience hurting someone-- you know, to the point of their life may be in danger. I was a very confused and angry person. And you know, it escalated into, you know, me shooting two people and leaving them for dead. My name is Chris Harris. I'm 38 years old. And I play the fourth character of Hamlet. Let me explain something. The character of Hamlet is played by four people. They are all on stage at the same time, taking turns delivering the lines. Agnes did this partly to give more actors speaking roles and not saddle any one man with all that dialogue. But as theatre, it works. Hamlet's role is full of long soliloquies and rhetorical asides. This small gang of Hamlets, which mutters to itself and laughs at its own jokes, nicely captures that fractured quality of Hamlet's different personalities. And it's also bonded the four actors together. They call themselves "The Hamlets" and constantly talk about their character. To Chris, it seems like Hamlet is just the fifth guy in their odd clique-- another criminal with a complicated past. Let me put it in terms of the year 2000s. What we have is an upper-middle class youngster, 19, 20 years old, who comes from a well-to-do family. You know, they own quite a bit of land. The people in the small town respect him and love him. And his uncle murdered his father and is now married to his mother. So, I mean, all kinds of serious issues there, all kinds. Chris and the Hamlets practice alone most days. Finding time when the four can just get together by themselves is tough when there's always 1,000 inmates around. So they do it where they can. On every Sunday after the noon meal, the four of us will assemble. We'll have our little gray Hamlet books, and we'll proceed down to the track. And if you were simply walking by, what you'd probably hear is-- you'd hear this chatter of somebody giving their lines clearly, the rest of us with our heads down in the books, walking the line. Now, there are people-- because there are benches that are all throughout the inside of the track. So there are people that actually watch us. So you'll hear this old English-style speech. You know, "Ho, Horatio," and these people are like, "Ho, what"? One of the problems of doing any play in prison is that being a good actor is the exact emotional opposite of what it takes to be a successful inmate. Rather than close off all feeling and look tough, you have to open your vulnerable self up and withstand often cruel laughter as you try to find some authentic emotion within you. In this way, a level-four high-security prison is no different from high school. And so most of the inmates who audition for Agnes tend to be, you know, actor-y people-- the theatre-types of prison. Back in 1999, they just had to put up with abuse from the bigger, meaner inmates. But that changed. In fact, a lot changed, after Agnes cast the role of Hamlet's best friend. My name is Derrick, Big Hutch. I just-- I play Horatio, the scholar. You might be surprised to learn that Derrick "Big Hutch" Hutchison is big. He has a smooth, bald skull and hooded threatening eyes-- the kind of guy that if you met him, you might think, he's probably serving 120 years for armed robberies. And that would be correct. Hutch isn't like the rest of the cast, and he's the first person to tell you. In prison, you got this hierarchy system. Listen, let's compare it to the ocean. You've got the minnows, and you've got the killer whale. Minnow being the lowest, killer whale the highest. So, which are you, Big Hutch? I'm the blue whale. [CHUCKLING] Right. That mean I control the killer whales, and I can eat up the minnows if I want. And I mean, that's how it is. Most of the guys in Hamlet, they're minnows. I mean, I don't normally would associate with them. Well, as he puts it, the killer whale versus the guppies, we're all guppies and he's the killer whale-- That's Tim, who plays Osric. And as a minnow/guppy, his take is a little different. In dealing with an individual like a killer whale, a lot of it-- a lot of, even for him, is a lot of show. The guys see him out in the yard, all right. And now some of the guys that have come into Hamlet, seeing how he is in acting and the seriousness that he takes, he's not what his persona is. In other words, he's an actor. But Big Hutch is also a critic. His criticism is sharp and extends to places most actors avoid-- his own character, Horatio. I think he a chump, for real. Really? Yeah, I think he a chump. I mean, he supposed to be cool with Hamlet. And they're best friends. But I think Horatio is just somebody-- a sounding board for Hamlet. I mean, the majority of his lines is, eh, my lord, yes, my lord. I mean, if we're friends, we're going to communicate better than that. I mean, you're going to tell me your deepest secrets. So I want to know what you and Ophelia did last night. I believe it. He should have been a little bit-- show me that I'm truly Hamlet's friend. Don't wait till I get to the end of Act V and I'm getting ready to drink a cup of poison and you stop me. You know? Let me know down the line, man, that I'm really your friend, you know? Have you ever heard anybody talk about Shakespeare's characters this way? Hutch was always doing this-- talking tough, but then betraying a real gift for literary criticism. Call it his inner minnow. In fact, he pointed out a weakness in the structure of the story I'd never heard before in all my experience with the play-- that Hamlet's dilemma over killing Claudius isn't really much of a dilemma. I don't see the conflict. I don't see what Hamlet is dealing with, man, that-- oh, I should kill the king now. I shouldn't kill him now. No, you knew once your father said, revenge, you knew you was going to do this. So what's the hubbub about? Do it. I mean, that's the same way I couldn't see somebody raping my daughter or something and just sitting around. No, no, no, no, no. I got to do you, man. And that's just-- you done. That's why I think Hamlet is an old minnow too, man. He-- you know. Are there no reasons to delay taking swift action, even if you're convinced that you've been wronged? I mean, that's why he stages the play within the play, right? To make sure that Claudius is the bad guy. See, that's why we've got to go back. Now, if I'm strong enough to believe in ghosts, you know, I'm strong enough to believe what that ghost tells me. (CHUCKLING) If I'm strong enough to believe you're a ghost, then I'm sure you know what happened to you. Once Hutch got on this riff, he kept going. Denmark's a prison, Hamlet tells Rosencrantz, in Act II. And Hutch says you could do a version of the play that takes this central metaphor literally. All the characters in the play are types he sees in the yard every day. The Claudiuses, who will do anything for the emblems of power-- money, drugs, high-end tennis shoes; Poloniuses, who kiss up to the powerful; Rosencrantz and Guildensterns. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Oh, man. Administration puts some guys out there just to get some info. Yeah, you got your rats. And in Hutch's version, he solves the play's structural problem, fabricating a true dilemma for Hamlet by giving him good reasons to kill Claudius and not to kill him. This is the way it would happen. Claudius killed this guy here because the guy had the biggest dope business in prison, or something. Gertrude would be some sissy. You find them everywhere in prison. But the guy they kill be Hamlet's brother. So now, being in the prison world, he must defend that honor. But he got a girl talking about, you only got five years. You know, you did two. Do one more, they're gonna parole you. Come on home, because I love you, and I'm duh-duh-duh-duh. He got another brother in business out there that he can get with to help raise his status. So he got-- he got all these things to look forward to on the street. But if he let that killing go, he'll have the roughest three years of his entire life. He'll be the piss-pot of the institution. So I mean, he got this dilemma. Would he be strong enough to survive that and get out there? Hutch wouldn't. I ain't gonna lie. I-- hey. OK. Places, please, for the top of Act I. Two months after my visit with Hutch at the first read-through, I was cleared once again into the old classroom. The actors tell me they've been practicing their lines wherever they can, often shouting them from cell to cell. Agnes has also had local professors come in and lecture. She assigns the cast essays to write about their characters. And the Hamlets have been walking the track, memorizing their lines, as has Danny, the Gravedigger. This rehearsal, they're already tinkering with tempo and intonation. That first read-through seems like eons ago. This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick's skull, the king's jester. This? Even that. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. He hath born me on his back 1,000 times. And now, how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. A lot of what you see looks like any rehearsal. Agnes is taking notes, a couple of guys are reading to themselves, and the occasional line reading devolves into laughter. I will fight with him, (CHUCKLING) upon the-- this thing. The scene that's really slaying everyone tonight is the first appearance of Osric, the king's toadying courtier. Sweet lord, if your lordship were at leisure, I should impart a thing to you from his majesty. No, just talk to Paul. Just talk to Paul. Just talk to Paul? Yeah. Come on. Let's stay in the scene. My name is Timothy Lantz. I'm 38 years old, and I play the role of Osric. Osric is what they call a fop, which a lot of people tend to say, well, he's-- it's a sexual gender thing where he's homosexual or whatever, but he's not. What he is is a king groupie, a wannabe. Tim is the one member of the cast with screen time, one second of it. He used to live in California. And in a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello revival, he was in the background in one fleeting camera pan, hitting a volleyball. Tim once ran a trucking company, and like most of the cast doesn't want to discuss his crime. But he does want to talk about how he researched his character-- in the TV room. There are so many fops in television and movies. Nathan Lane was a little bit too much. I think Robin Williams was a little too hyper. The one that really stood out was David Hyde Pierce, his character of Niles Crane. I'd watch Frasier and kind of look at how he did things and his mannerisms, and it worked out pretty good. I mean, sir, for his weapon. But in the imputation laid on him by them and his mean, he is unfellowed. What's his weapon? Rapier and dagger. What you say? Do you think your audience is going to be able to draw the very, sort of, fine distinction you're making between a fop and a gay person? Not really. To me, this seemed like an especially risky interpretation of the part. But Tim explains that folks on the outside have a TV movie understanding of prison sexuality. There is a small group of gay prisoners in the closet, another smaller group that is actually out, and then there's the vast majority of prisoners-- straight men, not having any sex at all. Just like outside, Tim says. OK, gentle folk, let's refocus. We're going to start where Laertes leaps into the grave. Putting on a play in prison is different. First, Agnes always has to deal with some last minute crisis. Tonight, one of the Hamlets can't come. He was assaulted and was placed in solitary for protection. Plus, everyone must be strip-searched in the side room before and after every meeting with Agnes or with me. Worse, it's incredibly hot. The room is stifling. The only relief is an ancient stand-up fan in the corner. And a lot of the time, the actors are just trying to figure out what their lines mean. Here's Chris, one of the Hamlets. There is a piece of dialogue I give in V.ii in which I'm talking to Horatio about how I got Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And it starts like, "Up from my cabin, sea-gown scarf'd about me." Up from my cabin, my sea-gown scarfed about me. I didn't know what that meant. And one thing Agnes will do, she'll stop us in mid-line. And she says, what does that mean? Let's go back. Remember that what you're wrapped in is not a cloak. It's fog. How do you describe it? Sea-gown. Your sea-gown. Scarfed about me. Yeah. Your sea-gown scarfed about you is the fog. I knew that. Yeah. But now you've got to act it. The sea-gown scarfed about me is the fog. I'm out at night. And it's the flow of the words. Up from my cabin, sea-gown scarfed about me, groped I in the dark to find out them. Shakespeare really put some work in this-- and this is the only play I've really studied from him. But he really is good. OK. Pick up the pace, y'all. Zip. Zap. Zop. Zip. Zap. Zop. After a few months, the rehearsals begin to resemble a routine. They always start with some silly voice relaxation exercises. Zip. Zap. Zop. Zip. Zap. Zop. Zip. (DELAYED) Zap. No, that's not him. The cast is such a mix. There's Chris, who's a member of Toastmasters International, and when not rehearsing likes to listen to Journey on his Walkman, while his good pal Brat, a former gang-banger, has a subscription to a lapidary magazine. Then there's Edgar, a former Post Office employee, and Mike, a fight coordinator and a devout Wiccan. And then Stan, who's obviously a college educated businessman, now trying his hand at writing Zane Grey Westerns. And of course, there's Hutch, the killer whale. What keeps them coming back to D-168, where Agnes, this tiny, tough lady, bosses them around? Here's Edgar. She makes us feel human, man. She really does. When I go in there, I have to take my clothes off and get butt naked and bend over and spread my cheeks so some man can look up my butt, you know, all the dehuman-- the humiliating things that they do to us here. And when she comes in and does what she does, for that minute, them two and a half hours, all these guys with PhDs and can be doing other things, they come in, I at least can feel human in here. I think this is taking me to being sane. For just one day, just one day I'm sane enough, you know? This is Brat Jones, another one of the Hamlets. If you don't keep exercising your mind, then you start to lose it, right? You know, that's possible, right? This gives me an opportunity to see a society beyond what I'm used to. I'm familiar with rap music and videos and big butts on the TV and all that. But let me come back to something that I'm not familiar with. You know, let me get into something else. You know, that did open my eyes into getting into reading Sylvia Plath and Frost and Wadsworth and different other people. Everybody had powerful answers for why they were in the play. One guy with a third grade education level said that he was surprised to find out that he wasn't stupid, just uneducated. And for almost all of them, acting was beside the point. But one inmate got bit by the drama bug, and bit hard. His first step onto the boards was a revelation. I'm James Word. I'm 32 years old. And I play the role of Laertes. My wife told me that I should be an actor. And she's like, you can act. You should be an actor. She's had the opportunity to see me deal with certain people on certain levels, and she's seen me change my-- Wait. Certain people on certain levels. OK, come on. Let's-- as we say in the editorial business, let's air that out a little bit. Well, I've always wanted to be a con. And I've always wanted people to like me. I wanted to be liked. And the environment that I was in, people liked the bad guy. You know, those were the heroes in our neighborhoods, the bad guy. And so I went from this real quiet church guy to this real bad guy. You know, and I'd get around them, and I'd be like, yeah, I'm this and that, and would act it-- you know what I'm saying? Act big, bad, tough, and I don't care, when that really wasn't me. Because when I went home at night, I felt bad about what I did, and most of the time was scared to death doing what I was doing. And my wife saw that. And I think that's one of the reasons why she's like, you can be an actor. James Word looks like an actor. He's young and handsome with a smile that can carry him through just about any situation. He plays Laertes, the brother of Ophelia. For the first few acts, Laertes was played by an Amish pedophile. That's another story. But the Amish pedophile got transferred, and so it's almost legend in the prison now, like something out of 42nd Street. James Word stepped into the role. He created a sensation among the cast when they realized what a really forceful performance could do for a character. Word made a lasting impression, even on the killer whale. You come along and in Act IV, and you get this guy, James Word. And Word's playing Laertes. And he was hittin' it, especially when he was mourning the death of Ophelia. Is it Scene 4 or something? He makes his entrance. And he's going to be after the king and the queen. Stop them. Hold up. And man, you should have seen this guy Word man. He come in there like-- dropped to his knees. And he did, why! Why! I said, man, that should have been my part there. I knew I had done a good job. You know, I knew I had done a good job. But when it was over, you know, and everybody was leaving and shaking hands and interacting with each other, the comments that was coming afterwards-- you know, we had our questions and answers. So many people was just-- man, you were so good. Have you done this before? You should do this more. You should continue this. And that feeling for me was just-- it was one of the best feelings I've ever felt. It was like the day my daughter was born. And it made me want to be better. Not just in acting. I mean, it just opened up a whole world for me, you know? Like, man, if I apply myself, I can pretty much do whatever I want. O treble woe, fall 10 times treble, on that cursed head, whose wicked deed that most ingenious sense deprived thee of. Now, pile your dust upon the quick and dead, till of this flat a mountain you have made to overtop old Pelion, or the skyish head of blue Olympus. The first chance I get to see Word in action is at tonight's rehearsal, where Laertes goes to the grave of his sister Ophelia. Word was a natural, and talked about acting that way too. Laertes' emotions in the final act roller-coaster from grief to fury to shameful regret. To pull it off, Word channels Laertes' character in a way that should make any method actor cringe with jealousy. Coming into Act IV, he was very angry, violently angry. And I can identify with that, and I can play that role very well, because I've been playing that role all my life. Must there no more be done? No more be done. Lay her in the earth, and from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring. I tell thee, old churlish priest, a ministering angel shall my sister be when thou liest howling. You know what I'm saying? And Laertes, he falls into the manipulation. And he becomes a bad guy for a little while because he's being deceitful now. You know, I never really looked at it, and it's somewhat cowardly. And I can relate that to my past life as a criminal. To put a gun in somebody's face, that's an unfair advantage. You know, and that's a cowardly act. That's what criminals are. We're cowards. You know, when we're criminals, we are cowards. Do you feel like you can be Laertes because so much of Laertes is inside James Word? I am Laertes. I am. I am. Coming up, what the ghost of Hamlet's father can teach you about murder. In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. If you're just tuning in, what we're doing today is that we're devoting our whole show to Jack Hitt's story, from the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center, where over the course of six months Jack watched prisoners rehearse and stage Act V of Hamlet. Again, here's Jack. As the performance day grew closer and I spoke to more and more of the actors, it became clear that each actor used his past, in dense psychological ways, to understand his part. All the Hamlets saw themselves in their version of the Dane, and Edgar would stop me in the hall to tell me that he thought evil King Claudius had some redeeming qualities. But for one actor, the relationship was even more complicated. He used his part to help understand his past. My name is Danny Waller. I'm 44 years old. The character that I've played was the ghost of Hamlet's father. The reason I chose that, when I first read the script, the words jumped out at me. And they made me feel things that I haven't felt before. What in your-- what in your experience drew you to those particular words? I took a man's life. And, uh, I felt he was talking to me through that-- that he wanted me to know what I put him through. "I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confined to fast in fires, 'til the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison-house, I could a tale unfold, whose lightest words would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, and make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres." There's one other spot that goes like this. "Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatched, cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, no reckoning made, but sent to my account with all my imperfections on my head." And it was pretty much the same way with him. He was taken before his time. So when you read the character, do you feel like-- who is talking when you say those lines? I'm the body up there. But the words are coming from mostly, uh-- William Pride, the man that I killed. He's mostly the one talking. There's not much defense between the actor and the word as you get with an actor who puts his or her training between the two. These guys call it like they see it. And it's true. It's just dead true. That's Agnes, the director. Besides putting on plays in the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center visiting room, she has mounted shows on more familiar stages-- the acclaimed Actor's Studio in New York, the Berkshire Festival in Stockbridge, and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. After becoming the artistic director of the New Theater in St. Louis, she started an outreach program to take professional actors doing dramatic works by writers like Don DeLillo and perform them before prison audiences. In time, the prisoners became the actors. And in more time, this side project took over her entire theater company. Now this is what she does-- directing prisoners, who may not have the chops of professional actors but have an intimacy with the material that doesn't exist anywhere else. When Claudius is in the chapel and speaks about his sin and his regret and his ability to undo it, it broke my heart. Because the man playing it felt all of those things fully. And you know, I know these guys have deep regrets. But it was palpable. The audience was stunned. You could hear a pin drop. And that was especially true with the inmate audience. He says, oh, my offense is rank. It smells to heaven. It hath the primal, eldest, curse upon it. A brother's murder. A brother's murder. Pray can I not, though inclination be sharp as will. My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent. What if this cursed hand were thicker than itself with brother's blood? Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow? My name is Edgar Evans. And I'm 39 years old. And I play the king, King Claudius, in Hamlet. And like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin and both neglect. I don't consider myself no great actor or nothing, but I try to do the best I can. And when I did the speech, I was looking upward. The chapel was at an incline there. And I was just looking up toward the top, and it was like no one was there but me. I literally-- I honestly didn't see a soul in the chapel when I was saying this. Maybe even-- and I'm just-- I'm not saying this. It seemed almost like I was praying this actual speech to God. But O, what form of prayer can serve my turn. Forgive me my foul murder? That cannot be, since I am still possessed of those effects for which I did the murder-- my crown, my own ambition, and my queen. I have a wife and four kids. And by being incarcerated, I feel that I've really let them down. When I said that speech and my wife was here in the visiting room, I don't know if it had an impact on her. I don't even know if she truly understood all of the content. But I wanted her to hear that speech more than anybody. O, wretched state, O, bosom black as death, O, limed soul, struggling to be free art more engaged. Help, angels. Make assay. Bow, stubborn knee, and hearts with strings of steel, be soft as sinews of the newborn babe. All may be well. Edgar wouldn't tell me his crime. Although I found myself playing a constant guessing game with all of them about this, they wouldn't discuss the past. That was then, they said. This is now. But I had to know. So one morning, instead of visiting, I went to downtown St. Louis, not far from the Arch, and sat in a records depository reading old case files. It was more horrible than I thought. One guy I particularly liked shot a man in the head twice at point-blank range. Another of my new friends raped his pubescent daughter, impregnating her. Later, there was an abortion. Another friend grabbed a man getting out of a car, put a gun to his chest during a robbery, and pulled the trigger. Others had sodomized children-- younger children, the age of my own children. I didn't fall asleep for a long time in my frigid Ramada Inn room. At 3:00 in the morning, I had one of those cinematic nightmares. I dreamed that a very good friend of mine, an editor at a magazine, had me over to dinner. She got angry with someone else there, pulled out a gun, and plugged him twice, right in the face. Then she asked me not to talk about it with anybody. I panicked. And the next thing I knew, I was sitting up in my hotel bed, panting like a sprinter. It didn't take Freud to figure out what it meant. Someone I knew and liked was a murderer. I wanted to talk to the cast about this, but I was anxious. I know this sounds crazy, but I was afraid it might hurt their feelings. I felt like they had betrayed me. But strangely, I felt that I had betrayed them too. There was only one day left to talk, just before the final performance. So before curtain, I asked Brat to sit down with me. I could barely spit out my question. You know, we came in here three months ago, or five months ago, and met you all for the first time as actors. And so yesterday, we decided to go down to City Hall and read everybody's record. And so we read everybody's record. And I have to say, since we met-- you know, since I met you as an actor first and now I know what you did, it's very hard for me to wrap my mind around this other guy that's on paper. And so I want to know how you do it. How do you square the Brat Jones of-- what was it, 13 years ago-- yeah, yeah-- with the one that I see on the stage tonight. It's taken a lot of practice. I'm trying to discover who I am now. It's not been easy. I was off into the drugs and all those things when I got locked up for that case. And I slowly had to come out of those things. Because I always knew in the back of my mind that I had already went to the lowest point in life. So now it was time to see what I could do as far as going to the highest point in life. It was a hard question for any of them to answer. They all said the same thing. But I'm this guy now, I'm not that guy. Are we forever the prisoner of our actions? It's a good question. It was Hamlet's question, and it's the unresolvable conflict in our penal system. Why do we put people in jail? To rehabilitate them and restore them to our company, or to punish them, regardless of how much they might change? One can't hold both these ideas in one's mind simultaneously. That's why our prison debates on TV and in Congress are so vehement and incoherent. The two sides cannot be squared by mere politics. They can't even be squared by the people at the center of the debate. Here's Danny. When I first got this sentence, I said, yeah, I'll go ahead and just die in here because I don't deserve to be out there the way I am. You know, that was 13, 14 years ago. But a person changes. I'm no longer the criminal I used to be. I know that I will not do any other crimes out there. But I took a man's life. Do I deserve to be out there? I cannot say. Hamlet, thou art slain. No medicine in the world can do thee good. In thee is not a half an hour's life. No medicine in the world, blah blah blah. I can't get it. I forgot. Line. The treacherous instrument is in thy hand. It's opening night, dress rehearsal. Word has flubbed his line again. Things aren't going well. The only time the authorities would allow a dress rehearsal is in the hour before actual curtain. This is the first time the cast has seen the acting stage, the first time in costume, the first time they have real props, skulls and shovels. The shovel is a story in itself, given every prison fear of shovels. You can use them to dig tunnels, remember. The authorities insisted on using only a flimsy cardboard replica. Everyone is tense, even Agnes. Guys, let's double the pace so we can get through this, get it all out. The sight is dismal. The sight is dismal. And our affairs-- We are in the prison chapel where their first performance will be held before an audience of inmates. Six months after my first visit, it is, at last, showtime. Alan, how are you doing today? Armed guards let the audience in the door, one by one. Agnes calls her actors together in a corner and gives them the final pep talk. Paul, Edgar, could I have you? OK. Things to think about. Make sure to stand still on yours and other people's punchlines. If something falls apart, pick it up, go somewhere with it. Make up words. I don't think anybody here has memorized it, so we're safe. And mostly, this afternoon people were working so hard I don't think you had much fun. Hard work's behind us. This is the night to just have a blast. Say "One for the team." One for the team. Ready, set-- hoo-ha! Once the play starts, Danny and Stan deliver their lines OK, but all that antique Elizabethan wordplay isn't connecting with the audience. But then midway through the scene, the crowd starts to really respond to the emotion in Ophelia's funeral march. Laertes is the last mourner, humming at the side of the grave, tossing rose petals on her corpse. Right away, the action picks up. The Hamlets appear, taunting Laertes about the sincerity of his grief. They quarrel and exchange insults. A duel is proposed, which culminates in the last sword fight scene. Come, begin! Most directors block the scene as a professional fencing match. Agnes has it looking like a knife fight in an alley. The audience totally gets it. Word holds his arms slightly out from his sides, his hand gripping his sword like he would a shiv. He and one of the Hamlets are circling each other, like thugs. Word jerks his shoulders forward-- a pure back alley feint, a fake movement to intimidate his opponent, something all of them have probably seen right in the yard. Then the room goes quiet, as the actors starts slicing one another, leading to Laertes' death scene. Hamlet, thou art slain. No medicine in the world can do thee good. In thee, there's not half an hour's life. The treacherous instrument is in your hand, unbated and envenomed. The foul practice has turned itself on me. Lo, here I lie, never to rise again. Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet. Let mine and my father's death be not upon thee. The audience, like a living thing, leans forward in unison to watch Word slide down the chapel wall and die. There are no cackles of discomfort, no shouts from the gallery. Just breathless silence, the silence of recognition. In all, there were three performances. And on the final night, before family and dignitaries, the entire cast found the magic that Paul said would happen during that first read-through. The actors knew that this would be the last time they get to perform as a group. So when Danny and Stan came out for their final gravedigger appearance, somehow those Elizabethan jokes worked. Art a heathen? How does thou understand the scripture? The scripture said Adam digged. Could he dig without arms? Having seen every performance, I can testify, the actors rose above their talents in that last show. Mike and Hudson as the belligerent priests, Buck and Tommy as the ambassadors, Sylvester's Fortinbras. You could feel the mutual support. Just as missed lines and other mistakes play off one another, and can spiral downward into fiasco, the rhythm of the room can go the other way too. Strong lines beget better performances. The gang of Hamlets came together in a way they hadn't before. That little mob seemed like one voice. But the real surprise for me that last night was Hutch. I am more an antique Roman than a dame. There's still yet some liquor left. It's here that Hutch's Horatio delivers his most famous line. The play is almost over. He's surrounded by corpses and speaks to his dying friend Hamlet. In the other performances, I always thought Hutch had been plagued by what you might call the Jack Nicholson syndrome. The actor's persona is bigger than any role he might play. But tonight, Horatio has Hutch under control and the audience in his hand. He has the one great line to deliver. And as Hutch might say, he nails it. Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. So Hamlet dies, and Fortinbras takes over. And then the drums of Hamlet's funeral begin. On other stages, a curtain would fall. But here, beneath the cafeteria's unforgiving fluorescence, the actors just stop. From the back of the room, Agnes says simply-- End of play. The audience tonight is a mix of St. Louis' artistic elite. It's a theater crowd-- polite, well-dressed people. Many of them have helped fund this production. They want and fully expect to meet the talent afterwards. And for many of the actors, this moment-- they call it the cast party-- is the most prized. James Word and Edgar Evans mentioned it specifically when I talked to them. Just the chance to stand around in a room full of normal people, drink a Coke, and carry on about the play, the future, the weather, the freedom to chat and mingle, like you were in the lobby of a theater instead of a bulletproof visiting room. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing well. Good to see you. This is my sixth time here. Yeah, you come to all of them. Yeah, I appreciate it. And we thank you. Thank you very much. In a high-security prison, though, when a play is over, it's over. No sooner had the bows finished than Danny, who doubles as the stage manager, turns right around and starts frantically striking the set. The guards had informed everyone that they'd have about 10 minutes for the cast party. Like any play, all the work was for this moment-- to get to the end of the last performance successfully. And now that it's here, these few minutes are shot through with a kind of melancholy. Soon everything will end, and everyone will return to his pre-acting life. Here, that near future is visible. In the side room, everyone sees him, is the guard waiting to strip search them back into the yard. He wears a dull expression on his face and rubber gloves on his hands. But that would be 10 minutes from now. There's still time for pretending. Thank you, sir. Thanks for coming out. We appreciate the support. I really like this act. I like the-- It was so complicated. --counter-balance between the beginning and the end. According to the prison commissioner, 97% of the people locked up today will someday join us on the outside. Manuel is leaving for a halfway house in 48 hours. He could have been out weeks before but chose to stay in prison so he could finish the play. Hutch has a scheduled date for release. And a few more of the cast have parole board hearings coming up to decide whether they've changed enough and should be allowed to mingle with us on the outside. To that extent, this whole night, including the cast party, is just another rehearsal. Thanks for coming! Oh, you were great. Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it. So, you think you like performing? Yes, ma'am. Well, you're very good. Jack Hitt is a longtime contributor to our show. Since we first aired this program back in 2002, most of the actors have been released from prison. Edgar, who played Claudius, is now the chief union steward at a hospital. Big Hutch works in public transit. James, who played Laertes, is starting a youth drama program in St. Louis. Tim moved to Hollywood to produce his own screenplays. Manuel got out and died in a truck crash in 2008. Danny, the guy who talked about speaking as the man he killed, is still serving time. Agnes has retired after two decades of running prison performing arts, but there's still an operation. Chris works there. Chris, Edgar, and Brat all continue acting in their alumni theater program. You can learn more about them at prisonperformingarts.org. This episode of our program was produced by Alex Blumberg, with Starlee Kine, Wendy Dorr, Jonathan Goldstein, and me. Our senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Our technical director for our show is Matt Tierney. Production help with today's show from Diane Wu. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our programs co-founder Mr. Torey Malatia, or as we like to call him, Shamu. I control the killer whales. And I can eat up them minnows if I want. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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When I picked up the phone, it was my mom. And it had been about a month since we talked, which is not unusual and certainly my fault. Anyway, my mom said that she had been invited to speak with a group of women at the local Hadassah. My mom's a therapist in the Jewish suburbs outside Baltimore. And these Hadassah women had this group that met regularly. All of them were women in their late 40s through early 60s. And when the group first started meeting, they apparently discussed all sorts of things. It was wide ranging. But as time progressed, they realized that there was only one topic that they wanted to talk about and felt like they needed to talk about all the time, that they felt traumatized enough to have to talk about. And that was their relationships with their adult children. And at some point, this became the only thing that the group talked about, its official reason for being. And they had invited my mother to lead a discussion about how to get along with your adult children. So my mom is a big preparer. When she gets invited to talk on various psychological topics, she looks up articles, calls experts, talks to people. And as part of her preparation, my mom decided to call her own three adult children to see what advice they would give to the group about communicating with your children, about having a good relationship with your adult children. So my Mom had already talked to my older sister Randy out in California by the time she called me here in Chicago. And she explained to Randy, "It's a thing about communicating with your adult children and how to be close to your adult children." And she asked my sister what advice she would give to the group. Randy's advice was direct and to the point. She said, "Tell them to get a different leader." Adult children, supposedly adult children, and their supposedly adult parents in this addition of This American Life from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass, back for another week documenting everyday stories in these United States. Today, Act One, Me and My Mom. Act Two, Sandra Tsing Loh and her father. Act Three, Sandra Tsing Loh, Her Father, and His Mail-Order Chinese Wives. Stay with us. So in this conversation with my mom, I was in the unusual position of being able to look like the good child in the family for a change. My older sister, for a change, looked like the bad kid. And I was able to say to my mom, you know, "Even if Randy thought that you weren't handling your relationships with us in the very best way, surely there was a way to express that that was a little less cruel." And my mom asked me, OK, so what advice would I have for this group? And I suggested that in the families of a lot of my friends and I think in my family, I thought that one cause of a lot of tension is the fact that as a family, we don't have a story that we agree on about the past. The kids, my sisters and I, we have one version of what happened when we were children. And that version tends to be kind of dark, actually. Not completely, but there's a lot of darkness in it. And our parents have a completely different story. And you know, I don't even think we need to come to a consensus. I don't think families need to agree about this stuff. I'm not even sure if they can agree. But I think there has to be some kind of mutual understanding that each side sees the past the way that they see it. So today's program will not be an attempt to find this common story, but it will be an attempt to define that gap as it exists in a few families. The holiday season is just ending and for so many people, the drama of the holidays is the drama of parents and grown children struggling to get along without disappointing each other or getting on each other's nerves. So to begin our program right now, I'm pleased to welcome to our show, telephonically from Baltimore, my mom. Can I say something? I was just going to say, feel free to amend or correct. Yes. When I told your sister what you said, she said, "Oh, I was just kidding. I didn't mean to be mean." Oh. Pfft. So I don't want her to be [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. But you're a professional psychologist. Now, don't you think often-- don't you think that there was a note of hostility in what she said? Oh, absolutely. OK. There, you see? Are you and I can agree. And frankly, she's not on the phone. So mom, the thing I wanted to ask you about is, OK, so you had this seminar with all these-- It wasn't a seminar. It was a discussion group. Discussion. The discussion group, excuse me. And I was the facilitator. And how many women was it? Around 30-some. Oh, so a lot. Now, if you had to characterize in a phrase people's relationships with their children, would you describe them as being very good, somewhat OK, generally kind of yucky? I mean, how would you describe it? I would say that there were a lot of people whose dreams haven't been realized, whose expectations haven't been met. And so there's a sense of disappointment, although there were some people there who were pleased with all aspects. And then, of course, the question was, "Well, why are you here?" To gloat? Was that the answer? To gloat and show you pictures of grandchildren? A little bit. A little bit. Yeah, OK. More to connect with the other women, I suppose. But these are the criteria for satisfaction. Do you want to hear them? Quickly. Whether their children were married, so that having single children was a disappointment. I'm just going to make a little checklist here. Taking [INAUDIBLE] my own-- Whether their children lived close by of far away. God, I'm shooting 0 for 2 so far. Keep going. Whether their children appreciated them. OK. I got 1 for 3. Whether they had grandchildren. Somebody announced that one of their children was pregnant with the first grandchild, and everybody went "Ooh," and they clapped. So that's the epitome. Whether their children were successful in their lives. How much they liked their child's spouse and got along with them. You told me on the phone earlier something interesting about this. Yes. I told you that there were several people there who did not like their child's choice of a partner at the time that they got married but had grown to love them very much and in some cases even liked them better than their own child. See, now I wonder if that is because there is an inherent tension between children and their adult parents, that the child sometimes wants to be treated as the child and sometimes wants to be treated as an independent adult. And for the parent, it's pretty much a hellish guessing game. And then-- yeah? Yeah. A lot of people talked about walking on egg shells. And several people said, well, what's the right way to give advice? And of course the answer is, you don't give advice unless somebody asks you for it. Do you think that this relationship is harder, the relationship between adult children and their parents, is harder on the parents than on the children? Yes. Because the parents have a dream of how they thought it was going to be, and it seldom matches the dream. One person said that her children are all single, all live far away, and she said she and her husband are very lonely. And what's happened, the good part, is that they've gotten much closer to each other because they realized that they were all that they have. Right. Well, Dr. Glass, I'm afraid that this would be about all the time we have for this particular segment of our radio show. Look, I'm glad for any time I can get with my children. All right. Touche. My mom, Shirley Glass, a therapist in Baltimore. Coming up, a septuagenarian dad hitchhikes. You know, I've just got to say. I'm just going to interrupt here. When you get into the genre of music about parents, you get into a real sorry lot of music, just a lot of bad music. I mean, we went on a little collection. We're talking about Cat Stevens' "Father and Son." Let's just-- I don't think I can take this song anymore. Let's just go for something else. Act Two, Sandra's Dad. I insist that this be the last radio commentary about my father. OK, maybe I've never talked about him on the radio before. I just don't want this to become a habit. Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer, composer, pianist, and columnist for Buzz Magazine in Los Angeles. And we're actually going to bring you two stories from her about her father today, about how the adult children in her family deal with her father. This first story began as a column in Buzz Magazine. It also appears in Sandra's book, Depth Takes a Holiday. At one point, she and I adapted it for radio, and a shortened version of this story on NPR'S Morning Edition. Here's the whole story. Understand that for years, stories about my father, anecdotes that I thought were throwaways were the only thing anyone would ever remember about me. There I'd stand at parties, one hip jutted out, trying to tell amusing yet compelling stories about myself, at which point the dark-eyed man I was speaking with would lean forward, rest a hand lightly on my arm, and murmur, "You know, I've been wondering for years." "Yes," I'd breathe. A flame would leap into his eyes. "How is your dad? Does he still wear his underwear backwards and do the Chinese snake dance on Pacific Coast Highway?" I'd close my eyes in pain. "No. Of course not. Well, yes." First, let's take a step backwards. Forget my dad. Immigrant parents in general tend towards eccentricity, don't they? They arrive from the old country, now they have VCRs and Cuisinarts, their children are growing up to be monsters, and worse, the local Ralph's stops carrying pig knuckles. For the record, my father does not wear his underwear backwards, only his sweaters. When the elbows wear through, you just turn them around and keep going. And yes, for the record, he did perform the Chinese snake dance for us kids, naked, armed only with a fluttering beach towel as he leaped and twirled, imparting his ancient Chinese folk song with a mournful howl. I know this may sound strange, but I've brought my father into the studio today to sing it. Papa? OK. This so-called snake song, actually, I borrowed from old Chinese shepherds. So it sounds like this. [SINGING IN CHINESE] Dad's lived in Malibu for some 30 years now, threatening to cause property values to tumble along with him. Papa, I'm going to tell this story now the way I tell it. So I hope you're not embarrassed, OK? OK. What choice do I have? Once a neighbor called the police to complain. My father was hanging out his old underpants to dry, Shanghai-style, on clotheslines strung out in front of the garage. The underpants had holes in them. The complaint calls eventually stopped, but questions remain. Does my father, a retired aerospace engineer with science degrees from Stanford, Purdue, and Caltech, have to wear old underpants with holes in them? Is this a person who can afford, say, new underpants and a Maytag dryer, perhaps? "Why, yes," would have to be the answer. Right, papa? Yeah. My father is one of those people who have untold stocks, bonds, mutual funds, IRAs, whatever, that they are continually shifting from one account to the next. For all his money, though, my father has always transported himself in and out of Malibu via hitchhiking. Yes, he owns his own car. He even bought me one, a Hyundai. He had to shelter income. But he doesn't like to drive. Say why. Oh, because the pollution. Also, the [INAUDIBLE], they only have 50 years. So we have to save this for the next, next generation. But your particularly like hitchhiking. HItchhiking, you can meet lots of people. Mm-hmm, especially in Los Angeles. Now, beloved listeners, this is my commentary, so I'm going to try and give you my point of view, what I see. Usually I'm driving through Santa Monica and I'll come by, let's say, the corner of Wilshire and 4th. And there my father will be standing, clutching his lucky grocery bag of scientific papers trying to flag down a ride. I'll never not pick him up. That would be a little too how-sharp-the-sepant's-tooth. But I have been tempted to just put my foot on the gas pedal and race towards the Pacific happy and free like somebody who's 75-year-old dad is not still copping rides from the public. OK. This is your section. OK, let's talk about the day you got the really good ride. And where were you standing? Well, I always get good rides. But that was an especially good ride. I had just come from the dentist's office in the late afternoon on Wilshire Boulevard near Western. And the first car stopped. A very gracious lady looked like Loretta Young, she drove up-- Looked like who? Loretta Young. You don't know, because very old movie star, very gracious lady. Loretta Young. Oh, like a Chinese movie star? No, it's American. Loretta. Oh, Loretta Young. Loretta Young, I'm sorry. I thought you were saying Lori-Tai Young. OK, Loretta Young. Loretta Young. And she was very gracious, without no hesitation let me in the backseat of her four-door Mercedes sedan. Because in the front seat, the passenger seat was occupied by a young man. So then we talk of different things. I say, what kind of business you people in? They say movie business. Ah, I says, that's exciting. You said she had known a lot about Chinese opera and film? Oh, yes. We discussed many Chinese movies. So she knows quite a lot. And then somehow we talk about the Clintons. And the lady said, "Yeah, I like both Hillary and Bill. We were in The White House recently." Then I say, "What's your name?" She say, "Anjelica Huston." I say, "Wow. I don't go movies so I don't know much movie stars. But I do know Huston family. Because your father, John Huston passed, a few years, away. I haven't kept track on your family's story." Note that that's an important point for my father. Because unlike Ms. Huston, I didn't go into my father's business, science, and it's been a little disappointing. But she gave you a letter, right? I asked her, "Can you give me your autograph?" So finally, she turned an envelope back. It says like this-- "To Mr. Loh. It was a pleasure to have you in my car." Then a heart with two wings. Then "Love, Anjelica Huston." Then down there "XXXX." Being Chinese, I don't know what the "XXX" means. Then later, I asked my friend. They said, "That's kissing, kissing, kissing." OK. So there's the story. Here's the way I remember my dad first telling me and ending this. I remember you said that while Anjelica Huston was a good ride, she wasn't a dream ride. Because she had this friend to drop off in Beverly Hills, which took you a little out of your way. And at that point, it would've been quicker for you to take the crosstown bus because you had to transfer. But by then, I remember you lowered your voice, you're an expert in such delicate matters of decorum, and you said that you thought at that point, getting out might be a little rude. Papa, why don't you just take us out with a song? Another song? Yeah. This song, usually I sing it with my wife. Since today Sandra didn't invite my wife, I have to let her stay in the kitchen at home. This song describes some young woman longing for her lover. Sounds like this. [SINGING IN CHINESE] Sandra Tsing Loh and her father in Los Angeles. This music, by the way, is also by Sandra. She composes and performs. This is from her album, Piano Vision. They play this music sometimes on Morning Edition. After the little news breaks, sometimes you can hear these little piano riffs from this record. Anyway, more parents and adult children coming up. Coming up, Sandra Tsing Loh, her father, and his new mail-order Chinese brides. 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, on our program, we invite a variety of writers and performers to tackle some theme that we choose. Our theme today is families in which the parents and the children see the story of their family in radically different ways. And rather than have a whole big bunch of different kinds of performers, actually we're only having one performer on the show today, Sandra Loh. And we have arrived at Act Three of our program. This is a story called "My Father's Chinese Wives." Sandra has performed this a lot around Los Angeles and, most recently, in New York City in a show called Aliens in America. My father has decided at age 70 to take a Chinese wife. He has written his family in Shanghai seeking their help in locating likely candidates. He has good confidence in this project. He's hoping to be married in six months. Let's unpeel this news one layer at a time. Question, is my father even what one would consider marriageable at this point? At age 70, my father, a retired Chinese aerospace engineer, is starting to look more and more like somebody's gardener. His feet shuffle along the patio in their broken sandals. He stoops to pull out one or two stray weeds, coughing phlegmatically. Later, he sits in a rattan chair and eats leathery green vegetables in brown sauce, his old eyes slitted wearily. At times, he almost seems to be overacting this lizardy old part. He milks it. "I am old now," he'll say with a certain studied poignance. "I am just your crazy old Chinese father." If he's that old, why does he still do the same vigorous daily exercise regime he's done for the past 10 years? 45 minutes of pull-ups, something that looks like The Twist and much unfocused bellowing. This always performed on the most public beach as possible in his favorite Speedo, one he found in a dumpster. No, crazy old Chinese father is, in truth, a code word, a rationalization for the fact that my father has always had a hard time spending money. Why buy a leather briefcase to take to work when an empty Frosted Flakes cereal box will do just as well? Papers slip down neatly inside, pens can be clipped conveniently on either end. Why buy Bounty paper towels when at work he can just walk down the hall to the washroom, open the dispenser, and list out a stack. They're free. He can bring home as many as we want. If you've worn the same sweater for so many years that the elbows wear out, turn it around. Get another decade out of it. Wear it backwards. Which is why, to this day, my father wears only crew-neck, not V-neck sweaters. "Terrific," is my older sister Kaitlin's response when I phone her with the news. Bear in mind that Kaitlin has not seen my father since the mid-80s, preferring to nurture bad memories of him independently via a therapist. She allows herself a laugh, laying aside her customary dull hostility for a moment of more jocular hostility. "So who does he think would want to marry him?" "Someone Chinese," I answer. "Oh, good," she exclaims. "That narrows down the field to, what, half a billion? No. As usual, he's doing this to punish us. Think about it," she continues, with her usual chilling logic, "he marries a German woman the first time around. It's a disaster-- you and I symbolize that-- because he's passive-aggressive and he's cheap. But no. To him, it's that rebellious, Aryan strain that's the problem. You take an Asian immigrant just off the boat, for example. Here's a woman fleeing a life of oppression under a Communist government and no public sanitation and working in a bicycle factory for $0.10 an hour and repeated floggings every hour on the hour, every day of every week of every month of every year. After that, living with our father might seem like just another bizarre incident of some kind." "It could happen." Kaitlin scores some compelling points, but nonetheless, I'm bothered for a different reason. Because in describing the potential new wife, he has used only that one adjective, "Chinese." He has not said, "I'm looking for a smart wife," or even "a fat wife." He has picked "Chinese." That word is meant to stand for so much. Asian. Asian women. Young Asian ladies. It is a month later and, as if in a dream, I sit at the worn, Formica family dining room table with my father, photos and letters spread out before us. Since my father has written to Shanghai, the mail has come pouring in. I have to face the fact that my father is, well, hot. "You see?" he says. "Seven women have written. Ha." He beams, his gold molar glinting. He drinks steaming green tea from a chipped laboratory beaker which he handles with a Beauty and the Beast potholder. Remarkably, my father doesn't make the least effort to mask his delight, no matter how inappropriate. He is old now. He can do whatever the hell he wants, is how I now understand it. With a sigh, I turn to the photos. And in spite of myself, I am wowed. Tsao Pa, Ling Ling, Siu Pai. 28, administrative assistant. 47, owner of a seamstress business. 39, freelance beautician. The words jump off the pages, both in English and Chinese translations. These women are dynamos, achievers, with curly black hair, in turtlenecks, jauntily riding bicycles, seated squarely on cannons before military museums, standing proudly with three, full-grown daughters. One thing unites them. They're all ready to leap off the mainland at the drop of a hat. And don't think their careers and hobbies are going to keep them from being terrific wives. Quite the opposite. Several already have excellent experience, including one who's been married twice already. The seamstress has sent him shorts and several pairs of socks. There's much talk of seven-course meals and ironing and terrific expertise in gardening. Super achievement is a major theme that applies to all. But the biggest star of all, of course, is my father. He clears his throat and gleefully reads from a letter by one Liu Sun. It reads, "Dr. Loh, your family has told me of your excellent scientific genius and your many awards. I respect academic scholarship very highly and would be honored to meet you on your next visit." "You see," my father chuckles. They have a lot of respect for me in China. When I go there, they treat me like President Bush. Free drinks, free meals. I do not pay for anything." "He had his chance. He got married once for 25 years. He was a terrible husband and a worse father." Kaitlin is weighing in. All jokes are off. Her fury blazes away, further aggravated by the fact that she is going through a divorce and hates her $50,000-a-year job. Her monthly Nordstrom bills are astronomical. MCI is positively crackling. "He's a single man," I say. "Mom's been gone for 12 years now." "And now he gets a second try? Just like that?" Kaitlin exclaims. "Clean slate? Start right over? Buy a wife? It makes me sick. He is totally unqualified to sustain a marriage. A family structure of any kind collapses around him. Do you even remember one happy Christmas?" Twinkling lights and tinsel suddenly swirl before me. And looking deeper, through green foliage, I see my mother looking beautiful and crisp in lipstick and pearls, her wavy, auburn hair done. Except for the fact that she is hysterical. And my father, his face a mask of disgust so extreme it is almost [UNINTELLIGIBLE], is holding his overpriced new V-neck tennis sweater from Saks out in front of him like it was a dead animal. "I try to block it out," is what I say. "Well, I was six years older than you so I can't." Kaitlin's pain is raw. "Why does he deserve to be happy now? He made Mama miserable all her lifetime. He was so cheap. I think she was almost glad to go as soon as she did. A $70 dress, leaving the heater on overnight, too much spent on a nice, steak dinner. He could never let anything go. He could never just let it go. He just could not-- let-- things-- go." Meanwhile, on its own gentle time clock, unsullied by the raging doubts of his two daughters, my father's project bursts into flower. And 47-year-old Liu, the writer of the magic letter, is the lucky winner. Within three months, she's flown to Los Angeles. She and my father are married a week later. I do not get to meet her right away, but my father fills me in on the stats. And I have to confess, I'm surprised at how urban she is, how modern. Liu is a divorcee with, well, ambitions in the entertainment business. Although she speaks no English, she seems to be an expert on American culture. The fact that Los Angeles is near Hollywood has not escaped her. This is made clear to me one Sunday evening three weeks later via telephone. "I know you have friends in the entertainment business," my father declares. He has never fully grasped the fact that I am a typist and that Swanson's Films clients include such Oscar contenders as Kraft Foods and Motorola. "Aside from having knitted me a sweater and playing the piano," my father continues, "you should know that Liu is an excellent singer." Turning away from the phone, he and his new wife exchange a series of staccato reports in Mandarin which mean nothing to me. "I'm sure Liu is quite accomplished," I reply. "It's just that--" "Oh, she is terrific," my father exclaims, shocked that I could be calling Liu's musical talent into question. "You want to hear her sing? Here, here. I will put her on the phone right now." Creeping into my father's voice is a tremulous tone that's sickeningly familiar. How many times had I heard it during my childhood as I was pushed towards the piano kicking and screaming? How many times? But that was 20 years ago. I gulped terror back down. I live in my own apartment now, full of director's chairs, potted ficuses, and Matisse posters. I will be fine. My father has moved on to a totally new [? pushy ?] who picks up the phone, clears his throat, then bursts out triumphantly [SINGING IN CHINESE] "I have left you, Dr. Loh, and taken the Toyota. So there." Five weeks later, Liu just packs her suitcase, makes some sandwiches and takes off in the family Toyota. She leaves her note on the same Formica family dining room table at which she'd first won my father's heart. My father is in shock. Then again, he's philosophical. "That Liu, she was bad, that one. [SPITS] She says I do not like to give her gifts. She says I do not like to go out at night, and it is true. I do not. But I say go. See your friends in Chinatown. It is OK with me. I like it better when she leaves the house sometimes. It is more quiet. But Liu does not want to take the bus. She wants to drive the car. But you know me. I am your crazy old Chinese father. I do not like to pay for her auto insurance." And then he actually says, "As with many Asians, Liu is a very bad driver." "Ha," is Kaitlin's only comment. "Isn't it interesting how he seems to repel even his own kind?" Summer turns to fall in Southern California, causing the palm trees to sway a bit. The divorce is soon final, Liu's settlement including $10,000, the microwave, and the Toyota. Never one to dwell, my father has picked out a new bride, Zhu Ping, 37, homemaker from the Guangzhou province. I groan. "But no, Zhu Ping is very good," my father insists. He has had several phone conversations with her. "And she comes very highly recommended, not, I have to say, like Liu. She was bad, that one. [SPITS] Zhu Ping is very sensible and hardworking. She has had a tough life. Boy. She worked in a coal mine in Manchuria until she was 25 years old. The winters there were very, very bitter. She had to make her own shoes and clothing. Then she worked on a farming collective where she raised cattle and grew many different kinds of crops by herself." "I'm sure she's going to fit in really well in Los Angeles," I say. Zhu Ping, indeed, is a difference sort. The news, to my astonishment, comes from Kaitlin. "I received--" Her voice trails off, the very words seeming to elude her. "A birthday card from Papa and Zhu Ping." My sister continues in a kind of trance of matter-of-factness, as if describing some curious archaeological artifact. "On the cover, there is a clown holding balloons. It's from Hallmark. Inside, in gold lettering, cursive, it reads, 'Happy birthday, love Zhu Ping and your Daddy.'" "Your what?" "I think Zhu Ping put him up to this. The envelope is not addressed in his handwriting. Nonetheless," Kaitlin thinks it over, concurs with herself, "yes, yes. I believe this is the first birthday card I've ever received from him in my life. The first. It's totally bizarre." A week later, Kaitlin receives birthday gifts in the mail. A sweater, hand-knit by Zhu Ping, a box of moon cakes, a bunch of orchids. She is flipping out. "Oh no," she worries, "now I really have to call and thank her. I mean, the poor woman probably has no friends in America. Who knows what he's having her do? We may be her only link to society." Kaitlin finally does call, managing to catch Zhu Ping when my father is out on the beach doing his exercises. Although Zhu Ping's English is very broken, she somehow convinces Kaitlin to fly down for a visit. It will be Kaitlin's first trip home since our mother's passing and my first meeting of either of my father's two Chinese wives. I pull up the familiar driveway in my Geo. Neither Kaitlin nor I say anything. We peer out the windows. The yard doesn't look too bad. There are new sprinklers and a kind of intricate irrigation system made of a network of ingeniously placed rain gutters. Soil has been turned, and thoughtfully. Cypruses have been trimmed. Enormous bundles of weeds flank the driveway, as though for some momentous occasion. We ring the doorbell. Neither of us have had keys to the house in years. The door opens. A short, somewhat plump Chinese woman in round glasses and a perfect bowl haircut beams at us. She's wearing a bright yellow "I Hate Housework" apron that my mother was once given as a gag gift and I think never wore. "Kat-lin! Sand-wa!" she exclaims in what seems like authentic joy, embracing us. She is laughing and almost crying with emotion. In spite of myself, giggles begin to well up from inside me, as if from a spring. I can't help it. I feel warm and euphoric. Authentic joy is contagious. Who cares who this woman is? No one has been this happy to see me in ages. "Welcome home," Zhu Ping says, with careful emphasis. She turns to Caitlin, a shadow falling over her face. "I am so glad you finally come home to see you daddy," she says in a low, sorrowful voice. She looks over her shoulder. "He old now." Then, as if exhausted by that effort, Zhu Ping collapses into giggles. I sneak a glance over at Kaitlin, whose expression seems to be straining somewhere between joy and nausea. I jump nervously in. "It's so nice to finally meet you. How do you like Los Angeles? I've heard so much about your cooking." My father goes off to put some music on his new CD player. "That bad Liu made me buy it," he exclaims. "But it is nice." Zhu Ping bustles into the kitchen. "Dinner ready in five minute," she declares. Kaitlin waits a beat, then pulls me aside into the bathroom and slams the door. "This is so weird," she hisses. We have not stood together in this bathroom for some 15 years. It seems somehow different. I notice that the wallpaper is faded, the towels are new. But no, it's something else. On one wall is my mother's framed reproduction of the brown da Vinci etching called Praying Hands which she had always kept in her sewing room. Right next to it, in shocking juxtaposition, is a green, red, and yellow Bank of Canton calendar, featuring a zaftig Asian female in a bikini. "I can't go through with this," Kaitlin continues in stage whisper. "It's too weird. There are so many memories here. And not good ones." And like debris from a hurricane, the words tumble out. "I go by the kitchen and all I can see is me standing before the oven clock at age five with tears in my eyes. He is yelling, 'What time is it? The little hand is most of the way to 4 and the big hand is on the 8. It was 3:18 22 minutes ago, so what time is it now? What's 18 plus 22? Come on. You can do it in your head. Come on. Come on.' I go buy the dining room and I see him hurling my Nancy Drew books across the floor. They slam against the wall and I huddle against Mom. Screaming. 'Why do you waste your time on this when your algebra homework isn't finished? You good for nothing! You're nothing! Nothing! You'll never amount to anything!' I go by the bedroom--" "Please." I have this sickening feeling like I'm going to cry, that I'm just going to lose it. I want to just sit down in the middle of the floor and roll myself into a ball. But I can't. Kaitlin's rage is like something uncontainable, a dreadful, natural force, and I am the gate keeper. I feel if I open the door, it will rush out and destroy the house and everything in it. "Please," is what I end up whispering. "Please, let's just eat. We'll be done in an hour. Then we can go home, I promise. You won't have to do this again for another 10 years. Or maybe ever." At dinner, endless plates of food twirl their way out of the kitchen, Zhu Ping practically dancing underneath. Spinach, teriyaki-ish chicken, shrimp, some kind of egg thing with peas, dumplings packed with little pillows of pork. And amazingly, there is no want of conversational material. Photos from Shanghai are being pulled out of envelopes and passed around of her family, his family. I do recognize three or four Chinese relatives, a cousin, an aunt, a grand uncle. Their names are impossible for me to remember. We had met them in China during our last trip as a family. I was 15. It was right before our mother started to get sick. Shanghai is a distant, confused memory for me of ringing bicycle bells and laundry lines hanging from buildings. What I do remember is how curious my father's family had seemed about Kaitlin and me, his odd American experiment, ooh-ing over our height and touching our auburn hair. There were many smiles but no intelligible conversation, at least to our ears. We probably won't see any of these people again before we die. But Zhu Ping will have none of it. Hearty Manchurian builder that she is, she is determined to use the crude two by fours of her broken English to forge a rickety rope bridge between us. "You, Sand-wa, you. You play the piano, no? Mozart, he very nice. You will show me. And you, Kat-lin, you. You are a teacher, no? That is good, Kat-lin, good. Kat-lin, you are very, very good." My father puts his spoon down. He is chewing slowly, a frown growing. "This meat," he shakes his head, "is very, very greasy." He turns to Zhu Ping and the lines of both sides of his mouth deepen. His eyes cloud. He says something to her in Chinese with a certain sharp cadence that makes my spine stiffen. Zhu Ping's face goes blank for a moment. Her eyes grow big. My stomach turns to ice. How will she respond? By throwing her napkin down? Bursting into tears? Running from the room? Will she knock the table over, plates sliding after each other, sauces spilling, crockery breaking? Will we hear the car engine turn over as she drives off into the night, leaving us here frightened and panicked? It is none of these things. Zhu Ping's head tilts back. Her eyes crinkle. And laughter pours out of her, peal after peal after peal. It is a big laugh, an enormous laugh, the laugh of a woman who has birthed calves and hoed crops and seen harsh winters decimate countrysides. Pointing to our father, Zhu Ping turns to us with large, glittering eyes and says, words which sound incredible to our ears. "You Papa, he so funny." My jaw drops. No one has ever laughed out loud at this table ever. We laughed behind closed doors, in our bedrooms, in the bathroom, never before my father. We laughed sometimes with my mother on those glorious days when he would be off on a trip. But Kaitlin is not laughing. She is trembling. Her face is turning red. "Why were you always so angry?" she cries out in a strangled voice. It's a question she's waited 30 years to ask. "Why were you so angry?" There is a shocked silence. My father looks weary and embarrassed. He smiles wanly and shrugs his thin shoulders. "No, really," Kaitlin insists, "all those years with Mama. Why?" "I don't know," my father murmurs. "People get angry." And I know in that moment that he doesn't have an answer. He literally doesn't. It's as if rage was this chemical that reacted on him for 20 years. Who knows why, but like some kind of spirit, it has left him now. The rage is spent. He is old now. He is old. Dusk is fallen and long shadows fall across the worn parquet floor of the dining room. After a moment of silence, my father asks Zhu Ping to sing a song. The house frau from Guangzhou opens her mouth and with an odd dignity, sings simply and slowly. My father translates. "From the four corners of the Earth, my lover comes to me playing the lute. Like the wind over the water." He recites the words without embarrassment, almost without emotion. And why shouldn't he? The song has nothing to do with him personally. It is from some old Chinese fable. It has to do with missing someone, something, someplace, that perhaps one can't even define anymore. As Zhu Ping sings, everyone longs for home. But what home? Zhu Ping, for her bitter winters? My father, for the Shanghai he left 40 years ago? And what about Kaitlin and I? We are even sitting in our own childhood home, and we long for it. Papa, why don't you just take us out with a song? This song, usually, I sing with my wife. Since today, Sandra didn't invite my wife, I have to let her stay in the kitchen at home. This song describes a young woman longing for her lover. It sounds like this. [SINGING IN CHINESE] Our program was produced today by Peter Clowney and by myself, with Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike and Dolores Wilber. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt and Margy Rochlin. "My Father's Chinese Wives," was first published in Quarterly West. Sandra's own book is called Depth Takes a Holiday-- that's "depth"-- Essays from Lesser Los Angeles. If you would like to buy a copy of this program, it's only $10. Call us, WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380, 312-832-3380. Or you can write us at WBEZ, 848 East Grand Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60611. Or you can email us. Our email address [email protected], [email protected] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass. Papa, I'm going to tell this story now the way I tell it. So I hope you're not embarrassed, OK? OK. What choice do I have? Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Here's the kind of thing that changes you from one kind of person into another. Adam and Wendy had been looking for a house for years, which is what you have to do if you don't have a lot of money. And finally, they found this house that they liked. And the broker showed it to them before it came into the market, so the actually had a shot at getting the house. And then, they were completely ripped off, but ripped off in this way that seems almost calculated to get inside their very molecules and rip them off at the cellular level. The owners of the house, they were very warm and friendly with us, and-- Paternal. Paternal, they were very paternal. In fact, they reminded me of my parents in a way. They were an academic couple. She seemed like an old hippie, which made me feel like, I don't know, she's pretty genuine. She wore clogs and just seemed kind of cool, and long gray hair, and-- They said to us at one point, "You know, we have great compassion for you two because we've got children your own age. And so we have great compassion for what you're doing." But it seemed really genuine at the time. An inspector came and pointed out a few problems with the house. For instance, the owners had said that the roof was brand new. But in fact, the inspector said, it had simply been painted silver and was a web of cracks and problems. The steps leading up to the house were being rebuilt, but the inspector said that the workmanship was no good. It would not last the winter. And then there was the question of the abandoned house next door. What was going to happen there? They understood that they knew nothing about it, nothing at all. But might it affect the value of this house? The owners insisted on talking out the problems face-to-face. And they invited us over and gave us coffee. And we sat right in this room. We sat right here. I think we sat in their couch, which was where our couch now is. And we looked them in the eye, and they sat across from us. And that's when I got the first sense that they were playing us. They didn't believe the inspector. They said, that's crazy, we have a new roof. And this guy that is doing the stoop is doing a very good job in fact. They made the point that the roof wasn't leaking on them. Therefore, it was not, as far as they were concerned, a problem. Therefore, why should it really enter the negotiations? Negotiations went back and forth for weeks. Wendy and Adam barely got their way on anything. But they bought the house anyway because they knew that if they didn't, somebody else would. They move in. And then, the very first time that it rains, streams of brown water come pouring into the house. So the water started dripping from there, where you can see the brown stains. Water was coming down here. The wall was bubbling out with a big pocket of water inside, and the plaster was falling. I just felt totally defeated when I saw that water. I couldn't believe it, how they just kept saying, the roof is new, you guys are crazy. You're totally overreacting. You can't listen to contractors who tell you you need a new roof. Yeah, you need a new roof. Yeah, right. Well, we've never had this. This place has never-- we never had a leak. And as soon as the water started, I started to really look at the ceiling. And I noticed that, wait a minute, you can see where it was leaking before. I had never noticed. It was very subtle, just a little bit of yellowing. And someone had repaired it. So they did lie to us. The second day they were in the house, Adam was walking up the steps to the front door, and he heard a sound, the steps cracking under his feet. Their first weekend in the house, they woke up to a different sound, the sound of jackhammers. It turns out that not only was there construction starting on the house next door, it would extend that house 15 feet back, blocking out all of the western sunlight from Adam and Wendy's backyard. And if that were not enough, neighbors informed them that the previous owners knew all about it, in fact, had led an organizing drive on the block to stop this construction. And what makes the whole thing so galling is they're still living in the home of the people who took advantage of them. Every day, they're reminded of these people. They smell their smell in the closet. When the drains back up, it's their hair and grease. We've gone through the house, over all the surfaces with razor blades, scraping off the fingerprints and the dirt. And it's obsessive. We've gotten overly meticulous about it. But every time I open those doors over there, I think of them. I think of their greasy hands, every time, even though I have scrubbed. In fact, over here, you can see I became really crazy, and I started scrubbing these cabinets. And I actually got the finish off of it, I was scrubbing so hard. Now, Wendy and Adam, I should say, are the sort of do-gooders who, when they move out of an apartment they've been renting, they'll hire a cleaner to make sure that the place is spotless for the next tenants. When they sell a car, they get that extra brake job for $600 before putting it on the market, not because they necessarily think it'll get a better price, and usually it does not, but because they think that it is right. They believe in deals where everybody walks away feeling like the deal was fair. Or anyway, that's the kind of people they used to be before they bought a house. That's changed the way I deal with people now. I'm bitter about it. I don't trust anyone anymore. In every negotiation, the way you see it now is, somebody's going to be the sucker. Yeah, I feel that way now. I feel that there's a winner and a loser. That you're either going to get screwed by somebody, or you're screwing somebody. Just last weekend, they went to a big home supplies hardware chain, a chain where they have gotten terrible advice in the past, terrible service. They needed some bolts. And, filled with anger and a spirit of vengeance, they simply stole them. The opportunity presented itself. They took advantage. And my friend, it felt good to steal. It felt good to make somebody else the sucker. They think they're going to do it again. That is what they have learned from the previous owners of their house. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it is This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Today on our program, Suckers. There are some people who see the world as a place where everybody can work out their differences and come to settlements, where everybody is happy, everybody getting along. And there are people who believe it's eat or be eaten, screw or be screwed. Today, the chasm that divides those two worldviews. They both can't be right. Either the world is dog-eat-dog or not. Today, we try to figure out which it is. Stay with us. Act One, No Receipt, No Surrender. Perhaps you're familiar with the story of a certain New Jersey family. They live in a lovely suburban home. The neighbors have no idea how all the nice stuff they own arrives there, or if they suspect, they keep their mouths shut. The attitude of the head of the household, sometimes there are opportunities to take, and you take them. Or maybe you don't know the family I'm talking about. I wouldn't even call it a crime. People do it all the time. This is a woman who asked to be identified only by her first name, Sheila, for reasons that will become all too clear to you. I should say that she does not make a living off of her little random opportunities. Her husband is a doctor, and he supports the family. But she embodies the kind of worldview that we're talking about in this week's show. She's the sort of person who talks hotels into giving her discounts when, really, they have no reason to, who shows up at famous restaurants where she has no reservation, sneaks a look at the names in the reservation book, and then claims to be one of the people listed in order to be seated right away. She's talked her way into sold-out events. She's talked her way into the Getty Museum. Here's a typical scam. I had been shopping with my older daughter. And I insisted that she buy this most gorgeous Geoffrey Beene outfit that had the Saks Fifth Avenue hangtag price of, I think, $3,800. And at Loehmann's, it was, oh, about $200. And I said, "Oh, Susan, you really have to have this." OK, well, she took it, and, of course, as luck would have it, she never put it on her back. About a year or so later, I said to my husband, "Would you mind detouring into the city, and we'll go to the Geoffrey Beene boutique at Saks?" And he said, OK. He doesn't generally approve of things like this, but I really didn't tell him what the purpose was. So I took the garment upstairs to the boutique, and I spoke to the buyer, told them that this had been purchased at another Saks, and I would like to return it. And he said, "That's not a problem." And he looked at the hangtag, and he said, "Well, the item has been marked down. It's now, I think, about $2,200." No longer $3,800. Right. I said, "Well, that's all right. Just credit my account." That was a $2,000 profit. You paid $200 for it at Loehmann's. Right, right, right. Now, your daughter Jen is sitting in the studio with you. Jen, do you just want to give your perspective on this, what this was like growing up with this happening all the time? I knew from a very young age that my mother wasn't necessarily like other mothers. My mother had a very large Country Squire station wagon when I was growing up. And oftentimes, the back of the car would be filled with things that were not illegally gotten, but certainly questionably gotten. I remember very clearly when I was very young, there was a promotion at a bank. And if you opened a checking account, you could get, I think, one blender or one toaster, one of something. But my mother thought, well, why get one, when I could open multiple checking accounts and get a whole bunch of them? And I remember returning to our house, I must have been maybe five or six, with the trunk filled with these blenders or toasters. And we already had a blender and a toaster. We didn't need multiples. But my mother has built this warehouse in our basement where she literally outfitted the homes of all of my cousins, who are all older than I am. I don't think anybody bought anything off the shelf. How often will you do something like this? Will you have something like this going, say, once a week or so? Oh, no. Mom? No, a few times during the year. Mom, I would say, conservatively, 24 times a year, you've got some scam running. What else has your mom done that you could never see yourself doing, when it comes to these kinds of things? Oh, boy. The Getty. Yeah, the Getty was a big one. My mother and I were at a wedding in California, in Los Angeles, and my mother very much wanted to go to the Getty. And I was keen on going to the Getty, but knew that you have two options. You either make a reservation months in advance to get a parking space, or you park at the bottom of a hill and take a bus up, which seems to me not the worst thing in the world. But my mother says to the attendant, we're on the list. We're staying at the Bel Air, and I believe the concierge made a reservation. I should be on the list. We have a parking space. And clearly, we have not made a reservation. I know we have not made a reservation. And I am livid. And we drive in, and that was a very tense moment. And then, what are you saying to him to-- Oh, but it's not possible. These reservations were made six months ago. I would not just show up here without a reservation. Do I look like that kind of a person? With me rolling my eyes next to her. How he didn't see that and know that this was a scam, I have no idea. I happen to look like a very honorable, decent sort of a person. But I have found a way to get around the system, which many people are reluctant to do. And will you just keep going until they give you what you want? Or will you stop at some point? Yes, I am very tenacious. And so your method is you just don't stop. Right, because I won't take no for an answer. I just wear the person down, I suppose. And very often, it doesn't take very long. For you, it's not about the money. It's just that it's like a sport for you, right? It definitely is. It certainly is not about the money. My dad was a very successful executive. And he always said to me, if you walk into a place and hold your head up high, nobody will ever question because you look as though you belong where you are. And that has served me in good stead. Wherever I have wanted to get into, I have been successful in getting in. Jen, do you sort of go too far in the other direction? Yeah, absolutely. Like I'll pay double. You'll pay double. If something's going on sale tomorrow, that's OK. You know what? I'll pay what it costs today. It's fine. Don't worry about it. I always overtip. Yeah. I can't tell, hearing you talk about this, do you wish you were more like your mom? In a lot of ways, I really do. Because she's fearless. And sometimes I think, like when I'm working, if I had my mother's steel stomach, I would probably be much better at what I do. Or conversely, she would be really good at what I do. But I just don't have it in me. Well, after our interview, since Jen said that she wished that she were more like her mom, we got the idea to have Jen's mom give her a little lesson, a training exercise in being her. Here it is. Here's Jen. We decided to try something simple. My assignment was to return a bright yellow sweater my boyfriend had received as a gift four years ago. It was from a high-end clothing store called Burberry. It was the type of sweater that might have been appropriate on a public golf course in Scotland in the mid-'80s. Suffice it to say, I hated the sweater. This is what we had working for us. The sweater had originally been purchased at Burberry and had a Burberry label. There was even paper folded into the sweater, printed with the trademark logo. On the downside, we had no receipt and no hangtag. And of course, the sweater was four years out of fashion and looked it, none of which fazed my mother. In fact, she thought the whole thing so easy, she decided to up the ante. She wanted me to try for a cash refund instead of a store credit. She was going to show me how. I don't have your skill, I don't know. I would have preferred the raincoat. My mom showed up at my office wearing a crisply pressed blouse, gigantic Jackie O sunglasses, and a pair of knockoff Burberry plaid pants that simultaneously embodied her two biggest beliefs in life. Always dress the part, and never pay full price. The training session started with some role-playing. OK, so I'll be me, and you'll be the Burberry's manager. Hi, I have this sweater that my boyfriend got as a gift a couple of years ago. I don't know that I would say a couple of years ago. I wouldn't say when it was purchased. Play dumb. He just gave it to you because you were going to be in New York and asked that you return it. OK, so we'll start over again. Hi, I'd like to return this sweater. That's good. That's good. I like that. Yes, my dear, how can I help you? This isn't the way my mother usually works. She believes in pure improv. But for my benefit, she concocts a backstory for me. It's astonishingly complicated. Apparently, I live in Arkansas with my Arkansas businessman boyfriend, who got this sweater as a gift, along with a lot of other Burberry clothing. Anyone who knows him knows it's his favorite store. I'm only in town for a day, and I rarely come to New York, so I want cash, not credit. And by the way, I don't know when the sweater was purchased, but he received it recently. It's such a crazy collection of facts that I have a hard time keeping it all straight. OK, so from the top, here's what I'm remembering. I live in Arkansas. My boyfriend lives in Arkansas. He's in business in Arkansas. He doesn't travel to New York. I understand that it's-- Has no occasion. Has no occasion. What's the importance of the phrase "has no occasion"? Because it makes him sound like maybe he is a more important kind of a person, rather than some yokel. Make him sound like he's a CEO of some major company, but likes small town living and does not like the city and doesn't feel comfortable-- This is method scamming. We head over to Burberry's. I'm wearing a hidden microphone, and my stomach immediately starts to hurt. OK, so I'm from Arkansas, and I'm only visiting. Burberry is a sleek, luxe store filled with coiffed salespeople and stylish Japanese tourists. There's plenty of taupe cashmere muffling the sound system. Everything is ordered, serene. I'm directed to the manager. I have a sweater that my boyfriend received as a gift. And we live out of state. And he asked me to return it while I'm in New York. The manager barely glances at me as he informs me of their policy. No receipt, no returns, no exceptions. I muster up the courage to try again and instantly forget every lesson my mother taught me. I volunteer information. I say things that could be used against me. I can't keep the facts of my fake story straight. It's possible it was purchased a little while ago. I don't have a receipt. And I'm actually not even sure who he got it from. So I'm not-- yeah, I have no idea to tell you the truth. He got a whole bunch of presents. I don't know. All I want to do is get out of there. The guy is, after all, just doing his job. No receipt, no returns, no exception. I nod feebly and wonder why we don't just give the sweater to Goodwill. I can feel that it's killing my mom to see me struggle like this, but she's trying to hold back. Finally the manager says, look, for all he knows, the sweater wasn't even bought at this store. It could have just come from some outlet. And that does it. My mom, unable to contain herself any longer, steps in. Oh, I can assure you that this was not purchased at an outlet. I don't know about outlets, because I'm not an outlet shopper. My mom saying she's not an outlet shopper is like saying she's not an air breather. My mom spends all of five minutes dealing with the manager before deciding it's a waste of time. Her cardinal rule is if you want something done right, you have to go straight to the top. Positioning herself firmly in front of the store's only cash register, she pulls out her cell phone and calls Burberry corporate headquarters. Hi. I'm sorry to bother you. I'm trying to help my daughter's boyfriend. I want to climb into the revolving rack of raincoats and disappear. And then when he heard that my daughter was coming to New York, he asked her to bring it back to any one of the Burberry stores. The lies fell from her like notes in an improvisational jazz saxophone solo. She's on a tear, and she will stop at nothing. No, he received a whole bunch of gifts from Burberry. It happens to be his favorite store. And your manager can tell you that I'm wearing one of your pairs of pants today coincidentally. Also coincidentally, people are starting to clear away from us. I'm sure the only thing the manager would attest to at this point is that he wants me, my mother, and her fake, Burberry, plaid pants the hell out of there. Well, he's in Arkansas. I'm here in New York with the sweater. You know, there is a time difference between here and Arkansas. It's 12:00 in New York, which makes it 11:00 in Arkansas. Well, I have been in many situations in my life, from Chanel to Givenchy, and I have never had a situation like this. I am a faithful Burberry shopper. Well, because I'm leaving the city today. I'm going out of state. And I probably won't be back for another year, so I was hoping-- She's on the phone for over 20 minutes. Burberry's return policy is designed precisely with people like my mother in mind. They just keep repeating over and over, no receipt, no returns, no exceptions. At this point, I'm surprised to find that I'm getting mad. The nerve of them. After an hour and a half, we finally leave, defeated. I think you did really well, Mom. I couldn't have-- I gave up. I was dying inside. I was definitely like, oh, God. Just get us out of here. I don't want this mean man looking at me like this anymore. I feel ridiculous. I don't know what-- I'm trying to feel what a person from Arkansas would be feeling. I'm no help at all. I really think that since everything jived, the label-- they didn't have a hangtag. Well, maybe that's the way they wrap their gifts, without a hangtag. Hear that? That's why I think my mom is so good at this. She truly believed she was in the right. She was actually furious at Burberry for not falling for her lies. She tells me this is unheard of. They've just lost a valuable customer. Never mind that she was never an actual customer in the first place. Later, back at the office, she chalks up our failure to one small strategic mistake. The reason we didn't get satisfaction is because he knew that my pants were knockoffs. I think so too. I think you pushed it there. I think that's where we lost our credibility. It was a good try, Mom. It was a good effort. What started as a lark for me, a little mother-daughter bonding time, escalated far beyond that for her. It was now a question of honor. She shot off letters to the CEO, the CFO, and, to leave no stone unturned, the mayor of New York. She refused to read these letters to me, and I'm terrified to imagine what she said. They must have been some letters though. The salesman called a week later to say that they were still working on the return. He called a few days after that to tell her that there was a credit waiting for her in the Spring Street store. They credited us for $59, which was brilliant on their part, because they paid less than the sweater was worth while getting my mother out of their hair forever. Honestly, if they paid her a dollar, she'd have declared victory. The problem now is I can't go get the credit, because I'm supposed to be in Arkansas. Not only that, but the store is just three blocks from my job. I'm so afraid they'll recognize me, I try to avoid their street completely. When I can't, I cross the street, so they won't see me. I know my mom wouldn't hesitate to stroll right by. Act Two, The Stereo Type. The sucker worldview is that when an opportunity presents itself, you and I should grab that opportunity. And if we do not, we are suckers. Unfortunately, this mentality could also lead us to become big suckers because, of course, there is no better mark than somebody who thinks that he is about to beat the system. There's no bigger sucker than somebody who thinks that he is about to make someone else into a sucker. Well, with that in mind, we have this little fable about suckerdom from our producer, Alex Blumberg. My friend Shane has this story about being a sucker and then getting the chance to get revenge on the people who suckered him. It starts when he was just 23. He had gotten one of his first adult paychecks, which seemed huge at the time. He was wearing a new suit that he'd bought with the money. He was walking down the street, thinking, this adult life is a breeze. Never before or since did he feel that the world was such a benevolent and bountiful place. And I'm approached by a van full of young guys in their, say, 20s. And it's got a stencil on the side. And they approach me, and they're like, "Hey, buddy. You want to buy some speakers?" And these guys really have it together. They're in uniforms. They have their names on the thing. The van is stenciled with the name of some company. And these aren't speakers that they've just pulled out of someone's living room, and the wires are dangling. They're boxed. They're packaged. They have shipping invoices. They have a whole clipboard full of delivery sites and inventory and this. And they have this whole spiel. And the spiel is, "Dude, you know, we're, like, the delivery guys. And the dudes at the loading dock put too many speakers on the truck. And if we get rid of these before we get back, nobody knows, dude. Dude, we're just trying to unload these fast." And then it's like, "These are $1,200 speakers. We'll give them to you for five bills, buddy." Shane played along, acted like he's down, he's been through this before, he's one of them. We're all dudes. We all know, we all speak that language. So I say, "Well, I want to hear them." So at this point, I'm just out of college, about two, three months. And I am living at my mother's house. And we're pretty far away from there. She lives in the suburbs. We're in the city. So I say, "Well, if you want to follow me, we can go try them out." And they're like, "All right." And so they follow me all the way back to my mother's house, which is a significant drive. And I get to my mom's house. And I'm looking at their setup, because I'm trying to think, can I plug the speakers in here to listen? And I can't. There's not enough wire to take it out of the wall. They follow me to the audio store. And I buy some speaker wire. And we bring it home. These guys are tenacious. If this is a scam, these guys are wasting a lot of time. It's getting harder to imagine it's a scam the longer they stick with it. And I bring one of the speakers inside. And I plug it in. And it sounds, it just sounds fine. It doesn't sound one way or another. And I go out and I say, "It sounds good, I guess." And they've got it in your mind that it's going to just blow you away. And I think I even said something mildly, not critical, but just unimpressed, like, "The low end sounds a little mushy." And then they have this whole spiel, like, "If you just put in Monster wire, it'll take care of that." The Monster wire, and it's Monster wire. And I don't even know what Monster wire is, but that sounds good to me. So now it comes to the negotiating part. And again, I'm thinking, "Heh. These guys don't know who they're dealing with." We go back and forth, and finally, it's like, "All right. $300." Because actually, that was the most I could take out on my cash station card. Did you use that as a bargaining-- Yes, yes. I probably said something like, "Well, you know, I can only get $300." From that point on, they knew they were dealing with a high roller. They had no idea who they were messing with. So now I'm past thinking that it's a speaker scam. Now I'm on to thinking, well, if I do this, I'm somehow criminally liable. And I don't want to get busted. So I-- Because you think they're stolen. Well, these guys, if their story is true, they essentially stole them. So we're at the cash station. I've taken out the money. They're waiting in the car. I already have the speakers at my place, at my mom's place, that is. And I go to give them the money through the car window. And I've already written down the license plate. And I say, "If I go down, I'm taking you guys with me." The next thing that happens is I come home to my new speakers. I think, well, I'm going to find out just how much money I essentially made. I'm going to call the high-end audio store and ask them how much they sell the Pro Musica 555, whatever they are. And I call the guy, I say, "How much do you sell, what do you know about the Pro Musica 555s?" He's like, "Hold on a second." He puts down the phone and comes back. He goes, "Did someone try to sell you those?" And I was like, "Yeah, someone did try to sell me those." And he's like, "You should get a hold of the San Francisco Chronicle," blah blah blah, and he names a date. And it's this whole coast-to-coast, national, multimillion-dollar scam ring. Apparently, there's training, sort of like those pyramid marketing things. And apparently, it's everywhere. It started on the west coast, and it's moved all the way here. And I was like, "Awww." And I call information for the number of the place they said they work for that's stenciled on the side of their van, and that was on their shipping invoices and their, you know. And it's like, "No such number exists." Fast forward a long time, a really long time, like 12 years maybe. And I'm in the parking lot of the fancy supermarket, Whole Foods, in Chicago. And I'm coming out, and it's like a gift from God. It's just so perfect. The exact same kind of van rolls up, the same kind of stencil, the same sort of guys inside. And out of everyone in this giant parking lot, they go, that's our guy. They come over to me, and they're like, "Dude! We got these speakers. We're the loading dock." It's this whole same spiel. What you want here is basically, you want a Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson line. You just want something totally cool and chilling that is going to totally stop him for some amount of time. And he's not going to expect it, and it's going to so perfectly cut through all his nonsense that he's just going to run in terror. And I was also thinking, give him a chance. Don't just gun him down. Let him get a little head start. So I'm like, "I tell you what. I'm going to give you five minutes. And then I'm going to call the cops." And then he starts mocking me like nobody's business. He's like, "Oooh, tough guy. Think we're scared? Response time is 10 minutes. We'll be out of here," blah blah blah. And all the guys, it was like the monkey cage in the van. They're like, "Oo-oo-oo-ooh. Oh, scary. Oo-oo-oo-ooh." And it's just, it's just so wrong. It's so embarrassing. And my retreat was so awful. In my mind, I'm slouching and hunchbacked and kind of worming my way to the pay phone. There's no quick calls. And that's the thing about Bronson. Bronson delivers his line and then shoots somebody or punches somebody. You delivered your line and then walked across a parking lot to make a pay phone call. Yeah, exactly. You want to try me, buddy? Pick up this phone. Of course, the one bullet I have left in my gun at this point is I can go call. They can be arrested. Meanwhile, I'm looking out the window. And these guys are totally non-plussed. They're going, and they're soliciting other people. They're talking to other folks. I call 911 from the pay phone. And a dispatcher picks up, and he's like, "911 emergency." I'm like, "Yeah, there's these guys doing this speaker scam at the Whole Foods." The dispatchers is like-- apparently she doesn't think this is an emergency-- and she's like, "What's the address where you're located at, sir?" And I have no idea. It's a shopping center. How do you know the address? And every question she asked me just betrays her thinking that this is not an emergency. This is not urgent. And we're not going to jump to it because you call and say these-- and I'm like, "Lady, you don't understand. A friend of mine fell for this scam once. I know what's going on." Shane Dubow and Alex Blumberg. Coming up, an entire nation which holds to the sucker mentality. Can you guess which nation I'm talking about? Can you guess? An answer 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, Suckers, in which we ask the question, is the world in fact a place where you either make someone else into a sucker, or you're the sucker. We've arrived at act three of our program, Act Three, Suckers in the Promised Land. Regular listeners might remember not so long ago when reporter Adam Davidson and I did some stories from Israel. And while he and I were traveling around there, Adam told me to notice how often people use the word freier, which is the Yiddish word for sucker, the Israeli word for sucker. And I have to say, it happens all the time, because the idea of being a sucker is so much more powerful in Israel than it is here. Adam put together this primer on the huge place that freierism has in Israeli life, and how it explains things you didn't even know might need explaining. There is this amazing moment that was caught on film at the Camp David Peace Accords in 2000. President Clinton is leading then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat into some log cabin for more negotiations. At the door, Arafat opens one arm to invite Barak to go in first. Barak stands there, impishly, and extends his own arm, telling Arafat to go in first. Things degenerated quickly. And you can actually see Barak and Arafat in a sort of fake wrestle, as Barak is trying to physically force Arafat to enter the door before he does. The thing seems irreconcilable until, through the door, you see President Clinton's long arms grab both men and pull them in. I think some Americans saw this and thought it was a good sign. These two old enemies are now friendly enough for roughhousing. But for any Israeli watching, the message was clear. Barak was telling Arafat, I'm in control here. I decide who goes in and who doesn't. Nobody tells me when to go in a door. Put another way, I'm not your freier. I'm not your sucker. You constantly hear it, constantly. Don't be a freier. This is Tom Segev, an Israeli journalist and historian. That is the worst thing for an Israeli to be, a freier, in his own eyes, and also in the eyes of other Israelis. So never, ever be generous. Be always on guard. Somebody is out there to take what is due to you. I think it would be impossible to understand Israelis without understanding the whole notion of freierism. It is at the heart of Israeli culture, affecting how people work, how they shop, how they vote, how they think about themselves and the people around them. Freierism is everywhere. When I asked my cousin David if he'd ever been a freier, like any Israeli, he first said no. But when I pressed, he surprised me by recalling, in detail, an incident that happened years ago. He was in line to pay at a supermarket, and this woman came up and asked if she could jump in front of him because she only had a few items. He said sure. Then she wheeled over this cart filled with groceries. He realized that she had made him a freier. He thinks about that woman every time he goes shopping, and he has never let anyone get in front of him since. This was years ago. Again, here's Tom Segev. Driving is a situation where the freier instinct really comes out. Driving in Israel is really hell because we will always be afraid that if you let the other guy get ahead, you will be the freier. Why would I let him go ahead of me if I can go ahead? Why should he go ahead of me? From an Israeli point of view, Jews were suckers for 2,000 years in exile, constantly being tricked and persecuted. The whole idea of Israel was to create a place where Jews were in control, where Jews would never again be freiers. And even though Israel is now a powerful state, the fear of being taken advantage of hasn't gone away. Israelis even fear that their own Jewish government makes them all freiers. Many Israelis say you're a freier if you pay your parking tickets, if you follow traffic laws. Even if you pay your taxes, you can be a freier. I've seen people collecting what their dogs do on the sidewalk, even though nobody watches them. And that would probably be considered a freier, somebody who obeys the law, even though there's no policeman around. Israel has an improvisational feel that America lacks. It's a place that hasn't quite settled yet. Every price can be negotiated. Every law is up for debate. Being a freier doesn't just mean getting taken advantage of, like being a sucker does here. It means you don't get how the whole system works. In America, you're a sucker if you buy your stereo from some guy in a parking lot. But in Israel, it's the exact opposite. Anyone can buy a stereo in a store. You're the only one who knows that Moishe's cousin from Uzbekistan just got a shipment of off-brand stereos with Sony parts, and he's selling them out of his car in the central bus station for cheap. It's not that Israelis are obsessed with getting things cheap per se. It's just that if you don't, you're a freier. I've always known that. And I've always noticed that when I get to Israel and start speaking Hebrew, my whole personality changes. I'm on guard. I'm ready to yell. But I don't think I really understood what freierism means until I was checking out of this hotel in Tel Aviv a few years ago. Because of some glitch, the hotel's computer put on my bill all these phone charges to places I've never called in my life, Poland, Uruguay, Sri Lanka. I went to the manager, and in seconds, he and I were screaming at each other. I'm yelling at him, asking how he can charge for calls I never made. He's yelling back at me. This goes on for a while, until suddenly, I realize that he and I completely agree. He doesn't want me to pay the phone charges. I don't want to pay the phone charges. What we're really fighting over is who gets to say whether or not I pay the phone charges. He's saying, "I'm the manager. You don't tell me you don't pay the bill. I tell you if you don't pay the bill." And I'm yelling back in Hebrew, "I'm the customer. You don't tell me if I pay the bill. I don't pay any bill that isn't correct." That's when I got it. We weren't fighting over money. We were fighting over who was the freier, him or me. (INTERVIEWER) ADAM DAVIDSON Have you been a freier recently? Probably. Again, here's Tom Segev. We are all freiers. We are a nation of freiers actually. We are a nation of freiers. And that's one of the childhood diseases which we have yet to overcome. What do you mean, you're a nation of freiers? I can tell you something on a more serious and on a more political level. I think that the Israeli left, the Israeli peace camp feels very much like being the freier these days. Because we have been advocating peace with the Palestinians, we are advocating compromises with the Palestinians. Very often, we have done that sitting in cafes which, hours later, have been blown up by Palestinian terrorists. So I think that many of us feel that Palestinian terrorism has made us, people of the Israeli peace camp, freiers. In fact, the whole peace process is infected with the idea of freierism. Both sides know what the final outcome is going to be, a Palestinian state next to Israel, Israel giving up some settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. But each side has to play its hand to see that it gets the absolute best deal, that they aren't taken for freiers. And of course, any peace depends on both sides trusting each other. And trusting, everyone knows, is the mark of a true freier. Adam Davidson in Los Angeles. We now move on to Act Four, Mother Sucker. We have this story about the meaning of parenthood and the prevalence of being made a sucker from Heather O'Neill. When I was 18 years old, I moved out of my dad's house with a suitcase and headed downtown. And there was nothing anyone could do about it. I grew up in the smallest apartment in the world, with my dad yelling all the time. My two sisters and I all slept in a tiny room with two bunk beds and a cardboard box of clothing that we all shared. After an atrocious childhood, I was delighted to be a grown-up. My friend, Ben, and I got an apartment. You turned on the oven at 3:00 in the afternoon if you wanted it to be hot by suppertime. We never locked the door. We'd lost all the keys. After living there peacefully for a couple of months, one night, Ben brought home Jimmy. Jimmy was a 16-year-old boy that he had found at the Electric Bumbum, a club down the street. Ben said that Jimmy had been walking around the bar, asking all the women for a hug. He was carrying a little leather bag that looked like a doctor's kit that he kept his underwear in. He had just escaped from Shawbridge, a juvenile detention center that was north of the city. He had tried to go home, but his mother had moved without telling him her new address. I could see why Ben had decided to help him out. Jimmy looked like the Little Prince. He had the biggest eyes on the planet. And he always had a surprised expression on his face. He had blond hair that was sticking straight up, and he was small for his age. He was 16, but he looked about 11 or 12. On his pale bicep, he had a homemade tattoo that said Lisa. Lisa was a half-sister he had only met once, five years before. He also acted like a little kid. That first night when Ben brought him into the living room, I handed him this transparent balloon with white stars on it, and Jimmy went on and on about how it was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever given him. I liked that. Jimmy needed a place to stay for the night. Ben said he could sleep on the couch. So Jimmy took off his pants and folded them on the coffee table. He was wearing Spider-Man underwear. "Heather, could you tuck me in?" he asked. I thought he was joking, seeing as he was 16, and I was 18. But he just lay there, perfectly still and straight, waiting for the blankets to be pulled up to his chin. So I did it. I tucked him in. What else could I do? It was silly, but it also made me feel warm inside. Suddenly, I felt very mature. When I fantasized about having a kid, it was never about being in a relationship or being pregnant. I always imagined finding a baby in a garbage can and raising it as my own. I would do everything for that little baby and never give it up. When I was still very little, my mother told me that she was moving to New Orleans. She said she had never been able to do fun things because she had had me when she was only 19. She said if she stayed and looked after me, she would only depress me. She said really, she was doing me a favor. She left her apartment and walked down the street with her things, saying that she was going to the airport. I found out years later that she had just moved across town. The next morning, when I sat on the coffee table and asked Jimmy where he was going to go, he begged me to let him stay. I told him I didn't want to get in trouble with the law. And besides, we were broke. "You guys could be my foster parents," he pleaded. Jimmy said that once a kid in foster care is 16, he can be eligible for independent living. As long as you got any adult to come and say they wanted you to live with them, it would be OK. He said he was very envious of his friend, Juan, who had talked a women who worked at his school's cafeteria into being his foster mom. We had to go clear across town to visit Jimmy's social worker. It was a bleak kind of neighborhood. There seemed to be train tracks everywhere and laundry lines with no clothes on them. There were two identical buildings next to each other at the end of a street. One of the buildings had all its windows broken. The other one was the Office for Child Welfare. Before we walked into the building, I opened my mouth, and Ben squirted some breath spray in. The social worker stared at us. "Why do you want to be Jimmy's foster parents?" she asked. "I like to read books," I said. It was all I could think of to say. I'd always imagined that kids who were read to must be much smarter than me. I was just quiet after that, but she didn't seem to care how we were planning to raise Jimmy. In fact, the only thing she wanted from us was proof that we were 18. Nothing else seemed to matter. Taking the long subway ride out there seemed to show enough initiative on our parts. She gave us an address of a school that would accept Jimmy, and then she gave us a roll of green children's bus tickets so that he could get there each day. Then she gave us some forms to fill out, which she apologized profusely for. She explained it was a drag, but it had to be done for accounting, so that we could get money. "If you have any problems, don't call me. Call the front desk first," she said, waving goodbye. We were given a $100 check to buy him things that he needed. It seemed like a lot of money to me. I took him out shopping for school supplies. We got a large purse with a rainbow on it that he could use to keep his school books in. I also bought him an umbrella and a pair of snow pants. Then Jimmy and I saw this dress shirt with pink birds on it that looked like it would fit either of us perfectly. We both grabbed for it. I shoved him right into a plastic container of shoes. "Child abuse," he screamed. On the subway back home, he wouldn't stop bugging me, so I bit him on the ear. My dad used to always do that to me with his broken tooth. Pretty soon after Jimmy moved in, things started to go missing around the apartment. If we left a handful of change on the bathroom sink, it would disappear. So would Ben's cigarettes. The radio on the kitchen table was suddenly not there one day, but Jimmy denied that he had taken anything. In my heart, of course, I couldn't really believe him. But it wasn't like he was taking anything I couldn't live without. Jimmy had to go to a remedial high school. It wasn't long before I was being called in to talk to his teacher. She said that he kept taking his shirt off in class. She said he had 100 spelling mistakes and never did his homework. And she said that Jimmy had been missing tons of school. "Why haven't you been going to school?" I asked him. "What have you been doing with your days?" "I don't know," he said. More things vanished from the apartment, records, books, cutlery. One afternoon, while sitting outside on the stoop, I noticed that the next door neighbor was wearing Ben's hat. I asked him where he got it. And the neighbor said, "That blond kid who lives with you sold it to me." Then while cleaning, I found under Jimmy's blanket a sweat sock, stuffed full, like a Christmas stocking. There was my gold chain with a pink rose. He stole a tiny porcelain southern belle that an ex-boyfriend had given to me. There was even a magnet from the fridge in the shape of a cough syrup bottle with a 1-800 number on it. When I brought it up, Jimmy said they were just souvenirs. I genuinely liked Jimmy, but I was slowly realizing that nobody else did. When we had friends over, he would moonwalk from one person to the next offering to massage their faces. He'd sit right next to them and ask, "If you could be any animal, what would it be? I'd be an otter because it's original and I like waterslides." Also, he'd ask for everything. "Oh, that's a beautiful watch," he'd say. "Can I have it? Can I have your necklace? Please, I'll wear it every day." "Why do you let that little mooch live here?" people would ask. "He's so annoying. He's so squirrelly." I defended Jimmy, saying that he was just going through a phase. He was only a kid. It wasn't his fault that he wasn't mature. I thought he was really showing signs of an artistic temperament. After all, Rimbaud was a runaway too. If we had found Rimbaud at the Electric Bumbum, I'm sure everyone would also think he was a pretentious teenager, what with his ranting and his poetry. Rimbaud might also knock over the lamp practicing his disco moves and wear glasses with the lenses popped out in an attempt to express himself. We had had him six months, and still no money had come. Ben asked Jimmy to stop at the social worker and find out where the checks were. Jimmy said that he'd just been there, and that there was a paperwork problem, and we'd be getting the money soon. Jimmy, our growing boy, was starting to develop a little potbelly from eating all the food in the house, while at the same time, Ben and I were starting to lose weight. Ben complained all the time about how there was never any food in the fridge. Jimmy would eat up every last thing. One time, we came home, and Jimmy was sitting on the couch, watching TV, with a big pot of spaghetti sauce on his lap. Ben started putting him on a scale to make sure he wasn't gaining weight. At this point, Jimmy wasn't going to school at all. Ben started complaining that he needed to have some sort of activity, other than "eating all our food and following me around all day." "You should try to do something that involves ambition," Ben told him. "Don't you even have a hobby?" He decided Jimmy had to get out of the house on his own for at least an hour on the weekends. Jimmy would just stand on the balcony, shivering. He'd get down on his knees and call for me through the mail slot. I told Ben that he was pushing Jimmy too hard. When the hour was up, I would rush to unlock the door and let Jimmy back in. Then one day, Ben had had enough. Jimmy walked in the kitchen wearing Ben's shoes, except they were painted white and had little blue stars on them. "How do you like my dancing shoes?" he asked. "Those are my shoes!" Ben screamed. "No, you never had a pair of white shoes with blue stars on them," said Jimmy. "I would have noticed." Ben told Jimmy he had gone too far. "I'm calling your social worker in the morning. I don't know how to deal with a kleptomaniac teenager." The thought of kicking Jimmy out made me feel rotten inside. It made me feel like a degenerate or a criminal. I couldn't stand the thought of him having no place to go. I don't know if that means I'm a sucker or that I just don't care if I'm a sucker. The next morning, Jimmy was gone anyway, along with a houseload of souvenirs. He didn't even say goodbye. I thought that I had been such a good mother too. I couldn't believe he'd want to run away. When Ben woke up, he found that the envelope with his $150 that he had spent 40 hours working for was gone. The rent was due, and we were flat broke. Ben called the social worker to ask about the checks. She said that they had all been given to Jimmy. Jimmy had just been cashing them and spending the money himself. Ben felt like Jimmy had totally taken us for fools. I felt like, well, what do you expect? Now, years later, I have a seven-year-old daughter, and I've come to realize that to be a parent is to be a sucker. You get suckered into being an unappreciated servant who works for free. You get suckered into giving up your privacy. You're suckered into giving up movies and holidays to pay for ballet lessons, and plastic alien babies, and enough bubble gum to stretch to the moon. And kids will treat you like a sucker. They'll lie right to your face. My daughter tries to convince me before leaving to school in the morning that she doesn't have lip gloss on even though her lips are glistening like candy apples. And what makes being a parent the ultimate sucker is that not only are you being taken for a sucker, but you actually like it. I lie and connive and manipulate on her behalf all the time, and I do it with pleasure. The other day, I sewed a little pocket inside her jacket so that she could sneak her cards to school after they were banned. "Watch out for the lunch monitors," I tell her. "They're on a power trip." I write her notes saying, "Please let my daughter go to the bathroom whenever she wants. She has serious stomach problems." And I only wish I could do more. I wish I could sit beside her during her math tests and whisper her the answers. I wish I could cup her ears with my palms when the teacher starts yelling at her for not listening. I wish I could stand with her in the schoolyard at lunchtime and give her the sandwich I packed for work because she decided to feed hers to the birds. Heather O'Neill is a poet and novelist. This is the last program that we have the pleasure of working with producer-in-training Chris Neary. He has had many ideas on how to structure and rework stories that have made our show better, and we are the worse for him going. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who's got an answer for anything we say about him here. Oo-oo-oo-ooh. Oh, scary. Oo-oo-oo-ooh. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Hi, it's Ira Glass. Today's This American Life was first broadcast back in 2002, which actually explains the premise of the show, which was to do an entire program based on the classifieds section of the newspaper. Now, of course, Craigslist has taken the place of a lot of this classified advertising, putting the entire newspaper business in peril. So in just seven years, this has turned into a look at what once was. Here's the show. Marilyn Tanious has been working in the classifieds for 27 years at five different newspapers. And when she reads the ads, she sees things that you and I don't. The other day, she was sitting in her office at the Chicago Sun-Times with two of her colleagues and with me, flipping through the paper and telling stories. She talked about the gun ads that Timothy McVeigh used to take out in the Arizona Republic, back when she worked there, long before he blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma. Or there was the time that Marilyn's own mother caught a thief when some stuff that had been stolen from one of their neighbors showed up in the For Sale ads. Then Marilyn turned the page and spotted this ad in the used car section. OK, here's an ad. Here's an ad that tells me something. OK, I'm going to read this ad to you. And I'm going to see, what do you think it tells you. OK. "Volvo, '92, a four-door sedan, automatic, mint condition in and out, 37K, Texas car, exclamation point, properly maintained and serviced, mechanically perfect, needs nothing. Must see to believe, respect, and appreciate, $5,850," and the phone number. She looks at the three of us like, well, isn't it obvious? Then she points at the ad. This line, "must see to believe, respect, and appreciate," this person doesn't want to sell this car. Someone has forced him to sell this car. It's either his wife, they had a baby, they have to get a minivan. I can tell he doesn't want to sell the car. He's upset. Respect it. You must see to respect? Marilyn says that, when you read your newspaper, you've got the news part of up front, which gives you the public life of the city. You have the sports. You have the entertainment. You have politics. But if you read the classifieds, it's really about individual, personal lives. It's, "My children are grown up, do I really need the piano anymore?" It's, "I'm really broke. I have to sell my possessions to live." I think you really get a sense of people's personal lives. With that in mind, a few weeks ago, we the staff of this radio program, took one Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, and that same week's edition of the Chicago Reader, which is this weekly paper that we wanted to use, because of the musicians classifieds and the personal ads that they run. And then we hit the streets, tracking down the ads. For instance, "New, never worn wedding dress, tulle beaded bodice, $750 or best offer." There are several wedding dresses and a bunch of wedding rings for sale in the Chicago Sun-Times. Well, the bottom line was he didn't want to marry me anymore. And I'll never get out of the dress what I put into it. I know I'm not going to get the money, but I would like it to find a good home. This is the woman who's selling this old-fashioned-looking dress. Before she broke off the engagement, like in any relationship gone bad, every little thing seemed symbolic. I collected this Classic Pooh. You know, Disney has this line of Winnie the Pooh stuff. And he bought me Mickey Mouse. And I'm looking at it, going, "Why did you buy this?" And he said, "Well, they didn't have Classic Pooh." I'm like, "But I don't collect Mickey Mouse." It was just, I don't know. You know me, but you don't care. The same weekend, two hours after talking to her, we followed up on this ad, "Agoraphobics In Motion, A-I-M, meets weekly in Lakeview East. Call for more details." Agoraphobics, you may or may not know, are people who fear going out into public, being around other people. And come Saturday at noon, when the meeting takes place, it's at a restaurant. And guess what? Only one person has the courage to show up there. Apparently, this is par for the course. The nature of your fear is that you don't want to join groups. But you have to join a group to get help for the problem. So it turns into a little bit of a vicious circle. Three hours later, a short drive away, there's this ad to answer. "House sale, featuring vintage furniture, linens, jewelry, books, postcards, and a steamer trunk. Same owner for over 80 years." OK, we're trying to sell all the contents to help her pay for her nursing home. Kathy Gemperle and Pam Ball are running this house sale for a woman named Frances, who's lived here since 1919, but is not present today to see strangers pick through everything that she has ever owned. She saved everything and organized her pen pal correspondences, carbon copies of letters, old birthday cards, all in plastic bags. As a librarian, she had a big collection of children's books. And she'd write in the front of her books where she bought them, under what circumstances. And not only that-- She would write in a lot of these books, "Given to me by my dear brother." Well, he'd been dead for 30 years. So she would gift herself books and then write in the frontispiece that it was from them. This is a book, and Frances wrote in it, "From my brothers Victor and Laurie in heaven, because I've always wanted this book. To Frances on Thanksgiving." And then it's dated November 21, 1980. I mean, the inscriptions in these, "There was a vacant spot in my heart. Now it's filled with a great love, a love that's everlasting, my love for Frances." Her mother. In this one day of classifieds, there are all the people trying to adopt babies, and all the formerly adopted babies who are now adults looking for their parents. There's a church selling off all its furniture, and the death notice placed by Local 17 of the Heat and Frost Insulators Union for one of its members. There are those weird ads that say "I am not responsible for the debts of so-and-so." And, this is a real ad, [? "Dan Earler, ?] if your belongings are not removed from 6123 South Archer Road, they will be discarded." And there are prayers. There are lots of prayers, every day in the newspaper. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Today on our program, something we have never tried before, and we're not sure anybody has ever tried this before. We bring you an entire hour of stories found from one day's classifieds. We use the Chicago Sun-Times from Sunday, August 25, and the same week's edition of the Chicago Reader. The classifieds are a public space where intensely private thoughts are being expressed all the time, much like this radio program. Stay with us. OK, maybe this is a cheap move, but we're going to start our radio program today with the most poignant possible elements for any story. They are the lost and found column and a puppy. Here's the ad. Stolen dog, black, toy poodle named Isis. Stolen 7/27/02 from the Armitage-Kinzie area. Call 312-719-3669. The production manager for our show, Todd Bachmann, who normally is not on the air, but who helps us get our show on the air, wanted to get in on the action this week. And he was the one to check out this ad. When I saw this ad, the thing that hooked me was the word "stolen." The toy poodle wasn't lost, like most missing dogs are, but abducted. Leo, the author of this ad, was working in his garage while Isis played in the fenced yard just outside. When he came out, Isis was gone. His best guess about what happened is sort of incredible. Leo thinks Isis was taken by a puppy mill for breeding. Some neighborhood kids say they saw a woman come into Leo's yard and chase Isis around and around until she finally caught the toy poodle and ran off, kind of like a scene from 101 Dalmatians. So when I asked the kids, then everything hit the rotary oscillator. I don't know. Being a locksmith, there's a right and a wrong. And what's mine is mine, and what's yours is yours. And I like to keep the status quo. OK? That's why I'm in the profession, to help keep that status quo. Leo misses Isis, and says his older dog, a 13-year-old Shih Tzu named Button, misses her, too. Leo had big plans for Isis. What I wanted to do was mate her with Button for puppies. Yeah, Shih Tzu and poodle, a shidoodle. The best of both worlds, the little bit of playfulness, and the ability to do certain tricks and stuff, and then the calmness of the Shih Tzu. Leo had adopted Isis only months prior to her theft, from a family who couldn't handle Isis's incontinence. According to Leo, this family just didn't get Isis at all. They called her Amber. The dog is jet black, all black, gloss black, curly hair, except for the little red in the mustache. And they called her Amber. I have no clue why anybody would call a black dog Amber. And once her face was shaved, immediately I thought of a black granite statue of the Egyptian goddess, Isis. And when I said Isis, she just perked up her years. And her hair stood on end. You could just see that, her face cocked and everything, she liked that word. So that was her name. I spent a few hours with Leo, running around in his minivan on his quest to rescue Isis. In addition to the classified ad Leo has in all the major daily and weekly papers in Chicago, he's flooded his local park with flyers, and has even taped an enlarged five foot by five foot version of it to his minivan. The flyers also offer a reward of $20. I'm a small guy. And I could offer the $100 reward or something. But I don't want the people to think that they can just steal a dog and get a lot of reward. I want them to realize also that the person that they stole the dog from doesn't have much, that that's not wealthy. Just because I got a poodle doesn't mean that I live in a Taj Mahal. We head to the animal shelter, which brings in newly captured dogs from off the streets every seven days. You be nice, or nobody's going to adopt you. Now, do you think anybody's going to want to adopt those teeth? After scouring the rows of cages without success, we decide to head over to a Spanish-speaking paper called La Raza to place yet another ad. Is this a help wanted ad? No, this is I had my dog stolen a while ago. I talked to you on the phone. For the ad in La Raza, Leo decides to take a more creative approach. He has the man at the desk read the ad back to him to make sure he got every word. Stolen black toy poodle named, is it-- Isis. Isis. May have a contagious disease, lepto. Can cause liver or kidney failure in humans. Symptoms: dry moth, shaky hands, light-headed, dizziness, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Desperate, after five dogless weeks, Leo has decided to put out an ad that says Isis suffers from a dog disease which is contagious to humans. He hopes that whoever took Isis will see the ad and come running back for some kind of antidote. So that would be $25.50. You guys ought to feel kind of ashamed of yourselves. Everybody else gave me at least one free ad. Is that right? Yeah, because of the lost dog and stuff. OK, well, you know what, I'm going to do the same thing. I'll go ahead and run the ad at no extra charge. OK, cool. Yeah, yeah. I feel for you. Despite all of Leo's ingenuity and effort, the ads just don't seem to be working. Even Leo says that if you don't find your dog after the first couple of hours, it's pretty unlikely you ever will. He keeps putting ads in the paper, though. He doesn't know what else to do. Well, Todd, thanks for that report. Let's try one last thing, since the ad doesn't seem to be finding Isis. We're joined in the studio here, Todd-- Yes. By you and by Leo. That's me. And Button. And Button. Button is right here. Leo, over a million people are listening to us right now on the radio. So if I could just ask the people who are listening to just take a moment and turn the volume up on your radios. OK, Leo, call the dog. Here, Isis. Isis. C'mere, Isis. All right, if anybody hearing our voices right now notices a black poodle barking or wagging its tail in the vicinity-- what's the number to call? 312-719-3669. You can turn your volume down now. It doesn't have to be so loud. Actually, no need to call that number. Back in 2002, a couple weeks after the ad appeared in the paper, Leo found Isis. Some neighbors found her barking in their backyard. Well, the Help Wanted section of the Sun-Times on August 25 was a thin four pages, which is a shame, because if you count people these days who have given up on finding a job, and people who are working part-time but want full-time work, the jobless rate in America right now is nearly 10%, according to the US Labor Department. That is really high. That's the highest since the 1980s. And a lot of people who go to the Help Wanted section of the newspaper for jobs are people on the margins of society, people who need a job to reenter the world. Here are two of them. Yes. My name is [? William Telposci, ?] and I would like to set up an interview for your waiting staff. And I was-- oh, OK. Oh, OK. OK, thank you. Good morning, Mr. Chadbury. How are you? It's going fine. My name is [? Helen Bowler, ?] and I saw that you have a listing for a waitress wanted. And I'm wondering, could I come by today or tomorrow and do an interview? Today would be better? What time? My name is William, and I've been looking for a job for a year, faxing resumes, filling out applications. I usually try to fill out at least 10 a day. I'm looking at the Help Wanted ads. Over the past few days, I've been to McDonald's, Burger King, White Castle, Kmart, Walgreens, Chuck E. Cheese, all over the place. We are in Presidential Plaza, and we're on our away up to the 40th floor, to the Plaza Club in search of employment. And now we're on the 40th floor. This is a beautiful view. This job is a banquet service job for an upscale, hoity-toity club. Looks like where some snooty white folks come and drink after work. Hi. How's it going? Hi, how are you? Good. Are you Helen? Yes, I am. OK. And what are the kind of hours that you're looking for? I'm looking for either early mornings or late evenings. Breakast and lunch shift. Wonderful shift. Are you looking for something in fine dining, or are you looking for something in catering? Fine dining would be more suitable. I always give myself a two-month span at looking for a job. Do have any experience in this field? Sure, I have. If that doesn't happen, at the end of my 60 days, then I take whatever is available, whatever I can find. I'm not particular anymore after the end of the 60-day run. It's been actually about 55 days already. So I'm pretty much getting fed up. If no one has called me by Monday morning of next week, then I'm going to go and get whatever I can get, even if it is a car wash job. Yeah, so at this time, I'm just taking the applications. And I am definitely going to give you a call by Friday. OK? And thank you for taking out some day on your busy schedule. You're very welcome. My pleasure. My pleasure. Being a single parent, I guess I just haven't figured out how to do it all and work at the same time. So periodically, when my family needs me, I will not work. And when I need to quit, I quit. I don't like it to be that way, because it makes me look unstable. But I have to do what I have to do in order to prepare my family to go out there and do something, so their resumes never have to look like this one. We're going in to the Cheesecake Factory. I was wonder if you were accepting applications for employment. You can fill it out upstairs, and just give it to me after you're done. OK. Thank you. You're welcome. My name's William. I was wondering if you were accepting applications for employment. I'm here about the job for the dishwasher, and-- Fill out the application, and they'll call you back. OK? Well, we're just at the John Hancock center for a security job. But I found out that I don't qualify, because they want a blue card, meaning having a clean record, and a GED or high school diploma. And I don't have either one. I'm 39, and I've been jobless for about five years. And I've been doing job search for the past year. I worked 15 years in a fast food restaurant. And I was a gas station attendant, groundskeeper for a cemetery, and for about two years, I was a short order cook. I went in to work drunk one day. And that's when I found out that I had a real serious alcohol problem. And it took me from that time up until today to do something about the alcohol problem. It's been 13 months since I had a drink. Cocaine and heroin, that was my drug of choice. Occasionally, I would take a drink. And in between using heroin and getting sober, I gave birth to two children. I have this friend of mine. He prefers living out on the street, no money or nothing. That's what he chooses, for that to be his life. And I was going down that road, myself. I had been what they call a kept woman. I always met men that wanted to take care of me. So a job wasn't important. I was young. And I wasn't thinking about tomorrow or I have no 401(k) plan, I have no old age into retirement money. So I wasn't thinking about all that stuff. Because when you're 18, you think you're going to live forever. I think turning 40 made a big difference in how I want to do things from now on. Then being a grandmother just really blew me out of the water. Whoa. And I've gained more respect for authority figures. So it'll be easier working now, because I've accepted the fact that I do need a job. So that calls for me to humble myself now, where I wasn't early on in life. When I was growing up, my mother always told me that little things mean a lot. That's why I get myself up in the morning, get myself out of the house to fill out the applications, get the newspaper, fax out resumes. I wish I could answer what's taken me so long on getting a job. William and Helen talked with Joe Richman of Radio Diaries. He put together their stories and thanks Strive, an employment service here in Chicago. Coming up, Jon Langford of the Mekons and the Waco Brothers tries to find out whether it is possible to create a workable band from the newspaper ads in just one day. That's from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International in a minute, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. If you're just tuning in, all this hour, we're bringing you stories that we got from the classified ads that appeared on just one day, August 25, in the Chicago Sun-Times, and in the Chicago Reader that same week. Often with the classifieds, you'll come across an ad where somebody is looking for something. And then, practically right alongside that ad, there is somebody else who is offering the very thing that that person is seeking. You've seen this? This seems to be especially true in the musicians classifieds. You'll see guitarist looking for drummer. And then right there, you'll see drummer looking for guitarist, right on the same page. It's kind of heartbreaking, really. So we got to thinking, what if somebody were to play matchmaker for all of those people and do what all of us think when we see those ads? Well, our producer Starlee Kine recruited Jon Langford of the Mekons to do just that, to go through the classifieds and create a band, a band culled entirely from the classifieds, to play together for exactly one day, long enough to gather together in a recording studio to record their one and only song. Starlee? Jon's never had to turn to the classifieds for bandmates. His band, the Three Johns, were such close friends that all three of them slept in the same bed while on tour. His country punk band, the Waco Brothers, was started at a club one night as a way to get free beer. And the Mekons, who have been together for 25 years, is mostly people he went to school with in Leeds. We have never really decided to form a band. They've just kind of appeared. It's like, you'd be sitting around in the pub and saying, "Well, we need to be in a band. Everybody else is in a band. Why don't we have one?" And it's been people pretty close to yourself, and with similar tastes. We chose seven different musicians. The only thing they had in common was that no two of them would have played together under any other imaginable circumstance. Ad number one, "Indie rock bassist and drummer available with practice bass in suburbs. Influences include Shellac, Fugazi, Mogwai, and Blonde Redhead. Contact Ben." This is from their demo. Ad number two, "Smooth, sultry, soulful female vocalist seeks jazz musicians for band." Ad three, an acid funk percussionist named Steve. Ad four, an electric violinist named Nathan. He's working on a rock opera about a conspiracy theory. And at present, that's all he's at liberty to say about it. Ad five, "Experienced contemporary Christian worship leader musician, plays guitar. Available for Bible studies and large or small church situations." Ad number six wasn't like the other ads in the musician classifieds. It caught our eyes immediately. "Theremin effects and song player wants an audition to amaze you. I also play an incredible musical saw." We've got to go meet this guy. We're going. We're there. I'll tell you what. There's not much amazes me anymore. That sounds terribly cynical, but I really am desperate to be amazed. The theremin, of course, is the only instrument in the world that you play without touching. You just wave your hand through the air above it, which alters the electromagnetic field. Somehow, this produces a sound like a flying saucer in an old episode of The Twilight Zone. We ring his doorbell. Hello. Hello, Eric. It's Jon and Starlee. Eric Mueller, ?] the theremin player, turns out to be a retired factory worker who lives in one of those overstuffed apartments where every corner is fulled with tchotchkes and souvenirs from all over the world, in other words, pretty much exactly where you would imagine a theremin player living. How are you? I'm OK, how are you? There are pictures of his wife and family everywhere. And it's the only apartment I've ever seen with a hand-painted mural that covers an entire wall and features both a waterfall and a volcano. Wow, wow. We head into a little room in the back of the apartment, and he flips on a theremin, a thin, black box which looks no cooler than a clock radio. Would you like something classical, or would you like something contemporary? What would you like to have? How about "Danny Boy?" Do you like that song? He pops a floppy disk into a keyboard for accompaniment, and positions himself in front of the theremin. Eric's a 60-something-year-old man in a royal blue tank top and matching blue gym shorts. He's warm and grandfatherly. If he had reached down and pulled a "who's got your nose" on me, I would have been ready for it. But when he sits down in front of his theremin, everything changes. This look comes over his face, a mixture of utter calm and complete confidence. His factory worker hands glide through the air. It's graceful, with a perfect economy of motion. I turn to Jon, and his mouth is open. Well, we were going to ask you to amaze us, and you did. You just did. I know. It's great. You speak the truth. I'm amazed. I told you, I'm amazed. I came here. I was going to say, I was going to ring your doorbell and go, Eric, amaze me. But then you wouldn't have let me in. Before we arrived, we hadn't understood that when Eric says in his ad, let me grant you an audition to amaze you, he literally means exactly that. He brings people to his home, plays for them, amazes them as promised, and then never, ever joins anyone's band. It's just not what he's looking for. To be just a part of a big group, I don't know if I could be happy in that kind of a situation. I've always played the solo. Nonetheless, he agrees to sign up for our band. Later, back at Jon's house, the difficulty of what we're going to do starts to sink in. What song could unite an acid funk conga player, a sultry jazz singer, two indie rockers, a Christian guitarist, an electric violinist, and an amazing theremin player? What one composer could shoulder the burden? I don't know why I keep thinking Elton John. Maybe we should do an Elton John song, because everybody likes Elton John, don't they? Even I like Elton John sometimes. There's certain Elton John songs I love. I like "Rocket Man." I think that's a brilliant song. I think it's going to be a long, long time, since touchdown brings me down again to find, I'm not the man they think I am at home. Oh, no, no no. I'm a rocket man. Yeah, I mean, maybe "Rocket Man." We could have space effects in it. You know, the theremin. Why don't we do "Rocket Man"? Let's ask them if they'd do "Rocket Man." Hey, how you doing? Nice to meet you, man. That's Sam, playing guitar. That's Eric, with the theremin. The big day arrives. One by one, members of our one-day band show up at the studio, where Jon had recorded most of his own albums. Eric, the theremin player, brings his wife. And just like in any situation, the cliques immediately form. The rhythm section hits it off immediately. They make musician jokes, like changing the time signature from a 4/4 to a 6/8, that crack each other up. Every band has the guy who's a quiet lone wolf. And in this band, it's the electric violinist. He's off in the corner, practicing his violin and not talking to anyone. When I ask how he's doing, he tells me he can't hear himself through his headphones. And then he utters the last sentence you hope to hear when you're throwing a group of strangers together in a band. I'm in anger management, actually. He proceeds to scare me with stories of other recording sessions he'd been in. Well, that was the same situation. I was in a studio like this, and I couldn't hear myself very well. So I took the violin by the neck, right here, and I basically just took it like, I don't know, an ax, and just went bam, and pieces went flying everywhere. And you've done this-- Twice, actually. Twice? So we're working on that. Musicians jam together a little. The singer, Karen, had told me on the phone that she hadn't played in public a lot, and she felt sort of shy about the whole thing. But there's something about the dynamic of being the singer in front of six musicians, that as soon as she gets up there, she seems to change, take charge. Meow. And the band defers to her. Indie rockers shift to jazz. One was the papa bear, one was the mama bear, one was a wee bear. One day, they were walkin' in the deep woods and talkin', and along she came-- After maybe 10 minutes of this, they know each other well enough to play through "Rocket Man" for the first time. I don't know, do you want to give a count? Do you want to go? Yeah. 1, 2, 3, 4. She packed my bags last night, pre-flight, zero hour, 9:00 AM. And I'm going to be high as a kite by then. I miss the earth so much. I miss my wife. And suddenly, they're a band. The guitarist and singer come together immediately, matching each other note for note. The rhythm section joins in shortly after, one perfectly fused unit. The electric violinist jumps in next, followed by the theremin player, right on cue. Jon's standing in the middle of the room, waiting to step in, but there's nothing for him to even do. And sure, this isn't a real band, and after today, they'll never play together again, and I know it's just a cover of "Rocket Man," but everyone in the room seemed to be feeling the same, all light and giddy and sentimental and corny. It came together so easily, like they'd been a band for years. From that point on, everything falls into place. Jon takes the musicians in separately to play their parts. The rest of the band eats pizza and zones out, like a real recording session. When it's Eric's turn to go in, his wife straightens his shirt collar and gently touches his cheek. The angry violinist goes in with him, and the two of them playing together turns out to be the highlight of the whole session. Eric, that sounds great. I've got a request, though. Could you do the classic 1950s flying saucer effect, just about 20 seconds from the end? Sure can. And that could lead us out? Sure. That was excellent. Fantastic. Do you do this around the house all the time? Afterwards, Jon and I go to his house and put on a CD for his wife. He can't get over how easy it was. His recording sessions never go this fast. I thought we wouldn't get through it for hours. And there might be some arguments, and people might think that some people weren't playing well enough. Maybe it means that people who put the-- actually taking out a classified ad implies some sort of skill or confidence, or desire to go in there prepared and ready to show off your stuff. Maybe it's like when you have bands with just old friends, then you can have people who can't really play that well. [LAUGHTER] That might be the-- I don't know. And that was kind of refreshing, in a funny sort of way, to think I could go in a studio, just with a bunch of people who had never met each other before, and make something that was nothing to be ashamed of. Before we formed the band, Jon said there wasn't enough amazement in his life. But since then, he hasn't ceased to be amazed by all the lucky accidents and connections that came out of the classifieds. Let me tell you about the taxi driver. I got the taxi driver today. I get in the taxi, he goes like, "OK, sir, which way do you want me to go, which way? You will be the commander-in-chief. And I am just your lackey. I'm just your flunky. I'll take you whichever way you want to go." And I'm like, "OK. No, I don't want to be the commander-in-chief. You be the commander-in-chief." He's like, "May I ask you what you do, sir?" And I'm like, "I'm a musician." And he goes like, "I too like to play an instrument." And he whips out this huge flute. He gets to the traffic lights. Yeah, under the seat. He gets to the traffic lights, and he starts pulling it out. "Tell me what you think of this." And he starts blowing. He starts blowing this flute. And he's playing the flute. And I was like, "Oh my God. I'm just going to record a bunch of people who have never met each other. What am I going to do? Did he just join the band or something?" So he stops at the next light, and he goes like, "Let me try in the higher register." I could have got him and Eric together, it would have been like, [MAKES EXPLOSION SOUND]. But then I said, "You know what I'm doing today? I'm going to a studio to record a load of musicians who have never met. And I could sneak you in, if you've got a couple of hours free and you want to come in." But I said, "What are the chances that I'd be doing that, and somebody would start playing music to me on my taxi drive?" And he went like, "Are you at all familiar with the writings of Jung?" And he just pulls it off and says, "Look, synchronicity. That's what Jung talked about, synchronicity." And that's why he was my taxi ride to the studio. And he was perfectly-- it didn't seem odd to him at all. But he couldn't come in. He was very busy. But he gave me his phone number. Well, the members of our one-day band, Eric Mueller, Nathan Swanson, [? Steve Ordauer, ?] [? Kirk Marcarion, ?] [? Ben Mazza, ?] [? Sam Cortesi ?], and singer Karen Cassidy. Jon Langford's latest solo release is called Gold Brick. Visit our website, thisamericanlife.org, to download your own full copy of "Rocket Man," this version of "Rocket Man." It's hard not to feel voyeuristic when you read the personal ads there in the classifieds. People's hearts are right there on the page. Our producer, Jonathan Goldstein, decided to look into one enigmatic personal ad that we saw in the paper. It read-- Joyce, I don't want another housekeeper. Ken. Explain it. Well, it's about a woman that I was going out with that I lost. She broke contact with me after going out for approximately three, four months. There isn't a great deal to tell. Enjoyed food, drink, music, the typical things that people do. She was just a tremendous influence in my life. So wait, about the house cleaning thing. Can you explain that? When you mention I don't want another housekeeper, what does that allude to? I wasn't really looking for someone else. Did she call herself your housekeeper? No. It was a joke between me and her. I don't know how well-taken it was. Explain her departure, though. It was brutally sudden. I found out what she did for a living, which is something that was part of her mystique as I was going out with her. Some allusions were made to being something like a secretary. And it was something that I probably should have tried to make more sense out of. And I found out that she was a sexual surrogate. How do you mean? What is that? She performed sexually for another person? I assume that's what it is. So when you found out about this, was that when you ended things with Joyce? Well, I didn't really end things. I gave her a call. And she said to me, this changes everything, doesn't it? And I was kind of caught off guard. I didn't know exactly what to say. So I just said that, like everything else, it changes everything, and it changes nothing. We're still who we are. But before I had a chance to say anything else, she said she didn't want me to call her again. So the next time that you called her-- That number was no longer functioning with her behind it. So how hopeful were you when you put the ad in the paper that she would actually somehow see it? It's just a shot in the dark, just an absolute shot in the dark. There's a Chinese poem. I forget who the poet was. But it's real simple and short. And let's see if I can quote it correctly. "I'm struck by the lightning of seeing you after you're gone." It's after you're with someone, sometimes their presence, as you remember it, can be as startling as lightning. One of the things that the people at the Sun-Times said to me was that a lot of the classified section is really for people in transition, ditching an old life or starting a new life, whether they want to or not. And of course, in the For Sale section of the paper, people go to the classifieds to start a new life by buying the castoffs of somebody else's old life. And they end up with stuff that's heavy with history, but it's not their history. Jay Allison has been making his life over from scratch recently, buying other people's stuff from garage sales, from eBay, from the classifieds. As part of the project, he polled his own kids about what to buy. And as you'll hear, they were only intermittently helpful. And he made some phone calls to the Sun-Times classifieds ads. What do you hate? Do you hate the house, or what it stands for? Both. What's wrong with the house? Dad. I don't know, look at it. It's tiny and small and falling apart. I wouldn't want to live here, even if we had to live here, like if you and Mom were still married. I still wouldn't want to live here. This house isn't falling apart. It's just-- It is, though. And the basements smells. And it probably has mice. After the separation, there was no choice but to get my own place. And I had to put things in it. I was going to be living by myself. And it had been about 25 years since I'd had to think much about what items I need or want in a house. So a few months ago, I got my little place, close to the old one, and began setting it up for myself, and for my three kids, whenever they're here. First I got rid of things, things with too many small parts, and all the broken things I'd been meaning to fix. I brought the things that were emphatically mine, like my old motorcycle, and my old guitars. I brought the cockatiel and the python. Then I had to outfit the place. I kept a list. I got a cookbook, a grill, and bowls. I didn't know how much I liked bowls. They contain chaos. And house plants, I'd never had them before. I wanted them now. And I asked the kids what they thought we needed in a home. Do you think this house is homey? Yeah, it's cozy. Yeah? Yeah. Does it have everything you need? Not everything. You can never have everything you need. We got stuff to cook with, so we can eat. It's got clothes. Clothes, yeah, clothes are required. Food is good. A bed, everyone needs a bed. TV isn't required. I admit that I do watch TV, but I read, too. I like to go outside. I love going outside. I like to climb trees. I like jumping around. I like squirt guns. What else we need to get for this house to make it any homier, Lil? I think it's pretty good, Dad. I like it the way it is. You don't think I need to get anything else? A dog? Oh, I want a dog. A German shepherd would be good, because they're good with kids and easy to train. If I were to call up people who had dogs for sale, what should I ask them? What the dog's record of biting people is. Hello? Hi, there. I'm calling about the German shepherds in the paper. Oh, yes. I do have German shepherd puppies, but what I have left is one female. And that is all I have left. All right. So here are my questions. The first dog my kids said they wanted was a German shepherd. Do you have a lot of experience raising German shepherds? Yeah, but not around kids, really. No? No, not around kids. What do you think about them around kids? Well, they should be good, because when I was small, I had one. He was always [INAUDIBLE]. But you know what happened the other day? No, what? Look, I'm normal, right? And then in August, three weeks ago, I got a makeover. And I changed my hair color. I put on perfume. I never put on perfume. And I changed everything, my clothes. And there's this one dog, one of the German shepherd's, and she's a real mean bitch. And I hadn't been there in two weeks until last week. And then I went in there to the yard. You know what she did to me? No. She bit me. What do you mean you had a makeover? You mean you changed the way you look? Now I'm curious. Yeah, I felt a little bit depressed and everything. So I changed everything. I changed my clothes. I changed everything. And I started going to a gym and everything. And I lost 10 pounds in, I don't know, in a month. And I don't know, I must have looked totally different for her. That's funny. One of the reasons I'm looking for a dog is my life has changed a lot, too. My marriage has broken up, and I'm living by myself. And the kids are there a lot, but I'm thinking about getting a dog to make it more homey. Ah, cool. Cool. Yeah, well, they would be great around them. What was your German shepherd like when you were a little kid? Oh, she was super-nice. She was nice. She slept in my room. And she slept on my bed also. Yeah, because I was very lonely. I'm a very-- I don't talk to a lot of people. I'm more of a lonesome person. I don't know. I just slept with her, and I talked to her. I've never told anybody. But yeah, I have, when I was sleeping, I used to hug her and everything. And she was like my older sister. Were your mom and dad together? They've always been together. But my dad, he's like this-- he's not mean. He's not mean. But he has this way of being. He never talks to us. He never hugs us or tells us things. So I was [UNINTELLIGIBLE] with a dog. Do you think you'll always have a dog? Yeah. I think I need a little friend. Yeah. What would you like a dog to be like? Playful-ish, cuddly, soft, and stuff like that. What kind of dog do you think I should call about? One that stays small. I don't want a big one. Like what? I don't know. No, one of the little ones that Britney Spears has and Mariah Carey has. They're this big, and they're so cute. And that means you can carry them around with them like little babies, is that the idea? Yeah. I don't want to do that. Well, I don't want a big one that, like, ugh. How about a beagle? What do you think of beagles? I love beagles! I love them! Oh, I want a beagle. Hello? Hi there. I'm calling about your beagle puppies. Sure, what would you like to know? Are they pretty friendly? Oh, they're lovable. Yeah? Yeah. They're very friendly. They're very lovable. They demand love. And they demand passion from their owner. How do they demand it? By following you around, wanting to hug on you, and wanting to jump up on you. Do you think a dog can love you? Oh, yes. I've got a dog that's a poodle that's particularly mine. And I have a bad heart. And every time that I go in the hospital, she's lost. She'll sit and scratch at every door in the house. She'll go to the window and scratch. She'll sit and look for me every place in the house. If I'm in bed, she'll stay in bed with me until I get up to make sure that I'm getting up. If I lay back down in bed, she'll get back in bed. So she just sticks with you. Yeah. We love our dogs. Yeah, I need a heart. It's down to that. Oh, yeah. Are you on a waiting list? Nope. How's that going to work, then? You live with your life as you can. Maybe I'll come back as a dog. I think you should get one. Why? Because, then when we're not here, you'll have someone to keep you company, and someone to take care of when we're not here. You think I'm lonely? I'm sure sometimes you get lonely. Everyone gets lonely sometimes. It's 4:00 AM. I'm in the bedroom. A dog explains those extraneous noises of an empty house. It breathes the same air with you. It needs an occasional conversation, a hand on the back, more so than a cockatiel or a python, anyway. It stays with you, even in the middle of the night, at 4:00 AM, when you've woken with a harsh taste in your mouth, and you're writing on a yellow legal pad in the dim light, and only the crickets and the wind outside, like now. The only pets I have now, and one of them is-- I have three kids. They're five, 10, and 15. And we have a snake that belongs to my son, who's 10. And we have a cockatiel. But a dog would be a big jump from a snake and a bird. Yeah. But you get a lot more affection from the dog than you would a bird and a snake. That's right. That's right. And I think sometimes my kids worry that I'm lonely in the house by myself. I think they'd like me to have a dog, because they would think that it would keep me company. Oh, I'm sure. They're always waiting for you. They're always happy to see you, no matter what happens. I mean, I lived with a man that beat me and held a gun on me. And I'd go to bed at night and wonder if that was the night was going to be my last night on earth. And I don't know. I just have such peace and happiness with the dogs. And to spend a day-- I said, if the Lord, if I knew the last day I had on earth, I would just want to be totally away from human beings and just let me brush my dogs, and clean my dogs. And I enjoy grooming those dogs. I can totally get lost. Just give me a dog, a brush, and a table, and forget you know me. So we haven't decided on a dog yet. I'm dropping by the pound, just to see. Really, the fellowship of looking for a dog seems to help. Everybody in their lives has holes to fill. And they're even willing to talk about it, when you are. And that's good for now. The kids and I have plenty of time to get a dog. By the way, here's the rest of the list of things I put in this house. Electric fans, a gas stove with visible flame for heat. New pictures of the kids in frames. Lots of old kerosene lanterns, good for parties, good for storms. One thing I went nuts buying was old kerosene lanterns. What do you think of that? Yeah, no kidding. I think it's cheesy. Cheesy? Why? Because you have one hanging from every tree in the backyard. Don't you think it's cozy? No, I don't. Sometimes. You just have a special soft spot for them, because you had them when you were living in West Virginia. I've started a collection of rocks taken from places we visit, and kitchen knives, old carbon steel ones, scooters, and helmets, a camera. Photograph us. Daddy. Here we are. Take a picture. We look cute. Walkie talkies, colorful flannel sheets for the kids, and a gun. And the first thing, the first thing I got when I moved in, was rugs to soften everything, to mute the empty sound, rugs on the floor of my house when I moved in, so I could circle three times and lie down, like a dog. Is there anything else I should get for this house to make it seem homier? Wall-to-wall carpeting. Wall-to-wall carpeting in this old house? Yeah. It would be so much cozier in this house if you had wall-to-wall carpeting. But when I first moved in here, do you remember how many rugs I got? Yeah, but rug, schmug. Jay Allison, he never did get that dog for the kids. They are now 12, 17, and 21, though Jay recently remarried. And last month, he and his wife had an incredibly cute son. His radio story got support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for the Open Studio Project. And you can hear more of Jay's work at transom.org. I'm in anger management, actually. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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We'll call this guy Chris. He had a job as a middleman, but a kind of odd sort of middleman. We basically are the middleman between the deaf and someone who can hear. Chris worked for a company that helped deaf people communicate over the telephone. To make a call, a deaf person would contact Chris. He would get the hearing person on the line. The deaf person would type what it is that they wanted to say. Chris would read this to the hearing person, and then type their responses back to the deaf person. Most of the conversations were what you'd expect: people calling their families, talking about what they had for dinner, calling their banks. And then again, because I usually worked nights, some of the calls were very intimate phone conversations between people breaking up, people just falling in love for the first time, people telling them that members of their family had died, phone sex, things no one would ever want you to hear, really. One thing that happened more often than you'd think, especially when parents were talking to their kids, is that they would get into an argument, and then one of them would try to drag Chris into the argument on their side of it. And I wasn't allowed to say anything, so I would just say, the CA, we're co-communication assistants, does not have that information. That was the blanket phrase that they let me use. That's so computer-like. Well, that was the paradigm they wanted us to follow. They wanted us to be computers, basically, information machines. I remember a daughter had been, it was a deaf daughter, and she had been out sleeping around and doing a lot of drugs, evidently. And the mother was just trying to tell her that she needed to stop doing all these things and saying, "You may feel like you're young, and you can just do what you want, and since you're deaf, you feel you have an excuse to do all these things." And she started talking to me, and she said, "You don't do drugs, do you?" And I said, the CA does not have that information. And then she said, "Well, can't you just type to her and tell her that you think she's hurting herself as well?" Now when she's saying this to you, do you have to type that in, so the daughter knows that she's saying it to you? Yeah, you do. You have to type everything that she's saying. The daughter really disliked that. The daughter would start talking to me and say, "Don't let her talk to you." And she would start trying to tell me just how terrible the mother had been to her growing up. The mother actually said at this point, "This is really embarrassing," and tried to pretend like I wasn't there the rest of the time. It's hard to be the middleman. Pizza delivery places always hung up on Chris and the other operators. Phone sex operators and drug dealers were way more service-oriented when it came to the deaf. And then there were the people who liked to mess with the middleman, like two African-American guys one day, who started using all sorts of words and phrases just because it would be funny to hear the white operator say them. They were talking in really heavy street slang. One person was intent on having me use the n-word, over and over. And it was very uncomfortable. But the two people using it on the phone obviously didn't care. They just wanted to have me do it. And they were even joking about me doing it. They would just be laughing. A lot of people find a lot of amusement out of playing with a Communication Assistant. I found it kind of funny after a while. All of my friends who went through the training for this were young black women. And they thought I was kind of really straight. And they used to perk their ears up immediately as soon as they heard me get into any sort of ghetto speak, or whatnot. Because I can't do it. I didn't like it. But I wasn't going to read in a completely white bread tone of voice, either. I didn't want to do that. It was humiliating and funny at the same time. Give another example of times it was hard just to be an information machine. A man actually had just fallen off a ladder in his garage. And he had gone deaf. And so he was calling up all his friends and telling them what had happened to him. And so these people were completely unfamiliar with the service. So I had to explain the service. They still didn't understand it. And then he had to tell them, explain what the service was, why he was using it, and how he had just gone deaf. And it was very obvious, I remember one man he had called, they were not that close. And the man obviously did not know how to react. He was having a really hard time. He just kept saying I'm sorry, over and over. And it was really excessive. And it was just really hard to keep telling all of it, knowing that you're going to have to tell six or seven people after this that this man has gone deaf. And at the end of that, so now you as a person, you've been through this experience with him of now, the two of you have told a half dozen people that he's gone deaf. It must be hard that after you get off the phone with the last person, that you and he don't talk about what just happened. Right. Sometimes people will say, because there is a 30-second window of time where I'm still on the line with him. I remember he typed, "Thank you so much. I'm sure that must have been very hard for you as well as me." So there is a brief moment of time. It's hard to be the middleman. It's hard to keep your feelings out of it. It hard to stay neutral. People want you to get involved, and they want you to get out of it. You can't win for losing. And I say this as a middle child. And there there's that whole "eliminate the middleman" thing, eliminate the middleman. If you Google the phrase "eliminate the middleman," you get 3,800 websites promising to eliminate middlemen of every kind for you, car dealers, realtors, stockbrokers, furniture stores, stamp sales, plus one site that has figured out a way to bypass the lousy crop of presidential candidates we're offered every four years. Eliminate the middleman, it promises. Satan for President in 2004. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Today on our program, middlemen. We will not eliminate him. We will not pass the savings on to you. No, no, no, for once, a defense of the beleaguered middleman in three acts, including a simple explanation of how you, yes, you, could have gotten rich off Michael Jordan, using the simple rules of market economics and a good down parka. Stay with us. Triple-A tickets, all events, seven days, concerts, sports, theater, Lincoln Park. And then it's got the address and the phone number. For a lot of years, I worked here. And if someone had called this ad, called in the phone number here, I probably would have been the one to answer the phone. When people call this number, I don't know what kind of place they're imagining, maybe a fancy little office downtown. But we were actually in the back of a video store, in this little dark office, the ceiling fan going real slowly counter-clockwise, kind of squeaking, one beam of light coming through the tall window up top, and dust streaming around the room, and a dog's barking out back. I remember, for a while, there was not many movies on the shelves. There was Buster, that movie that Phil Collins made. And no one would ever rent those movies. How long did you work there? On and off from '96 to about 2001. Over the course of those few years, I got to know the ticket world inside and out. I met people with names like 35th Street Eddie, South Side Frank, Fast Willie, Richie the Head. There was a guy named Elbow, who had sort of a big elbow. A lot of guys got nicknames after whatever event that they specialized in, Monet Joe. One time, there was a Monet exhibit at the art institute. So people come in from out of town, and they want to go to the exhibit. The only way they can go is if they have these VIP staff passes. And Monet somehow managed to have a few hundred of them. All the ticket brokers, all the ticket guys, all the hotel concierges, everyone was calling Monet. And from then on, he's just been called Monet. So you came back to town and started to look up some of the people that you used to work with, right? And so who did you talk to first? First, I looked up an old ticket friend named Liz. And we started talking about some of our old clients. You spends so much time on the phone talking to the worst people. They're either mean, or they're rude. Ugh. And you're always putting people on hold, like, "Let me get my supervisor. Let me talk to my supervisor." And you're like, ptth. I'm not doing [BLEEP] for this guy. He stayed on hold. He'll hang up. He'll hang up. We call it the stew pot. When you left someone just on hold, you say let them stew for a little while. And usually, if they're kind of hemming and hawing, going back and forth, you let them stew for a few, like five minutes. Maybe come on once and be like, "Hang in there, man. Hang in there. I'll be right back with you." Let them stew another five minutes. Then, after 10, they're ready to talk. They're ready to deal. Yeah, definitely. We had the lead transfer him to this line that would ring and ring and ring. You're like, "Don't pick up line four. Everybody knows line four is [BLEEP] line. Don't pick it up." That's so funny, because we always had the same thing. We had different lines that meant different things. You had a couple lines you had to answer different things. Like one line, you had to answer, hello. Like any time we try to get act tickets through legitimate means, like group sales or anything like that. You would put the home phone number. So it said on all the phones, hello. There was a little taped-up piece of paper that said "hello" on it to remind you to answer it "hello?" This was a phone line that was supposed to simulate an actual home, someone's residence. You were just supposed to pick it up and say, "Hello?" This was when we ordered group sale tickets from the Cubs. So we put in orders for tons of group sales. And if they knew we were a ticket broker, they wouldn't be having it. We wouldn't get the tickets. So we'd pick different names of organizations. They actually would check, though? No, they would just call you. And they would be like, what's the name of your organization? And sometimes you would say, "Oh, well, it's Grandpa Louie's 70th birthday. So we're bringing 40 people to that game." Or, "The Little League hockey team that I coach, we're having a special slumber party. And we need 120 tickets. We got tykes coming from all over, up and down the state. They're all-stars. You should see some of these kids. They're really fine hockey players." There was another phone line that if it rang, you were just supposed to pick the phone line up and not say anything at all, just pick it up and put it to your ear and be silent. That was Guy Lobster, who owned the business. That was one of his special lines. And it was important that just didn't say anything. You weren't supposed to let them hear your voice, even. So just pick it up and be silent. Actually, I never figured out what that one was for. There's a guy named Leo, who was one of my best friends of all the ticket guys. And a couple days ago, I was in Ann Arbor, at a Michigan football game, and Leo was out there, buying and selling. I saw a couple of the old guys I knew, so they'd come in from all over. And Leo was out there. So I put this mic on his collar, attached the battery pack to his butt, and just listened to him walk around. Anybody got one extra ticket? Anybody got one extra? What is this called, actually, what he's doing now? Is there a term for what he's doing? Yeah, he's walking the walk. The area by the stadium or by the concert hall is called the walk. And then you're walking the walk. You're saying, "Who needs two?" So he's just showed up here without any tickets. Right. He's trying to buy some tickets, so then he can turn them around, and, we say "flip 'em," so he can flip them for some dough, flip them for a profit. You got one extra? How much do you want for it? 20? We're at row 60. Row 60? How about 15? How about 20? 20? Yeah. 18? $49 ticket. OK. Sure you can't do 15? I'll do 18, but that's it. There you go. Got it. Thanks. Thanks. OK, so I actually timed this. From the moment he says "Thank you, man," to the moment he runs into another person is exactly 1 minute and 20 seconds. You guys need tickets? I got one. I'd sell it for 100. You'd sell it for 100? Yeah, midfield. We ain't got that-- Wait a minute. He just tried to sell it for $100? You get what you can, you know? You might as well start high. You never know. Maybe the guy's going to pull out $100 and say, here. It can't hurt to start at $100 and come down. You can't go up. You can't say $30, and if the guy says, "Only 30?" Be, "Oh, no, no, no. 50." Start as high-- you can always come down. Did you have other techniques that you used when you were doing this? There's a whole psychology to what to do to sell someone tickets. Like when I was on the street, outside of the United Center, say, at a Bulls game, I'd present myself differently to different people, depending on what I thought they wanted out of this ticket-buying transaction. Some guys would be kind of nervous. And I'd see him walking up, and all the hustlers going up to him, trying to sell him tickets. And they'd look all wary. And they'd have a couple kids with them. So then I'd go up to them, and I'd just be like, "Sir, my uncle couldn't come to the game tonight. But I do have this extra ticket, if you guys want to come. They're great seats. I sit in them every game with my uncle." And I made him feel comfortable buying tickets from me. And sometimes, there were the guys who, they'd come with a few friends. And they wanted to show off that they could work with our underworld element, that they knew how to deal with scalpers. They'd be like, "I'll take care of it." They'd say to their friends, you'd see them, "I'll be right back." And they'd come up to me. And then I'd be the hardened street hustler. And I'd be looking around constantly. I'd be saying, "Come on, man. The heat's tight out here tonight. Work with me. Work with me. What are you payin'? What are you payin'? What do you need?" Just trying to make them feel like they were really wheeling and dealing. Did you always win? Did the customer ever have a chance? Really, out of every transaction, both people win. If they paid you it, then they could afford it. So many people would buy tickets from me at just what I imagine to be an exorbitant-- I myself was like, this price is ridiculous. And yet, they would be so happy. They would be glowing. And they were so appreciative and thankful to me, for getting them into the game. But I did make it a rule, sometimes a point of pride, to not let them go in with any, you know, to see how much money they had in their wallet. And I was going to take all of it. They didn't need popcorn in the game. They didn't need a beer. Being a ticket broker is different than being in other businesses, where if you run a bar, and you run out of Bud Lite, you call up and have them pull that truck right up out back in the loading dock and wheel about 20 cases off. But when you want to get tickets, it's not that simple. There's no easy way to do it. So ticket brokers have to rely on just a whole network of shadowy associates to bring the tickets into them. There's a guy named Moose who has a whole bike gang. And every year, when Cubs games would go on sale, at the Cubs on sale, you're only allowed to buy eight tickets for up to eight games, so 64 tickets total. He would get about 15 of his biker friends. He would just keep them up all night on Friday night drinking, merrymaking, singing, whatever it would take. So when the tickets went on sale, he'd then have 15 guys who were waiting there. And hopefully the weren't passed out. They were waiting there to buy 64 tickets each. When he brings them in to the ticket broker, the broker will pay him $10 over the face value for each ticket. At the Bulls on sales, they started doing this lottery system. They didn't want people to just be camping out two weeks beforehand, because they knew that these tickets were going to be worth so much. So a couple enterprising ticket brokers started rounding up the homeless guys around Chicago. The actually would rent a school bus, and they would drive around Chicago, just pulling people into the bus, promising them $10 or $20 if they'd come hang out for the morning. Sometimes they'd even pull up in front of the homeless shelter right down there on South Wabash or South State and just toot the horn. And all the guys would come filing out and fill up the bus. They'd drive them down to the United Center box office window. When the tickets went on sale, you'd have, out of the first 60 people in line, there'd be 50 homeless guys waiting to buy these $100 tickets. And the brokers would just give them a few hundred bucks each to buy the tickets they wanted. Every once in a while, tickets would be released into the system. Suddenly they would become available. A game that had been sold out, suddenly there are six tickets that are available. And maybe it's a season ticket holder who has canceled, and said, "I can't come to this game." Or David Stern, the NBA commissioner, he actually has four front row seats to every game in the NBA, every night. And there's no way that he can go to every game every night. In fact, a lot of nights he doesn't go to any game. So sometime the day of the game, they'll release those seats. And those four beautiful seats will suddenly become available into the system. So whoever's the first person to phone in, go to a window, or punch in online at that precise second is going to be the one that gets them. So Monet, Monet Joe, what he would do is all night, he would just hang out at his computer, keep pecking, pecking, pecking away, with the Grateful Dead playing and smoking a J and just pecking away, pecking away. Usually it says, "Sorry, your selection is not available." He would peck again, one ticket. He might peck 1,000 times. But then all of a sudden, your screen lights up and gives you that section and row number and says, "Would you like to finish this purchase?" And you know you just made-- you can buy that ticket for face value, which is about as low as you can buy a ticket, and sell it for 10 times that, sometimes. During the time that you worked, during those five years that you worked as a scalper, how was the money? It was pretty phat. It was sick. It was humongous. I had a suitcase of money. You had a literal suitcase of money? Yeah. It was actually so much money that I didn't want to deposit it at one time in a bank. I didn't want to freak out the bank manager or anything like that. So I would put a little bit in one bank, a little bit in another bank. And then there was a third bank where I had a safety deposit box. And I would just stuff the cash into the safety deposit box. The Bulls days, Michael Jordan, were really the golden age of tickets in Chicago. There's always peaks and valleys. And I'm sure Yankees tickets are pretty nice now. Laker tickets are alright. But it was a rare, it wasn't just one sports team having a nice run. It really became something that-- it became the focus of the entire world. You'd meet people from Sweden and Japan and Korea and England and Germany, and you were like a celebrity to them. You had what everybody else in the world wanted. You had a stack of tickets to the Chicago Bulls game. And people would do anything for them, and they would pay any price. We felt like we were part of something bigger than us. We felt like we were part of this historical moment. The day Michael Jordan retired in 1998, in June, that's the same day I retired. Michael Jordan probably sits around with his cousins and friends and talked about his great shots that he made, his game-winning dunks. Some of the ticket people sit around and talk about the great sales that they made for Bulls games. Like, I talked to my friend, John, and he's got a story about it. An old lady was walking down the street. She passed all the hustlers up. And nobody had thought to ask her. But I was walking down the street, and I just said, "Do anybody have any extra tickets?" She said, "Do you need tickets?" I said, "Yeah." And she said, "Yeah, I got a couple of extra tickets, section 111, row 15." These was the best tickets. These was in center court, 15 rows from the floor. She sold me the tickets at $85 each, which at that time, was face value tickets. I, in turn, didn't even get a chance to walk 10 feet away after I bought the tickets. A whole gang of people got around me. And everybody was bidding on them. When we got finished bidding with those tickets, those tickets sold at $1,200 cash a ticket. I was so happy. And the guy that bought them was a Chinese man. Him and his wife went. They thought I was God, because they had the best seats. And I stuffed the money in my pocket and skipped on down the street. But that was the most memorable thing. This is what a hustler dream of, of a deal like that, because you hardly ever find a deal like that. You can hardly ever find tickets on a Jordan day. Even if you do a ticket like that, you're going to pay a few hundred dollars for it, and then you're going to run around and try to sell it for big money. But to get a deal like that, it just stays with you. There's nothing to say about a deal like that. Bought cheap, sold high, what more can I say? Yeah, well, it's just not like it used to be during the Jordan era. What can I say? It's terrible. It is. It's bad. How bad is it? Here, I'll show you. One day, I was at the White Sox, trying to sell tickets, right? And I had this guy that was going to buy a couple tickets from me. And wasn't charging a lot. And it was a $27 ticket. I was going to give it to him for $20 apiece. And a fan walked up and just gave him two tickets. That's how bad it was. And the guy said, "Thanks for talking to me," and went to the ballpark. It's a cold, dark, rainy, miserable, February day every day. And it's [INAUDIBLE] now. Where instead of the gleaming bright sun of the Bulls era. It used to be this page had about 30, 40 ads every day in here. Now there's, what, one, two, three, four, five, six. So a lot of people are out of the game that once were in it. It wasn't just me that retired. Our ticket scalper talked with This American Life producer Alex Blumberg. Coming up, 60,000 Memphis fans can't be wrong about you, can they? In a minute from Public Radio International and Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. When we arrived into Memphis, as soon as they find out who you are, you're a rock star. And now for what you have all been waiting for. We're here to meet the heroes from New York City. These guys are from Engine House 33, Ladder Company 9, which I think is about a mile from the World Trade Center. These were some first guys on the scene, and they lost 10 men out of their 40-man crew. So these are the real heroes of New York City. We represent good, you know. Sal, I'd like for Sal "Elvis" Princiatta to come up. Everybody wishes they could have been there, I think, in one way, for one hour, for one minute. So we connect them to that one minute. It's unnerving. And a lot of the guys feel the same way. It's very unnerving to be applauded. I just can't take it. I appreciate it, but it's unnerving. It's embarrassing. We represent, we are FDNY, and that's what they see. They don't see names, not me, not Pete, not Joe, not anybody. They see what we do. We see, and we know, that we pretty much didn't do anything. I think they feel sorry for us, because we lost the battle, maybe almost pity us. They do pity us. That's pity out there. That's pity treatment. Are y'all friends of those people that died in the World Trade Center? Mm-hmm. I welcome you to Sun Studios, the birthplace of rock and roll. And if you have any questions, hold them until the end of the tour. And if you have any pagers or cell phones, then turn those off now, because we are entering the year 1950. Sun Records was great. The birth of rock and roll, that was a good place to be. That's one part that sticks out in my head a lot. Everybody that comes off the tour, I'm going to give y'all one of our short-sleeve t-shirts over here. No way, they're getting a short-sleeve t-shirt? Black, white, burgundy, the blue, also in black, and all different style t-shirts. Perfect. Just pick your size, my friend. So to take gifts from people, how do I feel? People want to pacify, and want to do what they can. And so, I present a pair of gold and clausinate cuff links with the city seal. But it's hard to conceive. You're getting gifts while your friends are dead. That's all. How does that equate? What's the purpose? These are real heroes. These guys are from New York, World Trade Center. What's up guys, how are you? I've seen a cartoon in the newspaper of Spider-man, Batman, and Superman asking for a firefighter's autograph. And that's just too much to be put on any average joe's back. Because that's really what we are. And these great guys are here for three days. Let's give them a standing Memphis ovation. The symphony was pretty cool. I don't really like speaking in public. We were there for the closing ceremonies of Memphis in May. Or was it May in Memphis? I can't remember. A lot of people get emotional. Maybe they see the pain in our eyes, and for anybody who was ever a soldier, you could tell. They see the look in the eyes. So they feel for us. And also, it's their own grief, I would think, that they're letting out. They can't say enough. So they repeat themselves, which is fine. I'd like to just shake your hand, bud. Y'all did a hell of a job. And I would That's all I can say, is I'm proud. We're really proud of you. You guys have put us up and made us feel right at home here, very nice of you. We're just proud of you, is all I can say. That's all I can say. Thank you, sir. That's all I can tell you is, we're proud of you guys. Y'all did a hell of a job, and we're proud of you, that's all I can say. We're really proud of you. Y'all did a hell of a job, and that's all I can say, bud. We're his connection. We're his connection to what went down. And that's it. We connect him to what went down. And we give him a vehicle to feel it. Whereas for you-- Exactly. As for us, we're too connected? No [BLEEP]. Very much too connected. There was one day we played a softball game against Memphis Fire Department. Way to go, Sal. Way to come home. All right, whose-- Mine. You all right? Yeah. Want me to go get the bottle? He's now a paramedic? Something. I was having a hard time. I dug there a lot of days. That's why my health is so bad. But I was having a real hard time, until I got warmed up. If we had our team, if we had our A-team, we would have definitely beat them. Like we have Mike and Dave, who were killed in 9/11. They were great outfielders. If they were there, it's a different game. If Gerarde Baptiste, that's three outfielders. If we had those guys there, we would have picked them apart. We lost a lot of guys from the team. And in fact, a recent guy, Gary Guidell, who just took his own life, was on the team. And he was a good guy, Gary. So I think that's another reason why guys are feeling a little bit vulnerable at this point. Because Gary was a regular joe. He didn't show any signs of hurting any more than any one of us. So that stirred up a lot of fright in a lot of-- in myself. I can speak for myself, but I'm sure I can speak for others, that what happened to Gary is everybody's biggest fear right now, to take your own life. Thank you so much for allowing us to be photographed. You make us very proud. Thank you. Guys, let's go-- you guys have signed the paper, right? You got it. Sal Princiatta. His story was produced with Beth Landau, David van Taylor, and Allie Pomeroy at Lumiere Productions in New York. Mayor Jurczynski is the sort of politician who's great at talking with old ladies or small businessmen, or really with anybody, for about a minute and a half. But after that, after his opening lines, he goes into this patter. If you hang around him for more than a few hours, you hear the same lines over and over. There are awkward jokes. But he's making such an effort that you kind of forgive him anything. Here he is, showing a busload of Guyanese New Yorkers around Schenectady. But you know, there's people, Guyanese people, that have come here. And they said, "I've been to Schenectady. It's a little too slow for me. I like the fast pace of New York City." So that's understandable. And I like to tell people that come up here on the bus that if you like traffic jams, you should stay in New York City. That was a joke. You know, my jokes are getting pretty old. I know one thing. Whenever I run out of things to say when I'm talking to Guyanese people, all I got to do is mention cricket. And then everybody starts talking. He looks around the bus. Nobody starts talking. In 1995, when he first ran for mayor, Schenectady was going through the same kinds of pains as lots of Rust Belt cities. The biggest employer, General Electric, had downsized from 40,000 employees to just a few thousand. Tens of thousands of people had moved away, or were forced to retire. For a while, Al Jurczynski had this idea to lure Hasidic Jews to Schenectady. He wanted to repopulate certain problem neighborhoods with a group that was self-reliant, family-oriented, and tightly knit. That idea went nowhere. But then last year, some Guyanese people came to him for help getting an abandoned church for religious services. Well, we talked. And I talked about public assistance. And we had had quite a problem with a lot of people coming up from New York City that were not coming up here to work, but were getting on public assistance. A lot of them were doing things that we didn't want them to do, namely get involved in the drug trade. And they made it very clear, right up front, within probably the first 5 or 10 minutes that I met with them, that they don't believe in public assistance unless it's absolutely necessary. But it's against their culture to get on public assistance. And I heard that. I was extremely impressed by that. It was just so wonderful and so refreshing. And at that point, that's when I really I started to really embrace them. Thanks, folks, you're in tune to Herman Singh Showtime. It's 93.5 FM on your dial. It's now 20 minutes before 11:00 AM. And that's where Herman Singh comes in. He's a realtor slash mortgage broker slash weekly radio host down in New York City, in the Queens neighborhood where most Guyanese live. It was his bright idea to bus Guyanese up to Schenectady every Saturday, to encourage them to buy houses up there. He pays for the buses himself, and promotes the trip like crazy on his weekly real estate slash music program, Herman Singh Showtime. If you're planning to purchase a property in Schenectady, our next trip is actually going up to Schenectady on Saturday. And room with friends, if you are selling your property-- At the beginning of the mayor's initiative to bring Guyanese to Schenectady five months ago, the mayor went on Herman's radio show and gave out his personal cell phone number on the air, a political gesture he explains this way. I have free incoming calls. So if I was paying for the incoming calls, I wouldn't have done it. And I'd do it again. He gives me a sheepish look, and then blurts-- 857-4000, area code 518. If you want to buy a home in Schenectady, give me a call. One Saturday in December, I schlep out to Queens at 6:30 in the morning to take the bus tour myself. And while two dozen of us wait for the bus to arrive, I meet Ali Latif. He's 60 years old, and he's been living in the Bronx with his wife for the last 14 years. His black hair is perfectly parted on one side. And he's wearing a clean Oxford shirt buttoned to the collar. He tells me that he works as a doorman in Manhattan. And since he had to miss a day of work to come on the trip, and because he missed the bus by five minutes the week before, the trip is actually costing him $260. To be sure he doesn't miss the bus again, he's been waiting here since 5:30 this morning. And when he starts talking about why he's thinking of moving to Schenectady, he repeats over and over, his voice raised, pointing his long, thin finger at my nose, that he's not on a joy ride. He's a serious businessman, looking for an opportunity. So I lose two day's pay just to go check this place out. It means that I'm not joking. $260 are losing, right? I am going here on business. I am personally going here on business. I am a serious chap. That is what I'm saying. I don't make joke with business. It's a three-hour bus ride to Schenectady. And when we pull into town, it's not pretty. We pass abandoned gas stations and empty store fronts and ugly, rundown apartment buildings. And then, in the middle of nothing, is City Hall. And City Hall is spectacular, obviously just renovated with gleaming marble, the kind of old government building that's so beautiful, that the thought crosses your mind, "Maybe I should work in government." And there, lined up in front as our bus pulls up, are a chorus of clean, perky white men in multi-colored golf shirts. It's a long way, isn't it? We've got beautiful weather for you here today, if nothing else, huh? Good morning. You have a nice ride up? These are the important guys with the food, right? Come on up. We are led like little, sleepy sheep into an intimidating-looking room with leather chairs lining the perimeter. Everybody looks a little scared. Ali, the serious businessman who is not on a joy ride, picks a seat close to the front. Good morning. I want to welcome you. It's my job to talk a little bit about the general economy, the history of Schenectady. Schenectady was founded about 300 years ago as a Dutch trading settlement. This speech, by the city's Director of Economic Development, pretty much sets the tone for what's to follow all day, mind-numbingly boring facts, which go on and on and on, peppered with the kinds of utterly sincere-sounding appeals that you almost never hear from any government official, anywhere. --because quite frankly, you're a great opportunity for us. And please know that we want you and need you. And so we hope you find us as much of an opportunity as we find you. One by one, the men take the stage, the head of the Chamber of Commerce, a state legislator, the president of one of the local hospitals, and the guy who owns the Goodyear Family Tire Center. So it truly is a very, very exciting time to be a small person in downtown Schenectady. The Guyanese seem to find all of this captivating. A few of them are taking notes, and everyone is alert and attentive. Ali explains to me later, they're immigrants. No official of the United States government has ever courted them like this. They didn't welcome me in that way when I reached America in 1988. They didn't tell me anything about, I welcome you because you're a hard-working man, Guyanese people. But Schenectady actually, Schenectady is crying for help. And the only people who can put Schenectady back on its foot is the Guyanese people. It's true. It's not false. They're hard-working, and they're going to make it if they're going to put back the city on its foot. Which brings us to Mayor Al, who orchestrated this whole morning to get them to see it this way. He's the last speaker. And when he comes on, more than anyone else, he treats the Guyanese like they're special. He solicits them in a way that seems more genuine. Just in a couple minutes, I just want to tell you, Schenectady is a beautiful city. and I'm going to pass some cards out, too. If you want to just take one and pass it around. He hands around a stack of his own business cards, which people seem a little shocked to be getting. And then, to make them feel welcome, he says in various ways, I am like you. He talks about his own immigrant roots, about how his grandparents came over from Poland, and about how his wife's parents moved to Schenectady from Italy. And there's a lot of similarities between Italians and Guyanese. They're very family-oriented. They're very ambitious. It's not uncommon for the Italians to work the way the Guyanese work. I think you're a lot like Polish people, my family, in that you're very reserved. Italians like to argue. I know because my wife is Italian. The mayor's bus tour of town takes four hours. He shows us good neighborhoods and bad, the sewage treatment plant and the old GE plant. We even stop at his son's Little League picnic in the park for half an hour, because he promised his wife he'd drop by. Hey, Tom. Hey, Tom. And he's constantly dragging the citizens of Schenectady onto the bus for testimonials. Tom is a city councilman who happened to be working in his front yard. We also meet Eddie, another city employee, and Jewel, the secretary to the former mayor. And around two hours into the tour, we're driving down a long, narrow street, when Mayor Al spots a Guyanese family outside a house. I can see the mayor just about restrain himself from pointing excitedly at them. Well, just tell everybody what you think of Schenectady. Very nice place to live. The last stop on the tour is the one that closes the deal for a lot of people. The mayor takes us to his wife's parents' house. Next to a small white ranch home is a huge vegetable garden, with the most beautiful vegetables I think I have ever seen in my life. It strikes a chord with everyone. The mayor's in-laws, an elderly Sicilian couple, make a point of greeting each people and shaking their hand. They offer us all some homemade wine, and we're all goners, including Rohini and Gandhi Gopi, two New York City public school teachers who were skeptical after the morning presentation. When I see this, it reminds me of my own vegetable garden. And to my mind, this is the best part of the trip. So now, how are you feeling about Schenectady? More and more positive. We want to get, we want to start making steps, if we could talk to somebody today about certain steps of making a move. We stand around in the driveway, drinking sweet white wine out of plastic cups. When I check in on Ali, he's unbuttoned the top button of his shirt and feeling a little tipsy, and making plans to buy a house plus an empty lot next door. It's a month after the bus trip, and I'm back up in Schenectady. There's an old bar called Sark's in Hamilton Hill, which is the neighborhood that the mayor wants all the Guyanese to move to. You could say it's the worst neighborhood in the city, or you could say it's where the best house bargains are, depending on your point of view. When you drive through it, it seems like a third of the houses are boarded up, a sketchy enough place that people in the bar are kind of surprised that I would be walking in there alone. I talk to a guy named Rod Smith. He's a carpenter, and he grew up here. And though he and his friends don't think much of the mayor, they like this one initiative. Nearly everyone I meet in Schenectady likes it. Anything to upgrade this community would be 100%. Schenectady is in the dumper right now. I can't make from my car to my front door, which is 15 feet away, without somebody trying to sell me something. I have people running up and down in front of my windows all night long, selling drugs and other things. I got a guy standing outside of my front door, trying to sell drugs. And he thinks that I'm pulling over to buy something from him. And I said "I live here. Get away from my front door." Next thing I know, they're going to be coming through it. I don't want that. All the Guyanese believe it's safer in Schenectady than in New York City. But they're moving to the worst neighborhood in town, and the crime stats aren't encouraging. In the year 2000, Schenectady county had half the violent crimes per capita than Queens county had. But there were so many property crimes that overall, Schenectady had much higher crime rates per capita than Queens. Not that this makes much difference to the Guyanese I talk to. Whenever I ask them about the difficulties of moving, how dangerous the neighborhood is, the availability of jobs, the fact that Schenectady gets 60 inches of snow a year, so they're not going to actually get that much time in their gardens, they shrug it off. They say what I imagine immigrants to this city have always said. They say they're ready to sacrifice, which is one reason the mayor's pitch seems to work so well. He doesn't tell them it's going to be easy in Schenectady. He makes it clear it's going to be hard, and they're going to have to work hard. And they all tell me, that's exactly what they're prepared to do. This house, look at it. The driveway is very wide. Right? It's very spacious, wide. It's not choked up-- When I catch up with Ali, he shows me a Polaroid of the yellow house he now owns in Schenectady. Two weeks after our bus trip, he took another day off from work, bought a $70 bus ticket, and went up to see some houses. He liked this one immediately. He didn't have the place inspected or do any more research about Schenectady or the neighborhood. And compared to prices in New York City, it was a steal. He paid $55,000, all cash. The house is profit, because people-- It's a two-family house, and there are two tenants in the building. The tenants are section eight, which means that the government pays a large portion of the rent. He'll rent it out for two years, and then he'll move to Schenectady to retire. He's put his faith and his life savings into this plan. And it was all because of the mayor, he tells me, the way the mayor treated him. I think one, why I'm going to live here, I can approach him. That's a most important factor. I can't go approach Mr. Bush and Rudy Giuliani and the governor. I can't well meet them. It's hard to reach them. But I can reach, if I live in Schenectady, I could go and reach the mayor. And I am sure they would listen to me. These are people that are from Guyana originally-- Again, Mayor Al. --but for the last 10 or 15 years, have been in New York City. And in New York City, they revere the office of mayor. The mayor of New York City is an international figure. So when they come here, oftentimes they'll say, "I've never shaken the hand of a mayor before." And I go along with that. I let them think that I'm bigger than life. He says this is completely different from the way his regular constituents greet him. It's a hard, blue-collar city, he says. The old residents don't put the mayor up on a pedestal. Only the new residents do that, which is a mixed blessing for him, since he's not the sort of person who feels very comfortable on a pedestal. Wendy Dorr. As best as anybody knows, there were about 1,000 Guyanese in Schenectady before the mayor started his initiative in May. And according to mortgage brokers, perhaps 200 families, maybe 1,000 people have moved since then. The mayor's goal is to triple the Guyanese community to 3,000 people by the end of the year. His long-term goal is a little more ambitious, 35,000 people by the end of three years, a huge increase for a city of 60,000. So far it's a small enough change that everybody that Wendy talked to in Schenectady, even in the neighborhood that is most affected, told her they did not notice a change yet. I did make it a rule to see how much money they had in their wallet. And I was going to take all of it. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK, you know the rules. No smoking in here. Cell phones off. No talking during the show. Ready? OK, let's roll the film. This is a home movie, and it looks like any other home movie. People at a summer resort. White cottages with screened-in porches and red roofs. There's a woman with an 18-month-old girl running around. There I am. Aren't I cute? Look at that. Chubby. Some things just don't change. Kathy Alexander is the 18-month-old in the film, now all grown up. What interests her in this film is the woman. Kathy is adopted, and she thinks that this woman, whose name she does not know, might be her real mother. The woman's face is mostly obscured because they're in the shade. It's fuzzy. The film's old, and Kathy strains to see the resemblance. Oh, here she is. See, almost right in here, you could see her face. And if I could just get that lightened-- some point right here-- see, what happens is, it's lighter, and again, there's my profile. And then right here, this right here, is my posture. Just looking at that looks like I'm looking at myself on one of my other home videos. And here-- if you could take a look, if I can even just show you that thigh. I mean, nobody's got thighs like that. Those are mine. That's a hereditary feature because I could see my daughter has, just like I did. She watches this minute of film over and over. She gives copies of it to friends the way that other people hand out pictures of their kids. It's one of the most important things she owns. But to look at it, you'd never know because all home movies look alike. When they mean anything, it's small and it's private. The pictures themselves don't tell much. You know what I'm talking about. Birthday parties, weddings, rites of passage. First steps. Babies in bassinets. Alan Berliner spent six years of his life going around finding old home movies and watching them and collecting them and finally condensing them into this amazing film that he called Family Album. There's invariably the baby that they put on the back of the family dog. That's a standard shot? You've seen that a lot? I've seen several of that. Yes. The beach is also big, big. Big. Big time beach. Summer beach. The beach figures bigger into our home movies than into our lives. Yeah, I would say. Swimming is a big thing that Earthlings do, according to home movies. Life on earth is a life of leisure without struggle that, again, mostly takes place in the summer, in the water, at beaches, or around pools. Home movies are also primarily about children. Perhaps 60%, 70% percent of home movies contain images of children, I would say up to about the age of 12 or so. And then it stops. In fact, I've seen many, many collections of home movies, and they'll be-- for argument's sake, imagine a girl named Adrian. The cans will be labeled, "Adrian, Age 1," "Adrian, Age 2," "Age 3," "Age 4." And at about age 11 or 12, it stops. There's no more Adrian until, perhaps, she gets married. And that's because puberty happens, adolescence happens, and you suddenly have a kind of tension within the family in terms of the relation between parent and child. So when there are kids in the films, they're cute and they're little and they're happy. All the time. All the time. Home movies are a family's way of preserving, forever, the thought, we were a nice family. We loved each other. Any feeling, any fact, about the family besides that fact, generally does not make it into the films. And that's as true, Alan Berliner says, of the black and white films that he's watched from the 1920s as the videos taken last month at his niece's birthday party. Because all the images in everybody's home movies are the same, because the pictures are all the same, all the meaning comes from things that are not in the pictures, which makes them, I have to say, the perfect subject for a radio show. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Home Movies, what they say in spite of themselves. We bring you five movies for radio in five acts, including stories from David Sedaris and Jonathan Goldstein, a look at the cinematic output of 12-year-old auteurs, and what the producers of America's Funniest Home Videos know about America that you don't. Stay with us. Act One, The Big Night. We thought that we should begin today's program with one of the classic, typical kinds of home movies, a video of a holiday meal, a family meal. All the relatives sitting around the table. I'm sure that you have seen these at some point from Thanksgivings or Christmases. There are not many videos from the Jewish New Year dinner, Rosh Hashanah, a big family event, one of the big Jewish holidays, partly because Jewish law prohibits using a video camera or any other machine on that holy day. That did not stop Jonathan Goldstein's family from filming one. When I was a teenager, the Rosh Hashanah tape was the first thing I'd show any new girlfriend. It was a primer on my family that I felt they would need to see in order to best understand me. In showing them the tape, it was like I wanted to make them understand that no matter how messed up I was, all things considered, I really could have been a lot worse. It's been about 10 years since I've looked at the tape. Are you filming me? Yeah. Johnny, put that away, come on. The night begins with a feeling of expectation, everyone preparing for the big night. My mother clears stacks of laundry off the dining room table. With a great show of ceremony, she and my father moved the plastic-covered red velvet couch away from the wall and pull out the extra dining room table leaves from behind it. We'd only use the table twice a year. All the way? Yes. Later in the evening, people start to arrive. When I'd show this to girlfriends, I would freeze-frame on each of the cast and explain a bit about them. This is my uncle Lou, I'd say. On the night of his mother's death, he ate an entire brisket, so great was his grief. Hi, kid. Say hi. Don't give me a close-up because my eyes are too ugly for close-ups. Placing the camera up to my eye and squinting into it like that felt good, the way it covered up my face like a mask and stuffed the whole Yiddish circus of my family into a tidy, manageable, little frame that I could fade in and out at will. That camera has everything on it, everything. Has it got a stand too? You named the one thing it doesn't have. Early on in the night, I filmed my mother in the kitchen. She dances around and sings for the camera while preparing dinner. My grandmother walks in at one point and asks her where the Kleenex is, and my mother tells her to use toilet paper. No, go use toilet paper. [SINGING] In our house, whether you were blowing your nose, mopping up spilled pea soup, or bandaging a head injury, it was toilet paper. As a kid, I was embarrassed by this. Toilet paper. It sounded so personal. And pulling it out of my lunch bag to use as a napkin in the high school cafeteria brought just enough of my family bathroom to the table to make those around me lose their appetite. My mother singing and dancing around the house was another point of embarrassment for me as a kid. I felt like watching her sing "Let's Get Physical" while cooking pancakes was a mild form of child abuse. Watching her now on the tape, I realize she was singing, not because she was crazy, but because she was actually happy. Both her parents were still alive, so she'd let herself act like someone's little kid sometimes. I haven't seen her sing like that in years. The presence of the video camera puts my great-aunt Simi in a time capsule-y kind of mood. She decides to tell this story about her son for posterity, so my father helps her shout the table down. Let Simi talk. When Jeffrey was four years old, we went downtown. And we were caught in the rain waiting for the bus. So there was a Reichmann's store on St. Lawrence and St. Catherine, with a little hallway, so we went in to wait. And there was a display in the windows of lady's lingerie and everything. He looks in the window, and there's men and women shielding themselves from the rain. "Mommy, what's that?" I take a look, and I give his hand a jerk. I say, "Nothing." "Oh, you know. You know. You have it in your drawer." Guess what it was? A pair of falsies. Oh, is that something else? When I was a teenager, right here is where I'd pause the tape. I would freeze-frame the image of my great-aunt Simi, mouth open, just about to pop in an olive. With that as my backdrop, I would tell the story of how, when I was a child, Simi would command me to pinch her buttocks. "You can't pinch it," she'd cry, "and that is because it is too tight. Go ahead." "Keep trying. Keep trying," she'd continue, her face all clenched like a fist, all determined to make her buttocks as hard as a cantaloupe. In her slippery, skin-tight polyester slacks, trying to get a piece of my aunt's ass was as elusive as pinching a helium-filled balloon. Now, watching the tape with friends a half-generation later, I'm not going to lie to you, that story still kills. Incidentally, I should also say that Simi was the first person who ever really felt me up. Bored at my uncle Harry's Shiva house, she decided to check and see what was in the front pockets of my pants. She uncovered gum wrappers, old movie stubs, and a surprising amount of toilet paper, which she emptied out onto the kitchen table in three glorious scoops that I later referred to as my real bar mitzvah. Who made this marble cake? Steve and Lisa's brother-in-law's [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. This is excellent. I should probably also tell you that the entire Rosh Hashanah meal is consumed in 15 minutes flat. I mean the whole thing, the gefilte fish entree, the salad, the handmade coleslaw, the bean and barley soup, and the main course. 15 minutes. I remember the TV was on in the basement, and Jeopardy had just started. By the time it was Double Jeopardy, we were eating dessert. But then, paradoxically, dessert was something that lingered on and on. What are these? Moon cookies? Who made these moon cookies? They're out of this world. My grandfather ate dessert alone in the basement, so he could watch baseball. My grandfather was of the mind that no one up there listened to him anyway, so he pretty much stopped trying. He spoke through his actions, random outrageous incomprehensible actions. Like if he was tired and wanted you to get out of his house, he would come out wearing just his boxer shorts and sit right down beside you on the couch. You would collect your things, and you would leave. This next part of the tape, of him and me in the basement, I never made jokes about. I was so embarrassed by my inability to make simple man-to-man chitchat with my grandfather that when screening the tape I would often just fast-forward through the whole scene because it pained me so. It was just around the whole Pete Rose gambling scandal. They showed him on the cover of Time, crying. That's what they call it? Crying? Well, whatever it is. I'm sure he's very disappointed actually. This is what most of our conversations were like at the time. He would stare at the TV, and I would get all sweaty, trying my hardest to talk about anything I could think of that had to do with sports. Since I never watched them, nor did I play them, my talk revolved around the girlier aspects of sports, the scandals, the exorbitant pay raises, the poem I might have seen Muhammad Ali recite on The Mike Douglas Show. And all the while, my grandfather just sat there. He was a legend. Hall-of-Famer. Well, they can't omit him from that. That's up to the critics, I think. I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. Watching the video all these years later, actually 13 years after my grandfather's death, I realize in retrospect that this was around the time he was diagnosed with leukemia. No wonder he didn't want to talk. No wonder he went to the basement. At the time, except for my grandmother, he had told no one. Those kinds of personal things weren't ever talked about in the open. When we all got together, we argued about where the best place to buy a roast chicken was or what was on TV. Well, did you see her today, Oprah, about them? No, they don't get big. This guy had a big one, and that guy has a small one. No one gets to finish a story. Conversation is like this verbal game of murderball, back and forth, everybody shouting over everybody else, nobody really listening to anybody. But it goes further than even that. Here's my mother and her aunt Simi sitting side by side on the living room couch with my grandmother, all of them kind of staring off into space after the huge dinner. Then suddenly, apropos to nothing, one of them starts singing "White Christmas." Then the other one, as though sitting on a different couch in a different universe, as if the thought had just arrived from out of the blue, pipes up with the exact same song, never looking at the other, never acknowledging she's there. [SINGING] I'm dreaming of a white Christmas-- [SINGING] I'm dreaming of a white Christmas-- [SINGING] --just like the ones-- [SINGING] --just like the ones we used to know. [SINGING] --I used to know. Let's not even get into the fact that, one, they're singing a Christmas carol in the middle of September, and two, it also happens to be the holiest night on the Jewish calendar. What all this chaos leads to, the logical climax in consequence of the entire evening, is when, in the middle of dinner, my father gets it into his head that right now, at that very instant, he was going to fix the loose knob on the front door. The doorknob had been loose for years at this point, and why he decided to fix it just then, to this day, he cannot say. So my father goes downstairs into the garage to get his toolbox, which, to be fair, isn't actually a literal toolbox, but a plastic lunch pail which contains a wrench, a pair of rusty pliers, a plastic 12-inch ruler, and a screwdriver. The camera casually pans past a wall of neatly-stacked spare toilet paper on the garage shelves. My uncle Lou decides to help. These screwdrivers are [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. No, that isn't the one I want. Well, tighten the thing here. Now, let me make this as clear as I can. When my father and Lou first started working on the doorknob, the time code in the corner of the video screen reads 6:27. They would only finish two and a half hours later, and almost all of which time my father spent on his knees turning the doorknob screw around and around, for the most part, in the same continuous direction. Just a minute. He's taking pictures with the thing. I'm going to go down and get-- Johnny, please, excuse me. The other guests sing more songs, try on clothes, exchange recipes, take third and fourth helpings of dessert. And through all of it, my dad turning and turning like a Jewish Lady Macbeth, one who's abandoned murder for home repair. At some point, people start to funnel out the door to go home. Lou, good night. Good night. Buzz, take care. OK, take care. They shuffle around his kneeling body and say goodbye, like none of this is at all strange. Good night. Bye-bye sweetheart. My father does not look up, still hypnotized by the turning of the screw. When I try to tear him away from the job, he tells me he can't help it. It's an emergency. Is that turning? That's OK. That's turning. Is that turning? That's turning. So I thought this was the end of the whole thing. But having not seen the tape in over 10 years, I've forgotten that I also videoed the second night of Rosh Hashanah. So I keep watching, and then I see something that I have absolutely no memory of whatsoever. Sitting at the dining room table, sandwiched between my sister and grandmother, is this entire British family. Do you brush it after you wash it? I brush it, and I put in big, big rollers. There's an older Englishman, well-groomed and proper, sitting there sipping wine and actually sporting an ascot. There's his wife, an animated woman who chain smokes Virginia Slims, and their daughter, a woman who actually tells anecdotes about current events and expresses genuine interest in my video making. Well, I know my father, what he did was he had a lot of eight-millimeter old movies from where I was growing up. It's like they wandered off the set of a different home movie and into ours. And the strangest part of the whole thing is that everyone's acting like nothing unusual is going on. Do you drink tea or coffee? Tea. As well as drinking tea, we drink amaretto, and everyone is bumming cigarettes off the old British woman. All of a sudden, we're all having a grand time. Even my grandfather is. Instead of sitting in the basement, he's asking genial questions like: Who made this beautiful apple cake? It turns out the British family were my Uncle Melvin's in-laws, who were in from out of town. The evening plays out like that old Disney movie, Song of the South. The British are what appear to be real normal people, and my family are like the cartoon bluebirds fluttering around them, trying in earnest to keep them entertained. I use one [? schmuck ?] per week. Last year, I used to use 10 a day. I don't remember filming this, but I'm certain I identified with the normal people, not with the cartoon birds. I remember looking through the camera at my family and feeling like I was a million miles away, like I was looking into the large end of a telescope. It made me feel like less a part of them, like more of just an observer. But then there's one moment near the end of the night, where I hand the video camera over to my grandmother, a total old-country technophobe, so she could film me. Now you're filming me, right now. You see? I have to close-- And when you want to stop it, you press the red button again. OK. Go-- yeah, move around a bit. And there I am, moving around with my tapered pants, jelly bracelets, and long moussed-up '80s hair, which, in retrospect, actually looked a lot like my mother's perm. Watching the video, I see the way my grandfather gritted his teeth when he stretched, or how he did this thing with his shoulders when he drank something that was too hot, and it's just the way I do it. Here I am, comparing wrist size with my father. Look at this. It runs in the family maybe. Oh, no, you've got a very thick wrist. That's a thick wrist. I think on Mommy's side of the family, we have thin wrists. I told you, I've got very thin wrists. Posed against the British family or any other family since, there's no question as to what family I belong to. He's funny, Jackie Mason. I'm not nuts about the show though. Me neither. Chicken soup? Oh yeah, it's good. I got news for you. But he's not Jackie Mason. I don't like him and-- Jackie Mason is-- Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the radio show Wiretap on the CBC and the author of the book Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bible! Act Two, The Kids Stay In The Picture. If children ran Hollywood, what sort of films would they make? Well, because of video cameras, we can actually answer that question. There are 11-year-old auteurs. When he was a little kid, Darren Stein organized the kids on a little suburban cul-de-sac where he lived in Encino, California to make movies. They made dozens of films. They shot all the time, over the course of years. Darren says that he remembers wanting to get control of the video camera and make a movie from the moment that his dad first brought a camera home. He was seven years old, and he quickly invented a film for everyone to do. It was called Crazy News. And it was basically a newscast that was supposed to be crazy. And my dad was filming it, because at the time, I was seven or eight years old. So I wasn't allowed, nor could I probably hold the camera. And you're in a rec room or something. Yeah. We're in the den of the house. We're sitting on the couches. I had my neighborhood kids in a thing. It was me, and my next-door neighbor, Justin Satinover, and his sister, Lisa Satinover. My brother, Evan. Evan was probably five. He's three years younger than me. He's this tiny little kid wearing a little Batman shirt. And it begins with the camera on my brother, and he says: [GIGGLING] Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Stop. Stop. And first of all, Evan couldn't get his line right, so that took seven or eight times, which was incredibly frustrating to me. Because I was very serious about these things. [GIGGLING] Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This-- I forgot. I was so frustrated. Forget it. Stop it. Now say it, Evan. No. I don't want this, daddy. Hello, everybody. This is Crazy News. And now weather. And then it goes to me. And finally, I'm thrilled because I get to talk. Hello, my name is Darren Stein from Crazy News. Now, in Arizona, it is so cold, it is snowing. Can you believe that? It's hot in Arizona. So I was going on and on And I was saying this and that, and then the camera drifts away from me to this girl, Lisa. And she's sort of staring at the camera, looking at herself on TV, happy in that moment to have it on her. And I just flipped out because it wasn't the way I had planned it. I'm not doing it. Forget it, God dang it. Come on. Do it over. No. I should have said the weather and the camera stayed on me for my whole spiel. And then I would have announced either Lisa or Justin, and the camera would have gone to them. And Justin would do sports, and Lisa would do entertainment, like a real newscast. When you watch this as an adult, whose side are you on? Because I have to say, everybody else in the room is just trying to have fun, and there you are, baby Cecil B. DeMille. I feel bad for my parents, more than anything. And the other kids. A little embarrassing too. So at some point, you actually get your hands on the movie camera, when you're 10 or 11. And you start filming all the time, right? Yeah, just filming stuff. When my parents would go out, we were trapped on this cul-de-sac in the hills of Encino. So we were sort of shipwrecked up there. And we had nothing else to do. It was sort of like, what do we do now? Let's make a movie. Mark Entous's backyard was this big, verdant, green lawn. And we'd go back there for the jungle films or for the adventure, Indiana Jones-type movies. Michael's house-- or in front of it, there was this canyon that was really dry. So we'd use that for the Vietnam movies. Hold your breath, guys. It's a mine. Oh, my God. They did a Holocaust film when he was 11. They did a film about the day after a nuclear war. In these early films, the high concepts were just excuses so that the main characters can run around and try to kill each other. There are a lot of gratuitous ninja moves. There's the prerequisite ketchup-as-gore. Because Darren was three years older than anybody on the street, it was easy for him to call the shots. Darren always seemed very powerful. This is Adam Schell, who lived on the cul-de-sac and appears in lots of the movies. Darren was always the one that everybody looked up to. Basically, whatever Darren said, went. Action. Camera rolling. Cut. And what would it mean to be in one of these films? What would it mean to get a big part in one of these films? To me, it was the world. To me, it meant everything. It was the most exciting, the most cool thing that we did as kids. And would kids vie for parts in the films? Totally. I would actually offer the part to one kid, and then decide I didn't want him anymore, offer it to somebody else, and create little dramas behind the scenes. As we got older, I think when Darren was in high school and he made a couple of films through his high school drama program, there was more of an auditioning process. The first film he made there was Song From Below. I remember auditioning for that. And I remember Darren giving me the part for that film. And I remember I just felt so cool. And then I remember when he took it away from me, and he gave it to Michael. And I don't remember what his reasoning for it was. In fact, I think he didn't have a specific reasoning. I think he was just like, oh, I'm just going to take it away from you and give it to Michael because I can. And I remember going home and sitting on my bed and crying. It was just utter, crushing defeat. You know what it's like, though? It's like, a little kid decides to become a director. And then, not only do they have films to show for it, but their personality becomes like a movie director gone power crazy. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it was a total miniature Hollywood. That's what it was like on our street. And Darren loved that power, and he maintained it the entire time. And he had the power to make you a star, and he had the power to crush you. And the fact that we wanted it so bad, as well-- --is also so like the real Hollywood. Exactly. It's just like the real Hollywood. When you look back on that, do you feel a little embarrassed? I feel totally embarrassed about that. It was just, I guess, my way of controlling the situation and having fun. And kids are cruel. It was part of that power thing. As soon as that camera came out, everybody just crumbled in front of it and did whatever Darren behind the camera ordered us to do. There's some really intense videos that we made as kids. What are you thinking about? Well, I mean, I think there's some-- like the Gay as a Whistle film, for example, where Darren puts Allen, who is now openly gay, but at the time, Allen probably knew somewhere in his head, but he wasn't admitting it to the world. And Darren sees this thing in Allen, and maybe it's because they had some sort of underlying communication between the two of them. But he takes that, and he makes a movie about it, and he exploits this thing about Allen that he didn't want anybody in the world to know. I think I was 12 years old when I made that film. Gay as a Whistle is about a gay guy who has a coin in this little jewelry case. And when he shows you the coin, you turn gay basically. And this is back in the '80s when aerobics was big, and so our moms all wore leotards. And I thought, how cool would it be to put Allen in a leotard? Right. So he's wearing this leotard with lip marks all over it. Exactly. And the film starts out with him sitting in a rocking chair, looking very gay, rocking back and forth. And the camera is right on him. And he turns in to the camera and goes, "Hi, my name is Ramon. And I've got a little secret for you. I'm as gay as a whistle." Hi, my name is Ramon. And I've got a little secret for you. I'm as gay as a whistle. I've got this coin here that will make anyone gay when they look at it. Here comes the football team. Hey, great scrimmage, wasn't that? And basically, we have the football team coming up, and the baseball coach coming up. And at first, they see the gay guy, and they're like, ew, it's the gay guy. Let's beat him up. And then he opens the coin. And they're like, "Ooh, I'm gay." Oh, it's the gay guy. Shouldn't we beat him up? Yeah, come on. Wait. Look at my coin. Oh my God. Roses, bouquets, flowers. Oh, my God. Roses. One of the things I think is so funny about Gay as a Whistle is that as soon as the boys are turned into gay, the way that they express it is that they yell the words, "Roses." Gay is about roses, for some reason. And did you feel like the film was about you? Or was it even that conscious? It was not that conscious. Did you think of yourself as gay back then? No, I wouldn't admit that I was. But I think I knew I was. But I would never, ever admit it to anyone. Is this the end of the world? What would happen if this happened to the president? Will the world turn out gay? Stay tuned next week when Darren Stein Productions present: Gay as a Whistle. What weird about it is that it's simultaneously gay-loving and homophobic at the same time. Well, because that's how kids are. I think that's how young gay kids are because you love yourself, but you hate yourself at the same time. What better way not to be gay than to make fun of them and to demonize them? I remember-- it's actually funny. If you watch it, at the very end, Evan and I come up. We're on the football team. And Allen turns us gay with the thing, and then we skip off together. And I remember you see me grab Evan and hug him. And I remember everybody else teasing me about that constantly, being like, oh, you must be gay because look what you did there. Look what you did. And to me, I was like, I'm playing the part. That's what I was supposed to do. I am an actor. Exactly. I'm an actor. I'm playing the part. I'm getting into this role. And I don't think there was ever a moment when somebody wasn't being picked on, whether it was Michael, me, Evan, Mark. I noticed you don't list Darren in that little list. Darren was never picked on. Darren was always the one doing the picking. Because if he started picking on somebody else, then he was safe. You also made a musical called I Have No Friends. Yeah. I went to an all boys junior high/high school. And these kids just did not know what to make of me. And I got made fun of a lot. And you had no friends? You have to understand something. When I was in sixth grade at this public school, I was president of my class. I was just used to being really loved by people and popular. And so suddenly, I wasn't anymore. Right, and everybody hit adolescence. And you're the gay-seeming kid. Yeah, and I was completely gay and awkward and chunky and acne, and it was the whole-- and so the street was completely my escape from that all. It was my insulated world where I called the shots. But I Have No Friends was never consciously about me when I made that. [SINGING] I have no friends. Every day at school I sit alone at lunch. I have no friends. Darren didn't have friends. I think, as long as I can remember, Darren maybe had three or four friends throughout most of high school and junior high. Outside the group, you mean. Yeah, outside the group. [SINGING] I have no friends. I have no friends. You've, as an adult, made two feature films, one called Jawbreaker, one called Sparkler. Did you feel that you had more freedom to express yourself when you were 11 and 12 making movies? Unquestionably. When you're a kid, it comes straight from your id onto the film. Darren Stein and Adam Schell have collected their own movies and created a documentary about them called Put the Camera On Me. It's available on DVD. Coming up, when America just leaves the camera running, what does it see? And a Hollywood teen movie plot comes to a home movie. 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, home movies and the stories they tell, intentionally and unintentionally. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Back when home movies were actually movies, real movies on real film, they were expensive to make. The cameras were hard to use. You actually had to know how to work a camera pretty well. You'd run out of film in just three minutes. So most people really did restrict themselves to filming celebrations, babies, and vacations. But now that video cameras and videotape are so cheap, relatively speaking, people just leave the camera running for hours. And nobody knows this better than the producers of America's Funniest Home Videos, which has an archive of half a million video clips. Todd Thicke is the co-executive producer of the show. Trace Beaulieu and Mike Palleschi have been writers on the program. They each watch hundreds of home video clips each week. They say that they have seen video where people just set up a tripod and film themselves watching TV. They have no idea why. A lot of kids on stage. People golfing because they want to get their swing down. So that's why we have a million people losing their drivers. And we also see a Little League baseball game. We get a lot of the kid walking off the field saying, I gotta go pee, Mommy, and stuff like that. Then kids sleeping on toilets. Parents universally think their child sleeping on the toilet is funny. And when somebody has a video of, for example-- I've seen videos on the show of somebody trying to change a lightbulb and then a mishap happening. How do you explain the fact that they're filming the changing of a light bulb? They don't lead very interesting lives? That's a highlight? Trace, why did they tape themselves changing a lightbulb? Because they don't have kids and their cat is boring. And they got a camera. And is it your impression that there are a lot of people out there filming all the time? I think that that is fairly prevalent out there. I think if people have cameras, they're shooting stuff. We sometimes say, what are they shooting here? What did they have the camera set up for? Sometimes we've seen people videotaping their sheetrocking. It's like, why are they taping this? And then someone will fall through a ceiling. But you see one, and you go, OK, that's an anomaly. And then you see 20 guys taping themselves sheetrocking. I think you tape what you got. If that's your life and that's what you do-- if you're Cameron Diaz, you're at a premier. And if you're sheetrocking-- There was a guy, yesterday, pulling his cactus out alongside of the pool. And then he fell into the pool. We thought, did he set that up? Set up. Or did they really say, we've got to go film Dad taking the cactus out? It was a set up. We can spot the setups all the time. Aha. Now, that's very interesting. What's the tip off that it's a set up? What are the tricks? How can you tell? Camera placement is a big tip off. They have the shot. Normally, they don't get the shot. The camera's moving around, and they miss the birthday cake burning someone. Yeah. Usually when the moment happens, when you're taping something and something happens, you drop the camera, just for a split second or something, or you take your eye off it, and the shot jerks away. But if you hold that shot steady, there was no surprise to you. I never would have thought of that. I think it's an involuntary reaction. But not enough to help anyone. Does everybody's family seem the same, when you watch one of these videos after another? Yes and no. I mean, you see at the weddings when they pass the camera around and the microphone, and people say things into the camera, we find rich, poor, black, or white, there's always the person who puts the microphone up to their ear like a telephone. Or we had an old lady take the microphone and said, I'll have the chicken. It seems like, no matter what you are, there's always that person at your wedding. Who will make that joke. And every wedding has that one guy who really can't dance. But around the kitchen and the den when they're hanging out with the kids playing on the floor, everybody seems like, it's a nice country out there. Doesn't most of it seem-- in people's homes? Do you guys shoot home videos? I don't. But I did just get engaged. And I've seen more weddings, I think, than anybody. And my fiance couldn't understand why I was so nervous. And I had to explain to her, well, after two years of watching people catch on fire, throw up at the altar, pass out, and all these horrible things, people letting the doves go, and they poop on the bride, I was little squeamish about a wedding in general. Right. A wedding just seems like a series of possible accidents waiting to happen. Well, I've learned you don't to have open flame near the veils. The father's pants. Yes, all the old men must have their belts securely fastened around their waists. And no comedy at the altar. We've seen a lot of guys who-- oh, I can't find the ring. And then the UPS guy will run in the front. They've made the most special moment of their life into a Lucy skit. Mike Palleschi, Todd Thicke, and Trace Beaulieu of America's Funniest Home Videos. You can watch that TV show on the ABC television network Sunday nights at 7:00, 6:00 Central. That was such an official-sounding thing to say on the radio. I've never said anything like that in my life. Well, Act Four. The Cinema Of Upward Mobility. The plot line of a home movie is usually more home than movie. These are not usually, as you may gather, the most cinematic stories being told. When she was a teenager, Susan Burton tried to do something that you see many teenagers attempt in teen movies, and she actually pulled it off. As luck would have it, the effort was caught on video, and we offer it here as a kind of alternative to the Hollywood version of the story. Her family's videos, I should say, begin inauspiciously enough. My dad videotaped a lot of things, all the typical stuff. My little sister Betsy's preschool dance recital. [SINGING] Rubber ducky, you're the one. My solo in the fourth grade spring choral concert. [SINGING] The hills are alive with the sound of music. Birthday dinners. [SINGING] Happy birthday dear Susan. Happy birthday to you. Holidays like Easter Sunday, when we hunted for eggs the Bunny hid on the first floor of our house. I found one in the bathroom. You know what? I found one in the bathroom. Was it in the toilet? No. I just wanted to make sure you found an egg. I found an egg. Until two weeks ago, I hadn't watched these videos for years. When I put them in the VCR, I couldn't believe that the world could exist like this again, that it could just pop up like a stage set, my parents still married, all of us together in our old house. OK, why don't you guys all get next to Daddy? It's probably not good for me to be out in the dark, is it? No, it's fine. When I was little and planning on becoming famous, I always used to imagine that my house would be turned into a museum of my life, an exact reproduction of my seat at the dining room table, the order of the dolls in a row on my cedar chest, the Ramona book marked at the place I'd stopped before going to bed. Having these videos is like buying a ticket and opening our yellow front door and taking the tour. When so much of your childhood is documented, there are going to be moments you wish had been left out. For me, that moment is an entire era, middle school. It begins with a hike up Baxter Mountain. OK, you guys ready for another Baxter Mountain trip? Yeah. Every summer, my mom, my dad, Betsy, and I climbed Baxter together. Baxter's a good hike for children. It's 1.1 miles. In this video, Betsy's seven years old. She's adorable. She skips up the trail. She searches the trees for the soft, white semicircles of fungus we break off and take home as souvenirs of the hike. She throws up her tiny arms and beams at my father with giant, brown eyes. She pipes up with little observations about nature. Oh, these are roots. They go down into the ground. Let me see if I can find the taproot. What is it called, Betsy? The taproot. Taproot? Mm-hmm. When the camera pans to me, it's a different story. Allow me to describe myself. I'm 11, almost 12. I'm wearing a rubber snake around my neck. My t-shirt has a row of teddy bears across the front. Each bear holds a balloon with a letter on it, and together they spell the word "stickers." It is difficult to see my eyes, which are masked by enormous round glasses. I look like an owl, like something from science. I look like what I was at the time, which is a nerd. I regale my family with nuggets from my repository of random nerd facts. When my sister wonders if there are killer bees on Baxter Mountain, I'm ready with the answer. Are there killer bees around here? Not last summer, but the summer before, I checked out a book at the library. And it was all about these killer bees who were killing people. And then when I got back home to Grand Rapids, I read a story in the paper, and it said that there's killer bees in South America, and they should be coming up here in about five years or something. And then it was 1983. So they should be coming up about 1988. Not long after the hike up Baxter, I started seventh grade at a new school in my Michigan hometown, Central Middle School. I'd gone to my old school since I was three and loved it, and now that I was at Central Middle, I missed it like crazy. Longings for it would well up inside me every Thursday night, when the "Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name" song played before Cheers. But it wasn't long before everybody knew my name at Central Middle. Around Halloween, we received our first report cards in homeroom. My homeroom teacher was Mr. Bixler. He taught earth science and had a fondness for puns. He liked to add fake names to the attendance slip, like Eileen Dover or Justin Case. Mr. Bixler shuffled through the pile of report cards on his desk. Suddenly he held one up to the light, as if verifying its authenticity. "Susie Burton," he said. "Five A's and two A pluses." The boy in our homeroom with Tourette's Syndrome let out a series of profanities and yelps. I wanted to flee, but my desk was surrounded. Kids were actually coming over to see my report card. "She even got an A in gym," one boy exclaimed. I'd gotten off on the wrong foot at Central Middle. I had blind enthusiasm for spelling bees, book bowls, and science olympiads. I was the only girl in architectural drafting. My other elective was called brain teasers. I did the wrong things, and I looked the wrong way too. I had a short curly perm that hadn't come out the way it was supposed to, braces on my top and bottom teeth, and weird clothes like culottes. Everyone else at my school wore jeans and Reeboks. I wasn't allowed to wear either. I'd had one pair of jeans in my life. I was permitted to get them for a school play. It was a one-act about a Michael Jackson concert, authored by a sixth grader at my old school. At the store, my mother pulled out dark blue Lee jeans with pinstripes. She said that my father might like this pair. They resembled business suit pants. My parents didn't understand. My father said that the boys in architectural drafting teased me because they liked me, all 27 of them. My mother said middle school didn't matter, that college was where you met your real friends. I needed to improve. I needed a manual. So I got a subscription to Seventeen magazine. Seventeen gave advice on a lot of things, like fresh face makeup that would let me shine through, and what I should do if I was better looking than my best friend. But before I could apply any of it at Central Middle, my parents got divorced. My grandfather said it was because we all read at the dinner table. I disagreed, but it didn't matter. We were selling our house, and my mom and Betsy and I were moving to Boulder, Colorado. My mother told me that she liked the idea of the west, of the frontier, of going there to make a fresh start. I liked the idea too. In the west, I would be popular. I would reinvent myself. Nobody would know that back in Michigan, I'd been a nerd. And best yet, I would attend Fairview High School, where a junior named Holly had just won the Seventeen cover model contest. I had the issue upstairs in my room, carefully filed in a little library of teendom. By now, I'd been a student of popularity for two years. I did this with the intensity and seriousness with which I'd learned the migratory patterns of the killer bee. I had cassettes full of songs I'd taped off the radio. I'd accumulated the right clothes. I applied the scientific method to wardrobe selection. I typed up a list of my outfits on the Macintosh and posted it inside my closet. The list only applied to weekdays, and I did not deviate from the order. There were 16 outfits, so that there would always be an irregular beat built in, so that I wouldn't always wear Benetton rugby shirt on Mondays or the Guess overalls on Tuesday. The amazing thing is, the plan worked. We moved. I was popular. It was the fresh start any nerd dreams of. It was better than any article that had ever been in Seventeen. I had a group of friends. We all sat together every day at lunch on our jean jackets in a circle in the front courtyard. We French braided each other's hair. We traded clothes. We had slumber parties. On weekdays, we'd often ride bikes until just before dark. One time, we were riding to the grocery store to get ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, and my shoe fell off in the crosswalk. It became a famous story. There was a famous story about me. The littlest things, things that probably didn't matter to anyone else, made me so happy. I saved any note anyone ever wrote to me in class. There was a girl in the house behind me named Shannon, and one night, we yelled to each other from our windows before we turned off our lights and went to bed. It had only happened that once, but I thought about it a lot. It was like something from a movie, like a dream life. And there's video documentation of this too. Susie? Hi. What should we do? This is me on the telephone in Colorado. Well, I don't know. I heard a lot of people were going there, but remember what happened last night? OK, well, should we do that? Well, I don't know. OK, it's only, like, 7:30. So why don't we wait until, like, 8:00? And then we'll figure out something, OK? OK, should I call Lisa? In this video, I have long, straight, shiny blond hair. I have lip gloss, contact lenses, and perfect braceless teeth. I talk on the phone so much my mother has subscribed to call waiting. And then-- hold on a sec. Hello? Hello? Oh, gosh, my call waiting signal just messed up. OK, but anyway, you can come over, and we'll braid my hair. OK? And then we'll go down to Pearl Street, OK? OK, bye. The rules of being popular seemed easy to me. Anybody could have done it. The main ones were, smile a lot. Wear good clothes. Giggle. Be a little ditzy. I started remembering to forget my lunch. But the main number one rule of being popular was, don't let anyone know you're smart. On US Government quizzes, I answered questions wrong on purpose. But the notes we passed in language arts provided me with a real opportunity to shine. If my friend Joanna wrote, "Antigone sucks, and it's so cold. I wish we didn't have to walk home today," I would write back, "I know. I should of worn a sweater today." But I would spell "should've" like "should" and then the word "of," instead of the contraction for "should have." I'd continue, "Ms. C is totally on the rag today. She's bothering me alot." That's "alot," spelled as one word, no space. Things were happening so naturally that I could almost convince myself that my life had always been this way. One Saturday night, a group of us went to see the movie, Can't Buy Me Love. The movie's about a nerd who decides that his senior year of high school, he's going to become popular at last. He pays the most beautiful girl in school to go out with him. It didn't even cross my mind to identify with the nerd. I was in so deep that I identified with the pretty blonde cheerleader. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. I'm Susan Burton and Betsy Burton. And these are The days of our lives. These last two weeks, watching video of myself from those days, I saw something that wasn't clear to me at the time. Here's a tape Betsy and I made for our dad for Father's Day, two years after we moved to Boulder. We just wanted to make this video for you for Father's Day because we didn't want to get you a book, because we always do that. And this way you can look at us whenever you want to. I look exactly right, studiously plain hair, silver bracelets, pretty clothes. But I'm still a nerd. Here I am, explaining the music of the young people to my dad. And then, oh, Depeche Mode. Here's some Depeche Mode. I can't resist translating the name of the band. Depeche means "hurried." Mode means "fashion." Hurried fashion. Or dispatch fashion. Yeah, it's dispatch. Because it's not sous depeche. In this video, what I see now is how hard I'm trying. I've blowdried my hair and matched my socks to my shorts, even though it's a summer morning and we're just staying home. I'm sarcastic in a way I know is meant to mimic two of my friends from school. I make a show of talking about driver's permits, even though I was terrified of the day I'd eventually get behind the wheel. The popular girl is in this video. There's proof that she exists. But it's clear that the killer bee girl is right inside her. OK, I think that'll end my instructional video. As you can see, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] are better. I didn't change that much. Susan Burton is a writer in New York City. Act Five, Just Shoot Me. We end our program today with this story from David Sedaris, a story asking the simple question, why even bother to make home movies? It was the day before Thanksgiving, and my mother and I were at the Raleigh airport waiting for my sister Gretchen to return from Rhode Island. You could still smoke then, and so we sat beside the ashtray, passing the time as the plane rolled up to the gate. A young woman took a seat not far away, and when she pulled a camcorder from her knapsack, my mother groaned and prodded me with her elbow. "Oh, God, here we go." The camera was new and sleek, and as she aimed it towards a doorway, my mother covered the side of her face. "They shouldn't allow people to walk around with things like that," she said. "I mean, really. There should be a law." Had the young woman been carrying a loaded rifle, my mother might have brushed it off. But she hated having her picture taken. "Whoever she's waiting for might have it coming, but what about us poor nobodies caught in the crossfire? I don't want to be in some stranger's piss-poor movie," she said. "I don't even want to be in my own." The young woman overheard and looked our way with an expression reading, "Who would want to videotape you?" I smiled, and she left her seat to stand against a column. "Why do people need to get everything on film?" my mother asked. "Are they that afraid they're going to forget something? And why do it here? Can't it at least wait for the parking lot?" The exit door opened, and passengers stepped out into the terminal. The young woman started filming, and my mother scowled as complete strangers waved into the camera. We were well out of range, but still she kept her hand to the side of her face, looking as though she were talking about the person seated next to her. "Now, this is just ridiculous," she said. "I mean, what? Do you honestly think anyone's going to watch a thing like this? What's the point in making a movie when all anyone is doing is stepping off a damn airplane? It's not like it hasn't been done. It's not like there are any surprises here, so why bother with the $800 camera?" My sister Gretchen stepped into the terminal and wondered why her mother was covering her face. "Do you have a toothache?" she asked. "Did somebody slap you?" There were more video cameras awaiting us at the baggage claim. A grown man filmed a toddler pounding against the side of a suitcase. A teenage boy shot his father hoisting a golf bag. "I've got to get out of here," my mother said. And then she went outside to wait in the car. Once, while at the beach, my father borrowed a movie camera and spent the afternoon following us around. We were young then and excited by the thought of watching ourselves projected onto a bed sheet. He shot us swimming and eating and piling on top of our mother who had tried in vain to escape. "This is going to be good," he said. "Come on, now. Pin her down, so I can get a good shot of her face." My sister Lisa would later suggest that there had been no film in the camera, but I don't think our father had it in him to be that cruel. Most likely, he set it aside, meaning to have it developed, but never quite finding the time. Either that or our mother got to it first. She was good at destroying film. After she died, we took turns holding her various belongings to our noses. Mom's coat, Mom's washcloth, Mom's pillow. This is what people do when they're left with such paltry iconography. They smell things, continuing long after the scent has faded, and it feels silly to stand in the living room sniffing your mother's hairbrush. She'd been dead for three years when my aunt sent a home movie she'd transferred to videotape. This was film shot in the mid-'70s, when she and my uncle had gone with our parents to the Virgin Islands. My sisters and I put the tape into the VCR and watched as my father silently pleaded with a locked door. We witnessed our aunt and uncle strolling white beaches and merrily waving from the deck of a boat. It wasn't until the end that we finally saw our mother and then only briefly. Whoever shot the footage had caught her unaware, walking out the door of a restaurant and slowly moving into the sun. It was such a small thing, our mother snapping shut her purse and putting one foot in front of the other, but it seemed to us like a miracle, like the way the movies must have seemed when they were very first invented. On seeing the camera, she covered her eyes and ran back inside. "Get lost," we imagined her saying. But this was the beauty of video. Our mother retreated into the restaurant, and, against her better wishes, we hit the rewind button, drawing her back out. She was ours now. And we sat there for hours, none of us speaking except to say, "Do it again." David Sedaris is the author of several books. His most recent is When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can download our podcast or listen to any of our old shows for free. Also, we have all kinds of merch in our online store. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by Torey Malatia, whose original idea for This American Life could be described this way. It was called Crazy News, and it was basically a newscast that was supposed to be crazy. I'm Ira Glass, back next week. Stay tuned next week when Darren Stein Productions present: Gay as a Whistle. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Ladies and gentlemen, public radio listeners everywhere, now let us praise famous crap, OK, and not so famous crap too. Well, there's a show called Boy Meets World. You ever seen it? No. It's great. It's so good. It's in syndication? Yeah, it's one of those shows that just went under the radar. Friends, we are not here today to talk about those supposedly good TV programs people who think that they're smart like to talk about when they talk about TV. We're here to talk about the stuff that makes up so much of TV. We're here to speak of reruns. And not good reruns at that, I'm talking your Matlocks, your Living Singles, your Kate & Allies. This voice you are hearing is Starlee Kine, one of the producers of our radio program. And I asked her to talk about her relationship to TV, because she's the first person I've ever met who actively prefers reruns like Boy Meets World. And it just like was on for years, but you never knew it. And now it's just like permanently in reruns, and it's on like four different channels. But it's not very good. In fact, is it actually bad? I think so. I mean, it's hard for me to tell at this point, but it's bad, yeah. So if it's bad, why are you watching? It's very, very, very comforting to watch it. It's comforting because you used to watch it when you were a little kid? No. You never saw it as a kid? No, not that one. But Boy Meets World, it's like it didn't even matter that I didn't watch it as a little kid. I can imagine little kids being in really comfortable, carpeted family rooms and laying with their elbows propped up and watching Boy Meets World and feeling really safe. Because it's like the safest thing in the world. This family is so nuclear, it's perfect. But it's soundstages, and it looks really fake. The principal is also the kid's neighbor. You know what I mean? He's just always there and always looking after everyone. Hey son, how was your day? Fine. What did you do in school? Nothing. Hey, hold on right there. You know, every day I ask you, what did you do. And every day you tell me, nothing. Well, I'm tired of nothing. I mean, we both know something happened today. And I want to know what it is. I decided to be a girl. I would imagine, if I were a little kid watching it, I'd feel so secure. Knowing that there's kids out there who feel secure is enough for me to feel comforted by it and watch it every time its on. I try very hard to establish these things so that I have these reruns, because I live in eternal fear that the reruns are going to be gone. Like last night, I was watching TV and I couldn't find a rerun anywhere and I was panicking. The Godfather was on, and I was flipping, flipping, and I couldn't find one. I was just like, how is this possible? There was a rerun though. It was a rerun of The Nanny was on. And I don't have any relationship with it, so I was stuck. Because she's so scared of that happening, Starlee is perpetually cultivating new reruns, forcing yourself to immerse in them. Her latest is Caroline in the City. When I watch Caroline in the City, it's like I'm really trying to find something, even though I hate it so much, so much. I hate it, every part of it. Hate the way she draws. I hate the way she talks. I hate her assistant, everything. And as you've watched Caroline in the City over the course of weeks, do you now actually like it? I don't like it. But I know it. I am very familiar with it. And that's enough? That's enough. What percentage of television is about just straight up comfort and what percentage is about what we think of, traditionally, as entertainment? For me? Oh God, 80% is about comfort for me. If something good gets in there it's an accident. Or it's because I feel obligated to watch something good, because I know people are going to ask me the next day. Well, today on our radio program, a defense of not going out into the world and looking for new experiences, a defense of dwelling on what you already know, a defense of staying caught in your own personal reruns. Stories of people who have the same thing going on with some story from their own past that Starlee has with Caroline in the City and Boy Meets World. From WBEZ Chicago, it is This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three, yes three, acts. Act One-- Action! Action! Action! In that act the story of what happens when a person, who actually has the power to create reruns, gets stuck in a rerun. Act Two-- Marriage As Rerun. In that act, an exploration, possibly, we think, the first ever, of how in every couple, in every marriage, we are stuck hearing the same stories from our partners over and over, and what we're supposed to think of that. Act Three-- Reruns At The Back Of The Bus. In that act, Sarah Vowell explains what happens when we, as a nation, keep telling ourselves the same political fable over and over long past the point where it makes any sense to. Stay with us. Act One-- Action! Action! Action! Well, Starlee Kine, who you just met, somebody who loves reruns more than anyone who I've ever known, came upon a rerun moment. An entire film caught in a rerun in a way that dumbfounded even her. The film is called The Beaver Trilogy, and she put together this story about it. 10 minutes into watching The Beaver Trilogy I could already feel how much I'd be talking about it. Once it was over, I felt mournful that I'd never be able to see it again for the first time. Everything about it is so surprising and unexpected, the way movies almost never are. And what I'm going to try to do right now, here on the radio, is to recreate for you what it's like to see it. Are you typing it? Oh, wow. When can I see this? It's starts with a hand held camera moving up to a kid in the middle of an empty parking lot. The kid's taking pictures of a parked TV news traffic helicopter. He realizes he's being filmed, and starts into a John Wayne impersonation. John Wayne? Here. Mom. Here is John Wayne. Yo, while I'll tell ya something out there in TV land, I'm hamming it up. I'll tell you. The kid's wearing '70s clothes, bell-bottom jeans and a shirt with racing stripes. He has a Casio watch on. He looks to be in his early 20s. He cycles through a couple more impersonations, Barry Manilow, Rocky Balboa. He's a good guy, you know. He knows his fight. He knows his left from his right. He knows his left toe from his right toe, you know. He's a good guy, and he loves his wife, Adrian, you know. So, anyway. I love it up here though. I was just taking some pictures of Sky two over there, and man, it's really fantastic out here. I love it. I love it up here. I love impersonating and, by gosh, if I made the tube, I just thank you so much. I really do. So, boy I can't believe this. This is actual live, huh? Well, it's not going out yet, but it will. Well, I'd like to get a picture of you. That would be great. Take a picture of me taking a picture? Well, would that be all right? Sure. OK, smile, you're on Candid Camera. Don't you love this kid? You love him, but you don't know why you love him, right? Well, my day has come. It's shining. When I saw this in the theater, I couldn't get over what a great idea he was. I loved that someone thought up a character his is so excited just to be taking pictures of a news helicopter parked on a strip of highway. It's only later, after the movie was over, that I learned that I wasn't watching a feature film at all. It's a documentary shot in 1979. This kid's real. Basically, what happened is I was working at a television station in Salt Lake City, and they had a new gadget called a video camera. And I walked out into the parking lot to test out a camera. This is Trent Harris, the film's director. And saw this fellow, and he sort of walked up to me, and away he went. It took 30 seconds, and I was so enthralled with him that I knew that I just had to keep filming him. It's my little car. My little '64 Chevy. Hang on, let me kind of straighten it up before I get on the tube. And then he's so excited, he just keeps going, rambling, rambling, rambling. Is that where your from, Beaver? Yeah, I'm from Beaver. Beaver is a small kind of farming town. It's not close to anything really. What goes on in Beaver? It's just kind of a town where you drag main at night, go to school in the daytime. I'm not in school now, but I used to be. I'm 21 now so. Just kind of out working for the Union Pacific Railroad. It turns out that he's driven from Beaver just that very morning. His plan was to go to the news station and try and get on TV. So when Trent approached, it was almost like the Beaver kid had been expecting it. But I love hamming it up. You can tell. Well, I'm on TV. I can't believe it. Just in the right place at the right time I guess. Part of what makes watching the movie so great is the obvious joy the two of them feel over having found each other. If Trent had wandered out five minutes later, the kid probably would have been heading back home. If the kid had come the next day, Trent wouldn't have been there filming. It was just a lucky accident that they met, and it changed their lives forever. Dear Trent, how's things going up there? I hope OK. I hope I haven't bothered you in any way with the calls that I have made. If I have, I'm sorry, really. This is the very next scene. There's an image of somebody holding a handwritten note. You have no idea what's happening. And slowly you realize that it's a letter from the Beaver Kid. He's assembled a talent show, and he wants Trent to come down and film it. The show is scheduled to come off on the 31st. Please, Trent, come down. I'm begging, I'm pleading. PS, I will be putting on my makeup at the open mortuary at 8:00 AM. You may want to get some shots. Jeez, let's see. How are we going to do this now? And sure enough, the next shot we're at a mortuary, as if that makes any sense at all. The Beaver Kid sits with his hair clipped back away from his face. The local mortician applies eye shadow, mascara, rouge, and lipstick. I'm guessing, because she's the most qualified person in town to do it, but no one explains. The Kid seems different than he was in the parking lot, way more nervous. Well, Trent, I think I'll go get into my threads. The mortician smiles encouragingly. Let's get you wiggy on, she says. Let's get your wiggy on. Get my wig on. And pretty soon he's in character, wearing a bulky leather jacket, tight black jeans, and a blond wig that hangs down to his waist. He's supposed to be Olivia Newton-John. My purse, Olivia. Well, I really don't know what to say now. I guess I ought to get down in a minute. And I'm off. Watching all this, the thought doesn't occur to you that the kid's gay or closeted. And I don't think he in fact is. He's more like an overgrown boy dressing up for Halloween, doing the most outrageous thing he can think of. He can barely suppress the giggles as he zips into his knee-high boots. Again, here's Trent. You know, I grew up in a small town too, and I know what it's like to be on the outside. It's very difficult. There's an awful lot of pressure from the school, from the church, from your family, from everything to make you conform. And you just can't go around dressing up like Olivia Newton-John without people getting cranky. For a decade Joan and Julie [? Kesser ?] have been singing before audiences throughout Beaver County and the state. They have performed on the Eugene Jelesnik Show. The next thing you see is a man with a mustache standing on the stage of a school auditorium. He's the Beaver High School vice principal, who the kid has recruited to serve as the talent show MC. Joan and Julie [? Kesser ?] will now sing "The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA." The whole thing is like this. There's a drill team, a ventriloquist act. It's all pretty much what you expect from a small town talent show until the Beaver Kid comes out. Ladies and gentleman, Olivia Newton-Don. It doesn't matter that he can't really sing, or that he looks nothing like Olivia Newton-John. Watching the kid perform is totally riveting. His eyes are closed, and his face looks pained. He's singing directly into the camera. It goes on for a long time. It's so long and so raw that you worry. You feel like maybe you shouldn't be watching. It feels too personal. You have no idea what's going to happen next. And at the same time, you're aware he's orchestrated this whole elaborate event at 11:00 on a Saturday morning to a half-empty theater just so he can be up on stage at this moment and be put on TV. It's like watching someone finally get what they've always needed. Soon enough, the screen fades to black. Then something happens I never would have seen coming. A new scene opens. A handheld camera shakily approaches a kid taking pictures in the middle of an empty parking lot. Wow. Are you filming this? Yeah. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I never been on a set before. Everything's exactly the same. Except this time, instead of the Beaver Kid, it's Sean Penn. Sean Penn. I'm lucky I came on. I'm an impersonator. I'll do a John Wayne. All right, go ahead. Well, I'll tell you out there in TV land, I just made extra, and I'm just tickled to death. I love hamming it up, you can tell. When you watch the movie, there is no explanation for any of this. You have no idea why it's happening again, this time to one of the most famous actors in the world. But I can explain. Shortly after Trent shot the talent show, he moved out to Hollywood with dreams of making it big. But his first film was an unlikely vehicle to stardom. A virtually plotless single character dramatization of the documentary he'd already made. He wrote out a script and started looking for a leading man. It was 1981. Sean Penn had just finished filming Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and within a year he'd be a full-fledged movie star. But when Trent found him, Sean Penn was just another unknown actor looking for work. Once again, Trent lucked out. Basically, I didn't have any money. I'm shooting this thing with a home video camera. You can't believe some of the people I auditioned for this, Nick Cage, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards. Really? These people all wanted to play this part. And somebody said, you ought to call this guy, Sean Penn, on the phone. I didn't know who he was. I made him an addition for the role. And he came down to the place I was at, and rather than have him read lines, he decided that what he wanted to do was just become the character. And that he would follow me around for for the rest of the day. So he became my cousin Larry from Idaho. And then he just followed me around that day. And I introduced him to people as my cousin from Idaho named Larry. And he acted the part out. And it was really kind of funny, because a year later people would come up to me and say, boy your cousin's really become a big star. Let's get your wiggy on. Let's get my wiggy on, and Olivia will just about be here. Hello, I really don't know quite what to say. I guess we ought to be going. It's practically a shot for shot remake. The only difference between this version and the one with the real kid is the ending. After the concert, Sean Penn, whose character's name is Larry, goes home and calls up the director on the phone and asks him not to play the footage on TV. He's worried people will take it the wrong way. The director refuses. Sean Penn drops the phone and picks up a shotgun. He puts the barrel in his mouth and cocks the trigger. [PHONE RINGING] Then the phone rings. Yes. Hello, Larry? This is Carissa. Listen, I thought your performance at the talent show was really funny. I can hardly wait to see it on TV. Anyway, I'm having a party Saturday night. Would you like to come and act like Olivia? Sean Penn puts on his Olivia wig, blinks away his tears, and starts singing into a hair brush. It all feels very melodramatic and pat and unbelievable, like a tacked on Hollywood ending. And then the screen goes black. The movie seems to be over. And then, a handheld camera, a parking lot, a kid taking pictures. What, why, are you filming this? Yeah. Wow, oh gosh, I've been wanting to get on the tube so bad. Everything's exactly the same. Except this time, instead of a young Sean Penn, it's a young Crispin Glover, Crispin Glover. That's right, the guy that played Michael J. Fox's dad in Back to the Future. Well, let's see here. Here's a little bit of the old John Wayne for you. Well, let me tell ya, something out there in TV land. I just made the tube, and it just tickles the heck right out of me. The rest is the same too. There's Crispin in the mortuary. Guess I'd better get into my threads. There's Crispin at the town talent show. But while the first two versions of the story were basically made with a home video camera and looked it, this one looks like a real movie. It's shot on film. There's lighting and extras and actual sets. It also cost a lot more. Trent spent $50,000 on it. And, as is often the case in Hollywood, the big budget remake is not as good as the original. Trent adds a whole new backstory to make the Beaver Kid seem like an heroic outsider. People are constantly mocking him, sticking tacks on his chair, telling him he'll never make it onto TV. And the director is an oily, villainous, mustachioed type name Terrance. And just like in the Sean Penn version, Crispin pulls out a gun after the talent show and considers killing himself. He calls the director and begs him not to put the footage on TV. [PHONE RINGING] Hello? Terrance, how ya pal? I hope you don't think I'm crazy for this, but I'm a little worried about that Olivia number. And I'd be willing to pay for your gas, and film and stuff if you just wouldn't put it on TV. I put a lot of time and effort into this project. Look, people are going to love it. You look great. And besides, I got a deadline to meet. Would I lie to you? I emerge as a character in this series. And I guess my character is just kind of a jerk, for lack of a better word. He is very insensitive and very, sort of, just after a story and nothing else, and very exploitative. When I asked Trent why he felt the need to add the phone call, and the gun, and exploitative director character, at first he says, it was just for dramatic effect. He tells me every movie needs a villain. He tells me reality doesn't have anything to do with anything. He tells me to shut up. And then, finally, an hour into our interview, he tells me this. What happened? I did get a phone call. I did get a phone call after I'd been in Beaver. And the phone call said, listen I've been thinking about that, maybe you shouldn't put it on TV. And I remember saying, oh, don't worry about it. It's going to be fine. And maybe I wasn't as sensitive as I should have been or could have been. Not too long after that, I found out that he'd been shot. Trent called the hospital, and was told the Beaver Kid had an accident with a gun. The kid was OK though, able to talk on the phone. And then he just kept apologizing to me, which was kind of very confusing. Very sorry that he'd put me through what he was putting me through. Which seemed kind of odd at the time, because I felt like I should be apologizing to him. I guess I felt like maybe I'd pushed him a little bit too much. The Beaver Kid declined my request for an interview. After all that, Trent quit his TV job, never airing his footage of the talent show, and drove to Hollywood where he immediately started working on the Sean Penn version of the story. Still thinking about how he'd originally ignored the kid's request not to broadcast the footage and how the kid ended up in the hospital. Do you connect the two things together? I mean, in my mind, I connect them together. I don't know whether it's true or not, but in my mind I connect it together. Again, I'm very, very reluctant to talk about what is going on in his mind or to speculate that way. I don't think it's fair. I mean, but it seems more about you though. It seems more about-- If you're asking me, and I think you're trying to, if I feel guilty about anything that has happened? The answer to that is yes. Of course, I do feel guilty about things. I feel guilty about putting myself and my needs above other people's needs, above his needs. I wasn't appreciative of that, and sensitive of that. And for that, I've always felt guilty. And there you have it. That's why I keep making this damn thing over and over again. Now can we quit? You know, you're the one who made these movies. You set yourself up for this whole chain of events here. So then, did you feel better after? Right now, I feel terrible. It's getting worse. Good, I think we're having a breakthrough here. How about a cup to go? The third version of the story, like the Sean Penn version, has a happy ending. Crispin Glover wears his Olivia Newton-John outfit out in public. He doesn't care what people think anymore, and then he literally drives off into the sunset. [MOTORCYCLE REVVING AND MUSIC PLAYING] The screen fades to black. When I saw this in the theater, everyone in the audience hesitated for a minute before standing up. We didn't know who might walk out onto that parking lot next. What's so crazy about Trent spending years making the exact same movie over and over, is not what he added to the film each time, but what he kept the same. Trent could've shot anywhere in the world, anything he wanted, but instead he kept coming back to the same drab parking lot. Details that would seem totally random to anyone watching, he repeats. Like any obsession, it's always the most mundane things you can't shake. So what you end up with is a series of movies that only make sense to the person who made them. The same story, over and over, with inexplicably happy endings thrown on. If I hadn't talked to Trent, I still would've loved these movies, but I would have had no idea what they were about. But that's OK. Because they weren't meant for us anyway. After Trent finished the last version of the film in 1985, he did the same thing that he'd done with the first two, absolutely nothing. 13 years later, he came across all three of them in his closet and hooked them together onto one reel for the first time. He screened it at a local theater in Utah. One thing led to another, and he was invited to screen it at the Sundance Film Festival. For the first time in 22 years, Trent had to find the Beaver Kid. He had a friend track him down to invite him to Sundance. So I mean, you've got to imagine this. You've got to take this into perspective. Is that he doesn't know. This happens in 1979 and in 2001 he gets a phone call that says this is going to play at the Sundance Film Festival. Well, just before the show starts, the tickets haven't been picked up. What happens is that we show the movie. It's a huge screening. There are 1,400 people there. And after the screening, there's a bunch of people run up to the stage and ask more questions, stuff like that. All of a sudden, out of this sea of faces, one emerges. And he says, you probably don't remember me. And I immediately recognized who he was. And I grabbed him and dragged him out the side door into a snow drift. There was a lot of, huh, well, I mean, what have you-- well, I mean, wow-- That was really something. I can't believe. And then I'd say something like, yeah, I mean, wow, I tried to find you, but I didn't know where you were. And look at all this snow, and here comes a bunch of people. And then he'd say, oh my gosh, and I still have that car. And oh, you must think I'm some sort or a nut. And what in the heck is going on? Where all these people coming from? Do they think I'm some sort of a nut? Ans I said, No, no, everybody loves you, it's great. I mean, it was that kind of a conversation. And then we're mobbed. All of the sudden, there's 50 people standing around taking pictures and asking for his autograph. He doen't know. He just starts signing autographs, and then kind of slipped right into it as if he'd been doing it for years. After the screening, I took him to the big Sundance party at the end of the festival. There is a huge, huge party under a big tent. The room's filled with movie stars and all kinds of glamorous people drinking champagne and having a heck of time. And nobody cared about the movie stars. They were all around him. They're asking him questions and getting his autograph. And beautiful women hanging on his arm and running off to get him a glass of beer. It was incredible. It was great. Literally, he was the biggest star in the room. So was it a relief? It was a tremendous relief for me. Trent kept remaking the same film because he wanted it to come out right. He wanted to give the kid a happy ending. And somehow, the plan worked. The Beaver Kid wanted to be a star. 22 years passed, and in the end, he was. And what happened in between doesn't have to make sense. Starlee Kine. Trent Harris's Beaver Trilogy is not in distribution. It's not available in stores. It will not be coming to a theater near you. And maybe it's not over yet. He came up with an idea. He said, hey we ought to do part four. He had an idea, and I said, well, what's your idea? And he says, "Well, OK, imagine this. We're out on the sagebrush, nothing around except a long, long, dirt road. And you hear the music begin to creep up. And then over the horizon comes my car, in a cloud of dust, and I come. And I whip right up in front of the camera, and I screech to a halt. And as the dust clears, I lean out the window in my wig and I say, 'I ain't done yet.'" So we might do it this summer. You might? Of course I will. What? You have to film that. That sounds great. Coming up, sticking around after the break, is that a heroic act? A [? can do ?], starring the Montgomery Bus Boycott. We are pro and con-- well, mostly con actually. When we return 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. If you're just tuning in today, we are talking about reruns, personal reruns. We've arrive at Act 2 of our program. Act Two, Marriage As Rerun. And let us begin this act with this scene of people stuck in personal reruns. A scene, I would bet, that you have probably been in yourself at one point or another. Carmen and Candido were out just the other night with a friend. And Carmen started telling a story about her nephew, Nikko. And as soon as I say, well, when Nikko was three years old, one Sunday. Candido rolls his eyes. See, the problem is, that I heard this story like 1,000 times. And I can't sit through it again. Carmen tells the story the exact same way all the time. Because it's very funny. She should embellish it for me. Now, Candido, are there stories that you tell over and over? No. That's not true. I don't. That's so not true. Yes friends, it is a fact of married life, one that is almost never discussed, that being married, being in any couple for more than one night, I would argue, means hearing the same stories over and over from your partner, possibly for the rest of your life. But have you noticed that of all the stories that could get told in front of each other, only certain stories do get told? Well, to understand the taxonomy of this, the ins and outs of this phenomenon, I spoke with three couples. We begin with Carmen and Candido. There is a story that he tells about the day that he got hurt on the subway and strangers came to his aid. They live in New York City. And this story comes up in any conversation where it might be necessary to prove the point that New Yorkers are not cold hearted but, in fact, helpful and kind to each other. There are the stories that she tells about her nephew Nikko, which come up on when the topic of kids doing adorable things enters a conversation with her friends, usually with friends who have kids. And then there's the graduation story. Whenever they're talking about embarrassing moments, I guess this is the one that gets told a lot. It comes up. Our mother's stories. Our mother's story. So should I tell my graduation story? Candido rolled his eyes. What happens in this story? Yeah, tell me the story. OK, my mother was a teacher. She's now a principal. And she has that personality. Which is great. Very loving but very-- she's an Aries. Aggressive-- So I went to Catholic school, and when I was graduating from eighth grade, we had our our graduation in the church, in the school's church. And [INAUDIBLE] of those Instamatic Kodak cameras. And she didn't advance the film when my name was called. And I went up there, and I received my diploma, and she didn't get a shot of that. So she goes, go back up there. I was like, mom, you are not making me go back up there. Oh my God. Yeah, completely. In the church, in front of everybody, go back up there right now. I was like, mommy, they're calling other people. And she said, "Father Bradley!" to the priest who was giving the diplomas out. Wait, she calls out from the audience? Well, she left her seat, and went up toward the altar. She's by the altar. And she goes, "Father Bradley, just hold on. Go back up there. Go back up there right now." Father Bradley posed, and she took the picture. And she goes, "OK, thank you. Oh, my baby!" And hugging me. Everybody is staring at me. And what I love about that moment, when I think about it, is that my mom didn't care what other people thought. Exactly. I've probably heard this story 20 or 25 times. (SUBJECT) JOHN HODGMAN I would guess that she's probably heard it six to eight times. It seems like a lot. (SUBJECT) JOHN HODGMAN I think she thinks it's pretty funny. This is our second couple, John and Catherine, who've known each other since high school. The story in question happened when they were both 21, both briefly living in England. It's a drinking story to be told while drinking about a night of drinking. John was the one who was drunk in the story. He was young. He was working lousy jobs. He was absolutely bored. So there was a lot of drinking in his life. (SUBJECT) JOHN HODGMAN It was around this time that I also started doing some very low-key shoplifting. And I would take like a pack of gum, or like an onion. And this was very thrilling to me. So one night John's friend Charles and another friend suggested they break into the London Zoo. Which at that time turned out to be surprisingly easy to do. They simply hopped over a low iron wrought fence. Once inside, they spotted a pool, with penguins sleeping all around it, right there behind a wall so low that you just step over it. (SUBJECT) JOHN HODGMAN Yeah, it was exciting, because I'd always liked penguins. I've now learned that they are kind of shifty and mean and also harbingers of doom. I simply stepped over the wall, and I walked down and walked up to a sleeping penguin. Apparently they are diurnal creatures, and they sleep at night. And this one was not very happy about being woken up, because I petted him a little, and he bit me on the finger. It was not a major wound, but it was a token of bad things to come. I have to say, as a symbolic moment, it's a good one. Because something cute has suddenly become deeply un-cute. (SUBJECT) JOHN HODGMAN You find penguins cute? What are you talking about? Everyone finds penguins cute. (SUBJECT) JOHN HODGMAN I look at them differently now. It would be like a teddy bear biting you or something. (SUBJECT) JOHN HODGMAN Yeah, teddy bears are actually stuffed animals. But as an expert on penguin behavior, you're right, it is very unusual. What follows turns out to be one of those sprawling stories that takes 45 minutes to tell. So I will choose just a few highlights for you here. There is the run-in with the police. No story like this is complete without the run-in with the police. John is the only one caught. He's questioned. He's taken to jail. He does not tell them his real name. He does not rat out his friends. He tries to act tough with the cops. (SUBJECT) JOHN HODGMAN They were all laughing at me and saying, what were you doing? Are you Marlin Perkins or something? And they said, "OK, empty your pockets." Now, I had been smart in a way that I haven't been in a long time. Before we went to the zoo, I decided, somewhat presciently, that it would be a good idea for me to not have any identification with me. So I didn't bring my wallet or my keys or my ID. But I did have an onion in my pocket. Which really kind of stopped everyone for a very long moment. It was the only thing that I had. And they said, "What is that for?" And I said, "To feed the animals?" And they seemed to enjoy that. And I kind of thought that this couldn't go on for much longer. But they decided to put me in a cell for a while. An on and on, you get the idea. What's strikingly fascinating about hearing his wife, Catherine, tell this same story is that after hearing it at least 20 times-- Well, you'll hear. They had a good time for a while, and then, at some point, they were in the pig pen. And I don't know, they knew somehow that the police were there. Isn't funny that I am not really sure how this transpired? Do what animal bit John? A pig. OK, that's not right. You're kidding? Nope, it's not a pig. I thought he was in the pig pen. And there's this whole thing where he's like, the pig is licking my ear. Nope. Not the pig. Was the pig licking Charles's ear? You barely have this story. You barely know this story. I know. I do barely know this story. Do you think that I barely listen? Maybe I don't listen any more? The part that she actually does remember every time she tells it is the part where he's in jail. She says it brings out some sort of maternal feeling in her. She just can't stand the thought of him going through that. What they're both clear on is why this is the story that John has told over and over for more than a decade. Here is John explaining. (SUBJECT) JOHN HODGMAN I think that the story, it's a version of myself that seems a little reckless, adventurous, quick-witted, but also ultimately humiliated by my own overreach. Have you noticed that there's certain people that all the stories they tell, they are triumphant, and then other people, all the stories that they tell about themselves, they are humiliated. (SUBJECT) JOHN HODGMAN See, I think a good drinking story contains both. Both that heroic aspect and that completely de-clothed, humiliated, embarrassed aspect as well. When I was talking to him about it, I asked him, why is this the story that gets told over and over? And he said, that a really good story like this should be something where the person telling the story both appears as a hero and then as an idiotic fool. [LAUGHTER] Well, where's the hero part? Which brings us to our last couple, Robert and Tamar. They also have a story that gets repeated in their house that has been the source of a small difference in interpretation between them. It's a story they both tell. Though him more than her, you get feeling. They don't tell the story the same way. And we will start with her version of the story. The first thing you need to know about this story is that I am totally celebrity blind, just completely. So much of my life with Robert has been wandering around New York and him saying, oh, look you were sitting next to Candice Bergen. And I'd say, no I wasn't. And he's always right, and I'm always wrong. So I'm really pleased one day. I'm out all by myself in the world, and I'm on the East Side, and I'm walking down Madison Avenue. And I see someone, and I know-- me the celebrity blind person-- I know absolutely for sure, for sure that this person across the street is Jackie Kennedy. And not only is it Jackie Kennedy, but she's looking at me. And she has her hand up when I smile at her. OK, let's stop that right there. Before she gets too far, here is Robert's interpretation of the same event. Their interviews were recorded separately. It's a beautiful, beautiful fall day. And we're walking down Fifth Avenue. The Central Park is on our right. I just picture this very, very precisely. And we're walking along, and Tamar is distracted. She looks over her left shoulder, and she goes [SOUND OF SURPISE]. There I see, across the street, Jackie Onassis, President Kennedy's wife, and she's waving, very modestly, at Tamar. You've probably noticed the key differences already. He says that they're together. She says that she's alone. He says, next to Central Park. She says, Madison Avenue. But once she spots Jackie O, the stories fly in tandem for a while. She has her hand when I smile at her, and she waves at me. And I thought, oh my God. I didn't know that they knew each other, whatever. And I'm looking at Tamar, and Tamar's looking at Jackie Onassis. And I'm so excited. And I wave back sort of tentatively, but beaming, beaming, beaming. And she waves back more so. I then wave back with my whole, whole heart. So I'm just staring at this in wonder. And then Jackie raises her hand even more excitedly and starts sort of moving it back and forth and back and forth. And I'm waving, and beaming, and I'm so happy and proud. And in that moment, a cab pulls up alongside Jackie Onassis. And what Jackie Onassis had actually been doing is just waving for a cab. And my wife, by mistake, somehow thought that Jackie was waving at her and is feeling really stupid. And so I'm really, pretty humiliated. As am I. Because many people had been looking at Jackie Kennedy and many people had been looking at me making a fool of myself, waving, waving, waving, waving. And so we laugh about it, and we head downtown. So we laugh about it, and we head downtown. Now that is where his version of the story ends, a moment of love, a moment of togetherness. Tamar's version of the story continues. In her version, she comes home. Remember, she experienced the whole thing alone in her version. She comes home, and she tells Robert what happened to her. Weeks later, in her version, they are at somebody's house for dinner, and Robert just launches into his version of the story, the version that you just heard. As we leave that house, I say, you know Robert, you weren't there. And he said, "No. But I remember it, I can picture it, I can see it so clearly." And I say, "But you weren't there." She says that I wasn't there. Which is astonishing to me. I mean, this is like I can feel this on my skin. I have told this story with such vividness because I remember it so vividly. I just remember things. Like things, like the way the sun was catching leaves. I remember turning around. I remember the intake of breath and the surprise. I remember all the little things going on in my mind . How do they know each other? Oh my God. She said, I wasn't there. I was never there. But she told it to me, and I, just simply, sort of like Ghengis Khan or Alexander the Great I occupied it. Like it was real estate that I wanted to be part of, so I just marched in and became part of it. Do you believe her, that you weren't in it? Yeah. Yeah. Because I live, as all married people do, in a courthouse. And the jury, upon deliberating about this, said, this particular witness has proven over the years a complete-- and she is very, very believable. A credible witness has testified. And you sir? Over the years, we have formed our own opinions about you. Judgment to the wife. So now it's become a shared story. Wait, wait, and he'll tell it, and in his version, he's in the story? In this version he has his view of what happened, but he says, but actually Tamar says I wasn't there. Well thank you to all of our couple's, Carmen Rivera and Candido Tirado, John and Catherine Hodgman, and finally Tamar Lewin and Robert Krulwich. Robert? Yeah. If the story about Jackie Kennedy is true, you be able to tell me what she was wearing. Yeah, oh yeah. She was wearing a suit. She's wearing a suit, it had white buttons, and it had a collar, and it was a skirt, and I couldn't see her feet. But I remember that she had white buttons. You know where the buttons are attached to the garment, the stitching was black. OK, you were too far away to see that. Yeah, exactly. I never stopped to wonder about the zoom lens that I apparently had handy at that time. Act 3, Reruns At The Back Of The Bus. But we are a nation that keeps re-running for ourselves a certain story about ourselves and about Rosa Parks. Not only ago there was even a small bit of controversy when the movie Barbershop chose to depart from the official fable that we usually tell ourselves. Well, Sarah Vowell has been watching the trend carefully wherever it appears. According to Reuters, on January 20, 2001 in Washington DC, the special guest at the Florida State inaugural ball was introduced by the country singer Larry Gatlin. He said, in France it was Joan of Arc, in the Crimea it was Florence Nightingale, in the deep South there was Rosa Parks, in India there was Mother Teresa, and in Florida there was Katherine Harris. I leave it to my Indian, Crimean, and French colleagues to determine how the Florida Secretary of State is or is not similar to Teresa, Florence, or Saint Joan. As for Rosa Parks, Katherine Harris can get in line. Because people around here can't stop comparing themselves to Parks. To wit, the Mayor of Friendship Heights Maryland has proposed an outdoor smoking ban because, according to the Washington Post, citizens with asthma or other illnesses cannot have full access to areas where smokers are doing their evil deed. The mayor compares this horrific possibility to Rosa Parks being sent to the back of the bus. A California dairy farmer, protesting the government's milk pricing system, poured milk down a drain in front of TV cameras claiming that he had to take a stand just like Rosa Parks had to take a stand. A street performer in Saint Augustine, Florida is challenging a city ordinance that bans him from doing his act on the town's historic Saint George Street. The performers lawyer told the Florida Times-Union, telling these people they can exercise their first amendment rights somewhere other than on Saint George is like telling Rosa Parks that she has to sit in the back of the bus. Which is, coincidentally, also the argument of another Florida lawyer. This one representing adult dancers contesting Tampa's ordinance outlawing lap dancing. I would also like to mention the rocker, marksman, and conservative activist Ted Nugent who, in his autobiography, God, Guns, and Rock and Roll, refers to himself as Rosa Parks with a loud guitar. Which is so inaccurate. Everyone knows he's more like Mary Matalin with a fancy deer rifle. Call me picky, but breathing secondhand smoke, being subject to unfair dairy pricing, and not being able to mime or lap dance, though they are all tragic, tragic injustices, are not quite as bad as the systematic segregation of public transportation based on skin color. And while fighting for your right to lap dance and mime, and breathe just the regular pollution and not the cigarette smokers, is a very fine, very American idea, it is not quite as brave as being a middle-aged black woman in Alabama in 1955 telling a white man she's not giving him her seat despite the fact that the law requires her to do so. And oh, by the way, in the process, she gets arrested. And then sparks the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which is the seed of the Civil Rights Movement as we know it. The Bus Boycotters not only introduced a 26-year-old pastor by the name of Martin Luther King junior into national public life, but after many months of car pools, walking, and court fights against bus segregation, got the separate-but-equal doctrine declared illegal once and for all. It's not just the people on the right, like Katherine Harris and Ted Nugent, who seem especially silly being likened to Parks. I first cringed at this analogy trend at the lefty Ralph Nader's October 2000 campaign rally in Madison Square Garden. Ever sit in a coliseum full of people who think they're heroes? I was surrounded by thousands of well meaning well fed white kids who loved it when the filmmaker Michael Moore told them they should, like Rosa Parks, stand up to power. : What if Rosa Parks had said to herself, I'm the only person on this bus, I can't win? I'm afraid. By which I think he meant, vote for Nader so he could qualify for federal matching funds. I think I'm a fine enough person. By the very next morning I was having people over for waffles. But I hope I'm not being falsely modest by pointing out that I'm no Harriet Tubman and I'm certainly no Rosa Parks. As far as I'm concerned, about the only person in recent memory who has an unimpeachable right to compare himself to Parks is that Chinese student who stared down those tanks in Tiananmen Square. I was reminded of those Naderites watching a rerun of the sitcom Sports Night on Comedy Central. Dan, a television sportscaster played by Josh Charles, has been ordered by his network to make an on-air apology to viewers because he said in a magazine interview that he supports the legalization of marijuana. He stands by his opinion and balks at apologizing. His boss, Isaac, played by Robert Guillaume, agrees but tells him to do it anyway. Because this is television and this is how it's done. Yeah, well, sitting in the back of the bus was how it was done until a 42-year-old lady moved up front. I'm not very impressed with how things are done, Isaac. A few minutes later Isaac looks Dan in the eye and tells him-- Danny, you know I love you, don't you? Yeah. And because I love you, I can say this. No rich young white guy has ever gotten anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks. Got it? Yes, sir. Good. Finally, the voice of reason. Which, of course, was heard on a canceled network TV series airing on cable. Analogies give order to the world and solidarity. Pointing out how one person is like another is reassuring, less lonely. Maybe those who would compare their personal inconveniences to the epic struggles of history are just looking for company. And who wouldn't want to be in the company of Rosa Parks. On the other hand, perhaps people who compare themselves to Rosa Parks are simply arrogant, pampered nincompoops with delusions of grandeur who couldn't tell the difference between a paper cut and decapitation. In defense of Ted Nugent, the street performer, the mayor, the dairy farmer, the lap dancers, the Naderites, and a fictional sportscaster, I will point out that Katherine Harris is the only person on my list of people lamely compared to a civil rights icon who, at the very moment she was being compared to a civil rights icon, was actually being sued for massive voter disenfranchisement of people of color during the presidential election by the NAACP. Sarah Vowell is the author of the book, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, where her thoughts about Rosa Parks appear. Well, our program is produced today by Jonathan Goldstein and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, David Kastenbaum, and Starlee Kine. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Music help from Agoraphone. Special thanks today to Jeffrey Brown, author of the comic book Clumsy. Thanks to Jamie York and Doug Stone. The song, Could Be Worse had lyrics by Sarah Vowell and music by They Might Be Giants and featured Robin Goldwasser. It is not collected on the new They Might Be Giants CD-DVD set, Venue Songs. Our website, where you can get the free weekly podcasts, it's free, of our program. Where we do your Christmas shopping, send our brand new greatest hits double CD set, Stories Of Hope And Fear to someone you love-- www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Mr. Torey Malatia. He's been working on his John Wayne imitation, waiting for his big break, really. Here, listen. Well, let me tell you, something out there in TV land, I just made the tube, and it just tickles the heck right out of me. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life PRI Public Radio International
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Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe that before we go to war with any country, we have to agree as a nation on how to pronounce its name: I-rack E-rack, Irock, Errack. Let's get it together people. Have you heard this story? Back in July, a Democratic senator on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the nation's intelligence agencies for a report explaining just how much of a threat Saddam Hussein was. There are 13 different intelligence agencies in our country. And they were saying different things. So Senator Bob Graham from Florida asked for a report, which would look at all the data from all the agencies and come to one set of conclusions. If the Senate was going to have to vote on a war, it seemed important to have a clear sense of just how much danger Iraq posed or did not pose. He had to ask a few times. It got, actually, rather heated. It took a long time, so long that by October, the Senator accused the CIA of obstructionism for failing to get this information to the Senate. And then, finally, just a few days before the congressional vote on the war, he got his report. And when Senator Graham read this report and what it said, he thought it was so important that he asked the intelligence agencies to declassify some of its main conclusions so it could be released to the general public, which he says they agreed to do. But it seemed that what they had done is declassify those parts of the report which essentially supported the position that we ought to go to war with Iraq as a first priority. Other pieces of information and analysis which were in the report were not released. So he went back and asked for some of the other material-- the stuff that did not necessarily support the case for war-- to be declassified. And after a few days of wrangling, it finally was. And what it said was this-- and this is actually the part of the story that maybe you've heard if you pay close attention to the news. The intelligence community concluded that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat, that he probably would not use his weapons of mass destruction for the foreseeable future-- that was actually the exact phrase they used: for the foreseeable future-- unless we attacked and started to win a war against him. At which point, he probably would use his weapons of mass destruction. When Saddam Hussein reaches the conclusion that all is lost, that he is, in fact, about to be removed from power, at that point, he becomes the most dangerous. And that danger would be reflected in his use of weapons of mass destruction against the invading troops, on neighboring countries. And third, he would likely, 75% or greater chance, form alliances with terrorist groups in order to initiate terrorist attacks against the American people here at home. In other words, if we're going to war to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his weapons of mass destruction, going to war will actually cause the very thing that we're starting the war to prevent. Now it's not like this story didn't get any play. It was in the paper for a day or two. There were reports on radio and television. But then, after a couple of days, it just kind of dropped off the radar. And at this point, for a politician or for a member of the press to bring it up-- it's hard to bring it up without seeming like you're just out there on the fringe, like you're some kind of extremist, pinko, unpatriotic, like you're against the President, like you are picking a fight. In the weeks that followed that report coming out, I've sometimes thought about it as I've seen other news stories. And it always has this feeling of, did that really happen? Did that really happen? It's like this event which vanished off the face of the earth, never to be spoken of again. And if you ask Senator Graham, he says that he really thought that declassifying this material would have more impact on the debate over going to war with Iraq. Yes, I thought that this identification of the danger here in the homeland by an energized group of foreign terrorist agents would have caused us to say, let's reassess what our priorities are. And, in my judgment, such a reassessment would have led to the conclusion that the first thing we should do is to reduce, to the maximum extent possible, the capability of these terrorists who are sleeping among us. And once we had concluded that we had accomplished that objective, then turned to the issue of Iraq. Ira, let me ask you a question. Mm hm. I assume you have, or will be talking to people in the administration and asking them questions. Now, this kind of caught me off guard. At the end of our conversation, Senator Graham told me he had some questions of his own for the administration, that he would like for me to ask them about Saddam using his weapons of mass destruction against us. The question that I would ask is, do you have a different assessment of what the consequences of a successful war against Iraq would be than that which has been now made public by the US intelligence community? And then, what are you doing to deal with this potential threat against the people of the United States? And when you've gone to the administration, and when the committee has posed these questions, what have they told you all? It's just passive and non-responsive, essentially denial, that the most important thing to do now is to take down Saddam Hussein. And if that involves accepting some potential adverse consequences, so be it. So if I can just speak for myself and the staff of this radio program, we're confused. We still have some basic questions about why we're going to war and whether it's a good thing. And we are not alone. In fact, the staff of this radio show is squarely with the majority of Americans on this issue. A Los Angeles Times poll this week revealed that while most Americans support the idea of going to war, we like our president, most of us also feel that the President has not explained why we're doing this. 2/3 of Americans say that he has failed to make a convincing case that war with Iraq is justified. We're with him. We're rooting for him. But we don't know why. Here are some tourists from around the country at the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree in New York City. I have mixed feelings. I have more issues with bin Laden than I do with what's going on in Iraq. There's other ways to deal with the issue. I don't think that it's compelling enough to go to war. I haven't really decided yet. I think I'm for it. But I don't know the details. I have mixed feelings about it. I want to see proof that there indeed is a threat to the country. Today on our program, we step into the breach. We ask a few simple questions about the coming war and get some answers. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Each week, as you may know, we choose some theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Why We Fight. Our program in four acts. Act One, Senator's Proxy. In that act, we get some poor soul from the administration on the phone to answer Senator Graham's very loaded questions. Act Two, When Firas Comes Marching Home Again, in which we hear from an Iraqi soldier, who might have to fight the United States in the coming war, about what chances he thinks he has against the most powerful military in the history of man. Act Three, Realism 101. We think that it is possible that the most compelling arguments for the war and the most compelling arguments against the war are both arguments that you have not heard. Act Four, Kids' Letters to Santa-- excuse me-- to President Bush. Stay with us. Act One, Senator's Proxy. OK. Let's just say up front that we all take it for granted here that when a politician asks a reporter to go to his political opponent with a question, that is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Having said that, it seemed like a good question. And I have to say, after trying to get an answer from the administration, I understand Senator Graham's frustration. We tried calling five, yes five, different places within our Federal Government: the White House, the National Security Council, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Pentagon's new head of domestic counterterrorism. All of them had the very good sense to turn us down. And then, we remembered that President Bush had created an office for this very purpose, the Office of Homeland Security. There, we found somebody who kindly agreed to speak with us, namely-- Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security. Now, the intelligence community concluded in October that if we attack Saddam Hussein, if he's cornered, then he'd be likely to use his weapons of mass destruction, his chemical or biological weapons, on troops, on neighboring countries, or here in the United States. And it's that last possibility we wanted to talk to you about. It's of particular concern to Senator Bob Graham from Florida. And he had a question or two he wanted us to ask you. First of all, do you all have a different assessment of the consequences of cornering Saddam Hussein? Do you agree that he might strike here in the US if we start winning the war? Well, one, the President has made no decision about going to war, he says war is his last resort. Sure. But secondly, homeland security agencies will raise our protective measures and take the appropriate actions to address the threat. And is it the assessment still of the Office of Homeland Security-- do they agree with the intelligence community, back in October, that if we in fact do go to war, and if in fact we start winning, then the threat is greater here at home? That is an assessment for the intelligence community to make. And if intelligence suggests that Iraq is planning an attack, and we have information on it, we will respond to that. But if one is to take this intelligence assessment seriously, what do you want us to walk away from this with, those of us who've read this in the paper or have heard about this? Do you want us to believe, OK, if we go to war with Iraq, you guys have us covered? We don't need to worry? Or do you want us to think, if we go to war with Iraq, OK, we should all understand we're in a little bit more danger here? Well, I think that just remains to be seen. And what people need to be reassured is that if that leads to heightened concerns about threats and potential attacks, we will take the appropriate action to meet those threats. And how confident is the Department of Homeland Security that it could stop any threat? What our responsibility is to do is to take action to prevent and protect. And if, unfortunately, we are unable to do that, then we will respond to save as many lives as possible. Recently, we put together all the transactions, all the people that get visas, or all people that cross our borders, or fly into our airports, or containers that come in, and there are about 1.3 billion transactions a year where a terrorist or a terrorist weapon could come into this country. And we have to be right 1.3 billion times a year. And the terrorists only have to be right once. That does not sound very reassuring. Well, I think most people would agree, though, that this is a challenge, but that everyone is rising to this challenge. When I talked to Senator Graham, he raised this possibility. He wondered if it was the administration's position that you're prepared to accept whatever the consequences will be here in the United States, that it's more important to the country to eliminate Saddam Hussein, and that if some people should die in US cities as a result, well, we don't have a choice. That's the cost of war. Well, I would just say that the President's number one responsibility and number one job is protecting the American people. Right. But is it-- The President is not willing to give up lives, like you say, like Senator Graham says, almost kind of casually in the way that he couched it. And I just-- I take issue with that. Well, he was wondering if that was the administration's policy. Is it? No, it is not the administration's policy. The administration's policy is to protect Americans. Gordon Johndroe of the Office of Homeland Security. Act Two, When Firas Comes Marching Home Again. OK. We're going to continue asking basic questions from people in the United States about why we're going to war in just a few minutes, in Act Three. And we actually get some explanations that do explain it. But before we get to all of that, we wanted to hear some Iraqi perspectives on this. Though, if you've paid even the slightest attention to news reports, you know that it is very difficult for reporters to get anyone in Iraq to speak honestly about the regime or the coming war. They're too frightened of reprisals from the government. There is a huge population of Iraqis who come in and out of the country every day just over the border from Iraq in Jordan. There, they can speak more freely. And Adam Davidson talked to a few of them. If you want to get a sense of how many people are passing back and forth between Jordan and Iraq every day, you just need to go to the eastern part of Amman where there's this gigantic parking lot next to a big highway. The lot is filled with neatly lined up SUVs and Chevrolet Caprices-- the car used by taxi drivers and cops back in the States-- that drive every day, back and forth between Baghdad and Amman. It's hard to understand how they stay so clean. They're all white, except for these orange panels at each corner. They look brand new even though they drive 9 to 12 hours through the desert at least once a day, and often twice. These cars bring hundreds of Iraqi refugees here every day. There are about 150,000 of them in Amman right now, whole neighborhoods filled with nothing but Iraqis. The cars also smuggle cigarettes, family carpets and silverware, dates-- Iraq is famous for its dates-- anything of value. So most things coming from or going to Iraq spend some time in Amman, a lot of them in this parking lot. The first Iraqi I run into is Firas, a tall, elegant man in a jalabiya robe and a leather jacket. He sells cloth in Baghdad. And he came to Amman for a few days to meet up with his cousin who has been living abroad, saving money for the family back home in Iraq. Firas tells me he's a reserve soldier. He fought on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq war and the Persian Gulf War. And he knows he'll be called upon soon to fight the Americans. Have you had special training recently, in the last few months, for this American war? I didn't get any training in the last two years in the Iraqi Army, in any unit, or even any units I knew about from my friends, they didn't have any training in the last two years. But we have enough experience of fighting in the last 15, 20 years with Iran, with the Americans, the Gulf War. We are very well prepared, even without getting any experience or any training to refresh our army or the power of the Iraqi Army today. Have you gotten orders yet for this war? 3, 4 days before the war, usually, they call us to dress and to go to our units. And usually, we do that easily. So we go to the last unit that we served in. And we know where the location is of that. Easily, we can get into there. Now, what we're told in America is that the Iraqi Army-- I don't want to offend you-- but that it's weak right now. It doesn't have the training. It doesn't have the money. It doesn't have the support. And so we're told it will be a tough fight, but we're going to win it very easily. We know that America is a superpower now in the world. Nobody can fight America in the whole world. But what are we going to do? America is going to use the computer wars, and electronic wars, and very strong bombardments. And they will attack us. And they will kill us. But we have to defend ourselves. Do you see Iraqi soldiers preparing for the ground war in Baghdad or in your city? We've been in wars in the last 25 years. Do you understand what I mean by 25 years? Almost 2/3 of my age now, of my life. So the Iraqi Army, they're not really prepared for anything, because they are expecting that the Americans will kill them all, and they can't do anything against it. So this is the situation. I ask him if he thinks he'll die. His reply is what any Muslim might say, that we believe in Allah. We believe in death. Death will come now, or it will come later, Allah decides. I ask him if he'd like Americans to get rid of Saddam. And he tells me Saddam is bad. But whoever the Americans install could be worse. He doesn't expect any good leader to come to Iraq. Then, Firas says he has to go. He has to help his friend Adnan move some rugs. I ask if I can come along. And we walk a few hundred yards down the road. These rugs are at least 50 to 60-year-old rugs. So we usually buy them from Iraqi poor people who want to buy food, so they sell their rugs and their carpets. They have them at home. Adnan left Baghdad 10 months ago and now oversees this rug smuggling business. We're standing next to a store. I say store, it was really just an empty concrete room about the size of a small garage, packed floor to ceiling with rolled up rugs. Adnan and Firas watch five guys load them onto a truck heading to Saudi Arabia. Adnan invited us into his apartment. The house is three medium-sized concrete rooms with rugs everywhere. They sleep on rugs in the back. They sit on rugs in the living room, which is completely bare except for the rugs and one plastic chair. We sit, Adnan the rug merchant, Firas the soldier, and a bunch of young 18-ish Iraqi guys who never say a single word, but follow our conversation attentively. Then this Egyptian guy they're all friends with shows up. I want to talk with him about the coming war. But the Egyptian guy launches into all these ready-made speeches about how America wants to destroy Islam, how all Americans hate Arabs, hate Islam. I keep telling him that most Americans don't know anything about Arabs or Islam and don't really care. They just worry about their own lives. He doesn't believe me. When I look over at the Iraqis, they look completely bored. Finally, there's a break in the conversation. And I ask the Iraqis what they think. They tell me they don't care about these big issues. They don't care about Islam versus the West, about America's evil plans to destroy all Arabs. Those are just abstractions to them. They know that their homes might be bombed in a few weeks. And they seem genuinely curious to understand anything I can tell them about what Americans are thinking. Here's Firas, the soldier. What's all that issue about Saddam Hussein? Saddam Hussein, the Americans made him bigger than-- give him bigger than his-- his name is much bigger than his size. What does Saddam mean? He's very small. So he's nothing. So why? Americans know things that we don't know here? Firas is sure the guy is bad. But there are worse people, like the North Koreans. And I don't know what to say to him. So I stumble around like an idiot, trying to explain American foreign policy, which I honestly don't understand myself, to people whose families might be bombed-- another conversation you find yourself in with disturbing frequency around here. I mean, I find it very confusing myself. I think there are few-- George Bush-- it's very hard to fight-- Then Adnan, the rug merchant, tells me that most Iraqis he knows support a war. They want America to get rid of Saddam. But they're worried. He says, and I've heard this a lot, that the uprising against Saddam after the Gulf War was very real and widespread. And the Americans just abandoned them. We are with the Americans if they are true, if they're not going to change their mind now. We are with them 100%. But we are afraid. And Saddam is really preparing and now having groups of terrorists. And they are ready to attack the Americans, American soldiers, and American troops, and American civilians in most of the Arab countries during the war. This, of course, is exactly what American intelligence has been predicting since October. Adnan then, more or less, begs me to tell all of America about his best friend who was taken away by Saddam's Mukhabarat secret police and killed just because he started a home prayer group. Adnan tells me to use his real name and his friend's real name and to take his picture, things Iraqis usually won't do with the press, and which, in the end, I decided not to do. But Adnan is so sick and tired of the situation, he doesn't care what happens. He just wants the truth out. So Saddam Hussein is a man of violence. Saddam Hussein killed his people. Saddam Hussein used chemicals against his people. Saddam Hussein used biological against his people. So fear is the principle of our life today in Iraq. While he's saying this, Firas, the soldier, starts looking nervous. He's going back to Baghdad in a few days. And my guess is that he doesn't want to say anything that will get him in trouble. And so I turn to him. You don't want to talk about this stuff, do you? I've never heard of these things before. He looks directly in my eyes, smiling as he says this. Basically, you know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. Everyone knows what I'm doing. He adds that he's happy with Saddam, but he doesn't know what the other guys think. Saddam Hussein is such a peaceful man, he says. He doesn't even know he invaded Kuwait. [LAUGHTER] They're laughing, you know? Saddam Hussein didn't hear about his army invading Kuwait. [LAUGHS] He's a very peaceful person. There are so many Iraqis here, and they're so desperate. It's amazing who you meet and what they say to you. A couple days later, when Omar and I are walking around a different Iraqi neighborhood a young guy sees my microphone, comes up to us, and talks fast in Arabic. He says he was one of Saddam's personal bodyguards and would like to help the Americans kill him. He wants to talk to me, he says. But he can't do it in his neighborhood because people might turn him in to the Iraqis. I invite him to my hotel. And he comes along. He asked me not to use his real name, or his voice, for that matter. It's just too dangerous. So I'll call him Nabil. And you'll only hear Omar's translation. Nabil is a big guy, fat and tall. But he holds himself like an elite soldier. He sits in my room and tells me a lot about Saddam's palaces. He said that one of Saddam's palaces, Saddam's favorite, has a giant glass floor built on top of a huge aquarium with sharks and giant fish. Later, I check into this, and it's true. His life was great when he guarded Saddam. Saddam personally gave him a grand apartment. What was he like? Did you get to know him? Was he ever funny? Did you like him? It seems that Saddam Hussein has a special personality, unique personality. When you come to look at him on the TV, you come to hate him. For all the things that he made for the people, you come to hate him. But when you come close to him, and you just come one meter, two meters from him, you just change your mind. Different feelings usually come to your mind. Different feelings come to your body. Different feelings come to your eyes when you look at him. When you come very close to him, it seems that there is magic in this personality and in this man. Nabil quit the army when his term was over. And a few days later was arrested by the Mukhabarat, the secret police, and taken to a prison for divulging secrets about Saddam's palaces. He tells me that it wasn't true what he was accused of. It was trumped up. But still, they beat him with steel pipes, badly. He shows me his arm and forehead where the bones haven't healed properly. Half his teeth are bashed in and haven't been fixed. He says that he was in jail for weeks and finally was released, but was then told by a friend that he was targeted for death. So he escaped to Amman. He said he was always a healthy man, but now he just smokes and drinks coffee and thinks of ways to kill Saddam. You said you want to help the Americans. Have you tried to make contact with the Americans? I'm always scared, because I don't know if the Mukhabarat are watching me now or not. I don't know when they're going to kill me. I don't know whom I have to contact. But if anybody wants to use me-- and for sure I know everything. I know where are all the weapons are that they took from Kuwait, where it is now. And I know where the stores are, where they store it, in the north, and the south, and in the center of Iraq. Of course, there's no way to tell if he's credible or not without going into Iraq and doing inspections. So Hans Blix, here's what he's got. He told me there are weapons of mass destruction. And they're sitting in giant, movable bunkers under the sand dunes in a suburb of Tikrit. He didn't want money or any special privileges. He just wanted to talk to somebody. The next day, I go to the Iraqi Embassy in Amman, because part of the reason why I'm here is that I'm trying to get into Baghdad like all the other reporters. In the past two weeks, I've probably spent 30 hours at the embassy waiting to get a visa. Usually, a bunch of US reporters sit in a clump in the lobby, and nobody talks to us. But that day, an old man came up to me and my translator and said he'd like to tell us things about Saddam. I told him he shouldn't be talking to me in the embassy. And he agreed to meet us the next night. So the next night, my translator, Omar, and I pick him up at a gas station in a poor Iraqi neighborhood and take him to Omar's house. He tells me he was a famous dancer in Iraq. He has that sort of regal, straight-backed dancer's presence. He says he used to be in charge of several major theaters. And every year, he put on the big birthday celebration for Saddam. He met the man several times and had a very nice life. Then, his brother was killed for being loyal to one of Saddam's opponents, and the dancer came under suspicion. They beat me in the minister's office. And then, they called the Mukhabarat intelligence. And they took me in a van. And three people, they beat me until we arrived at the police station. And after that, I was in the Mukhabarat. There, I couldn't sleep for more than 30 days. They put me in a small prison, one meter by one meter. I couldn't realize if it's dark or light, if it's night or day. And I stayed there for three years. His story doesn't get any better. Not only did they constantly beat him, but they cut his right ear in half, broke his legs, his arms, his hands, and put knives in his back. One day, he says, Saddam's son, Uday, came by and oversaw the torture. At one point, he made the man take off all his clothes and told him, you're a dancer. You have to dance now. Yes, of course, they cut all his fingers. They broke all my fingers. They look like they've been broken, yeah. The nails. They took the nails, yeah. He just pulled his fingers to show how they pulled it. And you can see that his nails are not put-- you can see that his nails are not-- they're scarred all around. God, it's so upsetting to look at his hands. It's just so upsetting looking at him. His hands are just-- they look like they were broken and put back together. After he left prison, he went to find his wife and discovered that she had been taken and killed because she screamed bad things about Saddam in the street after he was arrested. Then, his six-year-old son died from some untreated illness. The man is now homeless and told me he was walking the streets, begging for money when he came upon the Iraqi Embassy. He decided to just go in, sit down, and wait for someone to arrest him and kill him. He says that's when he saw us and decided to stay alive a little bit longer. Maybe our interview would help somehow. At one point, he pulled out an article about himself from eight years ago, just eight years ago. I thought it was 30 years old. In the picture, he looks so young and happy and healthy, standing proudly in front of a group of his dance students. And he started to beat me. The old man spoke softly, calmly, crying a little bit every now and then. And while he talked, my translator, Omar's, eyes were wet. He could barely speak the words. If I could say a word about what it's been like to talk to all these people, I came to the middle east thinking this war that's coming is a terrible thing. I still don't really understand why we're doing it. But I feel sick. I really, actually have had a stomach ache this whole week talking to these Iraqis, hearing what Saddam Hussein has done to his people. One woman sobbed as she told me about her son who was killed because he wouldn't fight in the Persian Gulf War. A middle-aged man explained how members of the regime took food from his grocery store until he protested, and they beat him and threw him in jail for a year. Now, he sits in a room all day in Amman with his wife and six kids, because he's too afraid he'll be deported back to Iraq where he'd be killed. After talking to all these Iraqi exiles, I want Saddam Hussein to die. I asked pretty much every Iraqi if they fantasize about life after Saddam, if they ever think, wow, in three or four months, he might be dead, my country might be free? Not one said they think about it. They're too tired. And Saddam Hussein has been there for so long, they just can't imagine life without him. I just hope we do the right thing, that if there's a war, whatever ruler ends up running Iraq is a good man. Adam Davidson in Amman, Jordan. Coming up, Dear Mr. President, my birthday is November 12. And I'll be 15, so if you are president, you'll get me something, and other kids' letters to George Bush in this time of war. 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, Why We Fight, stories trying to understand the coming war with Iraq, or should I say, the likely war with Iraq? We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Realism 101. All right. Right now the administration is throwing around a number of arguments for the war, which I'm guessing are familiar to all of us at this point: Iraq's links to Al Qaeda, Iraq breaking a lot of UN resolutions, the ever popular, Saddam tried to kill my daddy. But at its heart, the case comes down to the idea that it is only a matter of time before Saddam Hussein gets a nuclear weapon. And when he does, it'll be a disaster for us and for the world. Well it turns out that the most interesting, and maybe the most compelling argument against the war in Iraq hasn't actually gotten a lot of attention in the public debate, in Congress or in the media. And one of the things that's interesting about the argument is that it does not come from a bunch of lefty peaceniks. No, no, no, it comes from a group of foreign policy experts who look at the tough guys in the administration and think they are not tough enough. It's a school of thinking called the Realists. Back in September, a journalist named Nicholas Lemann wrote an article in The New Yorker magazine explaining the Realists, which is how we heard of them. Within the foreign policy world, these arguments against war are totally in circulation, and they're talked about a great deal. In the wider world, where politicians say things to the public, the case against the war is still not really in circulation. And it looks like it may never be. What we're going to do now is run through some of the arguments that are put forward by the Realists, which are pretty convincing. And then, we're going to hear some of the arguments against them, which I have to say, are also pretty convincing. And we're going to do all this because a lot of this just has not been in general circulation. When I was doing the interviews for this story, I was constantly surprised at what I was hearing from both sides. And I'm guessing that might be true for you also. OK. So let's start. To give you a sense of just how different the Realists are from everyone else in the public debate, you can just start with this: Pretty much every politician, every commentator on television and radio, every mainstream voice out there accepts as a given that there should be a war on terror. As Nicholas Lemann points out, the war on terrorism has framed the way that we all think about these things. It's entered the language. We take it for granted. At this point, it just seems like the logical, inevitable response to the September 11 attacks to most everyone, except the Realists. They oppose the War on Terror. I'll say that again. They oppose the War on Terror. And they oppose it on practical grounds. They think it's ill conceived. And they think it won't work. I think he should have declared a narrow war on Al Qaeda. To declare war on terror defines a war on a whole lot of groups out there in the world, a lot of whom have never taken a swing at the United States, don't intend to take a swing at the United States. We need to keep our eye on the ball and not get distracted. This is Stephen Van Evera, a specialist in international affairs and security issues at MIT. When you say you're going to war with terror that means, hey, who's your enemy out there? The FARC in Colombia, and the terrorists in China, Chechnya, you name it. We don't need more enemies. We need to focus on the danger we face. And how's the War on Terror going? Poorly. It's going poorly if you look at objective measures. Al Qaeda is still out there. They're still strong. They're still able to land a big punch. We've only caught about 40% of their top leaders, which is a disaster 15 months into the war. The CIA warns us that they're as capable as they were before 9/11, that the threat they pose is as large as it was before 9/11. So if you look at it objectively, we're not doing well. Are you worried? Are you frightened by the focus on Iraq at the expense of Al Qaeda? Yes, I am. I am unsold on this war in Iraq. I think Saddam's a horrible fellow, and a nasty guy, and a threat, but Al Qaeda poses a much more serious threat. When it comes to Iraq, the Realists not only point out all the practical problems with the war-- that it might lead to huge problems in Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons that could end up in the wrong hands, that we could bungle the occupation after we win. What they see in Afghanistan, they do not find encouraging. But beyond that, they question the central reason for the war. And again, they do it on grounds that have not gotten a lot of attention publicly. The administration's central argument, as you know, is that we have to stop Saddam Hussein before he gets nuclear weapons. The Realists say, if he gets nuclear weapons, so what? So what? I believe that Iraq, even if it had weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, would not be able to do very much with those weapons. That's Steven Walt from Harvard, another Realist. And the reason it can't is because it cannot threaten to use them without facing retaliation from the United States or from others. There's good historical evidence suggesting that Saddam Hussein, like other dictators before him, can easily be contained and deterred. If you look at the historical record, this is a government that has only used force when they were vulnerable, when they were feeling threatened, and, most importantly, when they felt their opponents were isolated. So if you go back to the Iran-Iraq war, this is a case where the Iranians were the aggressors, were actively trying to overthrow the Iraqi regime, and yet were also isolated and appeared to be vulnerable. So he fought. Similarly, the Gulf War, the invasion of Kuwait, they had serious financial problems. The Kuwaitis were playing various games with oil quotas that were helping keep Iraq weak and vulnerable. And most importantly, we gave them, I think, an inadvertent green light, the famous April Glaspie interview where she says, we, the United States, have no interest in inter-Arab disputes, such as the border dispute between Kuwait and Iraq. She was a US ambassador in the region that-- That's correct. She was the US Ambassador in Baghdad. And I don't think we intended to signal him that we weren't interested in Kuwaiti security. But that is, in effect, what we did. The lesson of the Gulf War is not that he can't be deterred. It's that we didn't even try to deter him. OK. Let's just stop that tape right there. As you've probably noticed, this is a very different Saddam Hussein than we're used to hearing about. He's not a madman. He's not hell-bent on territorial expansion and bullying other countries around. He's rational-- rational enough to heed warnings from others. And Stephen Walt knows that all of this sounds just a little bit funny to basically any civilian like you and me that he ever talks to about this. I don't mean to be an apologist for Saddam Hussein at all. He is in fact a brutal despot. But if you look at his foreign policy conduct, like many despots in the past, such as Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, he's actually quite concerned with his own personal survival and quite concerned with the survival and security of his regime. That has made him actually relatively prudent in using force. The other point to note is, this is a man who's never used weapons of mass destruction against anyone who could retaliate. He used them against the Iranians who had no such weapons themselves. And he used them against the Kurdish population in Iraq, also a group that couldn't retaliate. He's never tried to use weapons of mass destruction against us, against the Israelis, against the Saudis. I saw in something you wrote that you quoted some of his generals, who said the reason why chemical and biological weapons weren't used during the Persian Gulf War was precisely because he had been warned, and he didn't want to allow for retaliation. That's correct. We sent a very explicit message, I believe in a letter from Secretary of State James Baker, communicated through the Iraqi Foreign Minister, that if they were to use weapons of mass destruction against us, we would not limit ourselves to retaliation in kind. I forget the exact wording. But it was an unmistakable threat, which the Iraqis seem to have heeded. And some Iraqi officials have said our warning was part of the reason why they didn't use it. All right. You still with me here? Now, remember, I said that we were going to get to the arguments against the Realists. And we looked for the most convincing spokesman for the other side. And we were lucky enough to get our very first pick, Kenneth Pollack, who was a Persian Gulf military analyst for seven years at the CIA, including during the Persian Gulf War, and after that, for the National Security Council under President Clinton. He's now at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He's written a book called The Threatening Storm: the Case for Invading Iraq. And when I recited to him the Realist case, chapter and verse, that Saddam Hussein could be deterred from using a nuclear weapon, he nearly sputtered. He honestly did not know where to begin. Boy, we're going to be here a while. The arguments that they're mustering are based on simply incorrect information. Their understanding of Saddam Hussein's decision making is just deeply flawed. We know a huge amount about Saddam's decision making in some of these cases. And it simply doesn't square with their arguments-- for example, the invasion of Kuwait. Good idea. Let's start with the invasion of Kuwait. Pollack disputes even the basic facts that the Realists offer on this. He says that we know now that Saddam had decided to invade before the American Ambassador indicated to him, inadvertently, that we wouldn't fight back. He says that we know now that Saddam did not attack Kuwait as some kind of modest, rational act of aggression, but as the first step in a larger plan of his to becoming a kind of superpower. Even before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam was already saying, the demise of the Soviet Union leaves the world badly unbalanced. Iraq has to become a new superpower to be able to stand up to the United States. Seizing Kuwait, as best we understand it, was part of that plan. And we know this through his speeches, through-- Through his speeches, through Iraqis who've come out of Iraq, through even sources inside of Iraq who've all reported on this. In your view, did deterrents work when the United States warned him against using chemical or biological weapons during the Persian Gulf War, and then it turned out that he didn't? We really don't know. And it's important to remember that James Baker, the Secretary of State, went to Saddam with three deterrent threats, which were, don't use weapons of mass destruction, don't conduct terrorist attacks, and don't light the Kuwaiti oil fields on fire. And if you do, we will do bad things to you. And it was unspecified consequences, very severe consequences. And it was the same statement for all three of those threats. Well, Saddam did light the Kuwaiti oil fields on fire. And he did engage in terrorist attacks and tried to attack the United States homeland. Wait. What are the terrorist attacks you're talking about? In 1991, during the Gulf War, Saddam launched a wave of terrorist attacks against the United States. They all failed. Now, we checked into this story, and it does seem to be true. There's a CIA counterterrorism guy out there who has written about it. Saddam did not heed our deterrent threats. He did launch attacks against the US during that war, which is exactly the point, Pollack says. Saddam will not be deterred. Now, beyond that, one of the things that we learned after the Gulf War-- and, I think, was a very frightening thing for myself and many of my colleagues in the government to find out-- was that Saddam apparently concluded after the Gulf War that his biggest mistake during the Gulf War was not that he should never have invaded Kuwait, but that he should have waited to invade Kuwait, that he should have waited until he had a nuclear weapon. Because, he apparently believes, if he has a nuclear weapon, it is the United States that will be deterred, not him. Now, how do we know this? How do we know he thinks this? We know it from a variety of different sources, including Iraqis who are close to Saddam, and also through a variety of technical means. Technical means, means listening in, spying in various ways? Exactly. I'm guessing this must be how it goes when you talk to any former CIA guy. He tells you incredible things that explain so much about what your government is thinking and where policies come from, and then, as soon as you ask for details or evidence, he can't tell you. They're secret. Kenneth Pollack was able to explain, though, why so many US policymakers fear Saddam could not be deterred from using a nuclear bomb, if he ever got one, in a way that made it very, very clear. He says, imagine Saddam Hussein decided to threaten the country of Jordan. And what Saddam could conceivably threaten to do is, if you come and try to stop me from moving into Jordan, I will use nuclear weapons on regional targets. Israel, if you come after me, I will use them on Dimona. United States, if you come after me, I will use them against the Saudi oil fields. And then, the question becomes for the United States, do we want to dare Saddam? And why isn't Saddam in the same position, though, that the Soviet Union would be? If he were to use his nuclear weapon, he knows the United States would just come in and blow him up? Well, again, this is the problem with Saddam's thinking. As best we understand it, he is not making the same calculation that the Soviets did. And just so I understand the logic that would be behind what Saddam is thinking, his thinking is the United States would be faced with this choice: Are we going to drop a bomb on Baghdad and kill hundreds of thousands of people? And the United States, when faced with that choice, would blink. We wouldn't want to do that? Correct. Again, that is our understanding of Saddam's thinking. I have to say, in a way, I feel like I understand that. It is hard to imagine the United States dropping a nuclear bomb on a city right now. Imagine a scenario where Saddam is basically saying, if you stop me from going into Jordan, or Kuwait, or wherever the country may be, I'm going to blow up the Saudi oil fields. And your only response is to nuke the city of Baghdad, with 5 million innocent people. Let me put it this way. As a former US policymaker, that is not the kind of choice that I ever want to be in. So where are you and I supposed come down on this? What should we believe? Could Saddam Hussein be deterred from using a nuclear weapon or not? Or maybe that's not even the right question in the end. You know, it's not really about keeping Saddam from getting nuclear capacity. That's not the central reason for doing this, I think. Or it's a reason, but not the only reason. Again, Nicholas Lemann, from The New Yorker. I think there's a sense in the conservative world that the nuclear threat is the argument most likely to sell with the public, but isn't the only reason to do this. The other reasons to do this, Lemann says, are right there if you talk to the Hawks, or if you read what they wrote before they took office. First, it's doable. We're going after Saddam Hussein not because he's so strong, but, in essence, because he's so weak. The Hawks see him as easy to defeat, compared with say, North Korea. And they believe that they can change the political climate in the Middle East through a show of force. People in the administration are fond of quoting Bernard Lewis, the eminent historian, who has been down and briefed people at the White House and so on. And they will quote him saying, Arab culture, in particular, respects strength and shows of force. It's a warrior culture. So if you invade a country like Iraq and win, rather than that inflaming the Middle East, it will quiet the Middle East, because people will respect you more. This, in a way, was the most surprising scenario I heard from anyone, Lemann's summary of how the Hawks imagine all of this could work in the end. Well, I think this is the scenario. First thing that happens is, we would set up some kind of permanent or semi-permanent military base or presence in Iraq. We could get rid of the Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia and make Iraq the United States' military base of operations. It's a nice central location in the Middle East. Second of all, having a friendly government there and having a steady supply of oil from the Iraqi oil fields would make us much less dependent on Saudi oil. And that's a good thing, because then you get more leverage with the Saudis. So here's some of the ways it would play out, according to the Hawks. First of all, the government of Iran would fall to some of these kind of student protest groups or other reform groups. Because the student groups would see, oh, look, there's been change in Iraq. We want a more secular society, more modern society. Yes. And they'd be getting heavy encouragement and funding from the United States. Syria is another country where the Hawks very clearly want to see the government fall, and believe that it may well fall in the wake of a successful US invasion of Iraq. Then, I think, what they'd like to have happen is the two really big countries in the Middle East that are our friends, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, we could go to them and have very serious and soulful conversations with the governments, in which we say, we want a little better behavior out of you guys. We want you to really crack down on the Islamists. We don't want any more movies of protocols of the Elders of Zion on Egyptian television. We want you to move toward allowing opposition parties, including secular parties. Just kind of put the lid on the tide of Islamist extremism in your country. And if you don't, expect there to be negative consequences that will be short of military invasion, but painful to you from us, the United States. I feel like everything you're saying, at some point or another during the last six months, I've read in a kind of shorthand. And I feel like this is the first time I'm hearing somebody lay the whole thing out: This is why we're going to war. I think this is why we're going to war, yes. I do think so. I mean, I think we are going to war. And I don't think it's not about weapons of mass destruction and the idea that Saddam might acquire nuclear weapons. And I don't think it's irrelevant that he's a brutal, totalitarian dictator who has murdered his own people. But I really think the primary goal here is to try to use this as an opening into a remaking of the Middle East. Nicholas Lemann. You can read his article about all this called, "The War on What?" online at The New Yorker magazine website. [MUSIC-"READY TO DIE" BY ANDREW W.K.] Act Five, Who Cares? Well, it's been a heady hour of radio. And we have to admit, it's Christmas. While we all may have nagging fears about the War against terror, or the war against Iraq, or the war against whatever, we all have a lot of other things on our minds. And if you have any doubt about that at all, all you have to do is look at this new website started by this guy named Gabe Hudson. He was a rifleman in the Marine Reserves in 1992, just as the Gulf War was ending. And he wrote this book of short stories called Dear Mr. President. And partly as a crude promotion, and partly as an idealistic public-minded venture, he started a website where he invited everyday Americans to post their own letters to the President. Well, one of the letters was posted there by a teacher in North Carolina and her class. Out of 19 kids, note that only five had anything to say about the War on Terror. "Dear Mr. President, Hello there. I live in a small town in North Carolina. Well, that's not exactly right. I live outside a small town, what may be termed rural. I live deep down a dirt road in a wooden house beside a creek that's cut into orange clay. This is where I grew up. It's nice here. I teach English here, eighth grade. Most eighth graders have a lot of opinions. Some of them don't. I asked them all to write down something that they would like to say to you. And I thought you might be interested in hearing their responses. I'm very glad that we have a good Christian man as our president. Whitney Moore, who is the shortest person in her class. You need to get out of the office and really need to be replaced. Reyna Pacheco, who admires Selena. Mr. Bush, I would rather you use another country to handle your wars and light work, because I want Osama to feel like he's going up against a gang, and not just one person. Will Castillo, who will be a famous writer one day. My favorite president is you, Mr. Bush. Jonathan King, who makes odd noises in class. Do you think we'll ever find bin Laden? And when we do, will things go back to normal? Melissa Jackson, cheerleader. I want to know, why is the writing test so important to North Carolina schools? And why should it determine if we fail or pass a grade, or if we have met the standards of the writing test? And why is it the end-of-grade test is so important? Nikki Norman, who resembles Alicia Keys. Why would you be president, knowing that many people don't like you? The war didn't happen until you became President of the United States of America. Tarika Williams, who is serious. What would you do to make the world a better place? Leticia Antonio, who has impeccable handwriting. Bush, I think you're doing an excellent job considering the terrorist attacks and the sniper attacks, and even the fights between Elizabeth Dole and Erskine Bowles. Natalie Calcutt, who hangs out on the back hall. How many four-wheelers, et cetera, do you have? And how many food restaurants do you have in your house? Tara Spell, who plays three sports. Did you ever think when you were little that one day you would be president? Madelyn Wooten, who also hangs out on the back hall. I think they should have more church camps. I love going to them. Karen Cribb, who has a big smile. My name Michelle Blue. And I am wondering, what are you going to do about the elderly people without Social Security, and they're not able to work, and they've got to be the age of 65 to be able to stop working? Michelle Blue, who speaks in one long sentence as well. I like cats. Courtney Barefoot, who also likes boys. Try to stop the war so we wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. Jose Jose, real name. Why do terrorists want to kill you so much? April Tew, who flirts. I'm 13 years old and in the eighth grade. I go to Midway Middle. I like to talk on the phone to boys and play soccer. My favorite subject is math, but my favorite teacher is my language arts teacher, Miss Honeycutt. Leslie Strickland, who sucks up. My birthday is November 12. And I will be 15. So if you are a president, you will get me something. James Brady, who raps. I just want to say that you need to take your job more seriously. Teresa Goodman, who can do a mean Harlem Shake. These are my kids. They just wanted you to know that they are here. Sincerely, Britt Honeycutt." If you want to write to the President as part of this project, go to gabehudson.com. Otherwise, you know, there's always that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address you can use. I mean, I find it very confusing myself. I think there are a few-- George Bush-- it's very hard to fight. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Years ago, my girlfriend was on the phone, talking with her friend Richard, who she just loves. And she's at home, and she's sitting on the couch, and the TV's on. And at some point, he notices the TV in background. I think because occasionally, she would switch channels, which, you know, is kind of a giveaway that maybe you're not paying complete attention to the phone call. So he starts to get annoyed at this, and starts to say to her how rude it is, and how wrong. And her case, her self-defense, completely disarms him, and she totally wins the day with this argument. "I love you, so how can this be wrong?" I love you. So if you're mad because you think that I'm watching TV because I don't give a damn about you and what you're saying, please note that this did not detract in any way-- it does not represent any kind of diminishment, any kind of depletion-- of my love. So could it be wrong? Which I have to say completely cracked him up with its brazenness. Under that logic, you can do anything, anything, to the people you love and get away with it. Love is very hard to argue with. You're in an argument with somebody and they say they did it for love-- what are you going to say to that? You just wave the word around, and that's that. Which brings me into the song "You Are So Beautiful... To Me." You remember that song? Imagine for a second somebody writing that song for you, or singing it to you, and you're hearing the song for the first time. OK. They start off, "You are so beautiful," and you think, OK this is romantic, this is going just great. And then they get to the "to me." You're not beautiful to everyone. If you were beautiful to everyone, the lyric could stop right there. The song would be called "You Are So Beautiful." There are, in fact, songs exactly like that. "You are so beautiful." But no, no, no. You're not so beautiful in general. You're just so beautiful to me. It's insulting, you know? But then, because the entire song is about how huge and complete this love is, what, you're going to argue? The writer or the singer would just say, "I love you. How could this be wrong?" Today on our radio program, we bring you two stories about love. Each story a variation on the idea, "I love you. So how could this be wrong?" Act one of our program. Polly Wants So Much More Than a Cracker. The story of a bird and three small children and what people will put up with for love. Act two. On the Border Between Good and Bad. In that act, we're very excited to have the novelist Russell Banks here on the radio program, reading a short story that we have wanted to get on the air forever. We're finally getting a chance to. From WBEZ Chicago, This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Act One. Polly Wants So Much More Than a Cracker. When Veronica tells this story, it's a story about love. When she was 17, she saw a bird in a pet store. A macaw, which is a kind of big parrot, brightly colored, with a three-foot wingspan. And I fell in love with her immediately, and you know, I was still in high school, I had no money whatsoever. How expensive was she? Well, the price tag on the cage said $1400. So how long did it take you to pay off the bird? It took me about five years to pay her off. Working part time jobs, babysitting. And what did you love about her? What was the thing that drew you to her? It's hard to describe how it feels to love an animal. But as soon as I saw her face, I just thought she was the most beautiful thing, and I had to have her, and I wanted to see that face every day, and I wanted to care for her. And I didn't know anything about bringing up parrots, or feeding them, or caring for them. I just wanted to take her home like a treasure. OK. Fast-forward 23 years. Veronica is now 40 years old, married with two twin boys, Kyle and Cameron, age five, and another boy, Daniel, who's eight. One of the things that she didn't know about parrots when she first saw her macaw is that they can live for 80 years. 80. So every morning she takes the bird, whose name is Gideon, out of her cage, so she can freely wander the house. And get into things she shouldn't get into, like a baby. Climbing into laundry baskets and ripping up clothes, and taking the kids' Pokemon cards and ripping them to shreds, and pulling newspapers out of boxes. And so at breakfast, you've got three little kids there. The kids will interact with each other, and Gideon will scream as loud as she can over their heads. Now let's play a recording of Gideon for people at home. It sounds really loud. It's intolerable. It's a sound that you don't want to hear. It sounds very dinosaur-like. Yeah. Well, you know-- The word you just use was "intolerable"? It's the most unpleasant sound I think I have ever heard. But you've lived with this sound for 23 years. I've lived with that sound for 23 years. It's in my dreams. It's wherever I go. It's in the kitchen, it's in the dining room, it's in my bedroom. And the kids have grown up with her, so they don't really notice it at first. But after about the fourth or fifth scream, they will start covering their ears and shouting back at the bird, and-- Will you stop it, please? Mommy! Will you take Gideon and put him-- her in the tree? Now, you taped little interviews with your kids about Gideon. Here's Cameron, who's five. Do you like having Gideon in the family? No, really. Would you rather that she went somewhere else? Yeah. All the way to [UNINTELLIGIBLE], to England. Because I don't want her to scream when we're watching TV. Would you rather have a different kind of pet than Gideon? Yeah. A dog that is really nice and doesn't bite and doesn't bark. But do you understand why mommy loves Gideon? Um, no. This is Kyle, the other twin, also five. One time she just almost bited off my thumb. That kind of scared me. Um, they're terrified of Gideon. If they are approached by her, they'll immediately scream and run away. They won't go near her now. And is that because Gideon is in fact a little dangerous? They're right to be a little scared? Well, Gideon's primary objective in life is to be my mate. And so every other person or creature that comes near me is a threat to our relationship. And my children are a very big threat to our relationship, because we have physical contact with each other. And she sees me carrying them and cooking for them and touching them and picking them up. And so she has a desire to kill them, basically. I mean, in the bird world, she would kill a predator or some intrusive love interest. Now, after your kids were born, and you saw how Gideon reacted to your children, and you saw how your children reacted to Gideon-- they were scared that Gideon bit Kyle-- did it change your feelings about Gideon? I don't think anything can change my feelings about Gideon. But if I had a dog that I loved, and you know, then I had a new baby in the house, and the dog was hostile towards the baby, I wouldn't feel the same way about the dog. You know, like I would feel protective of my kid, which I'm sure you did. Well, I do feel protective of the children, and I take certain steps to protect them from her. But I can't stop loving her because of her natural tendency to want to drive away competition. As I said, this is a love story. And though Veronica knows Gideon is driving everybody else who she loves crazy, she loves the bird. The same monogamous feelings that make Gideon mean to everyone else, make Gideon fantastically sweet to Veronica. Gideon watches her every move, cuddles with her, blushes-- Gideon actually blushes when they play together. She is all that Gideon lives for and it's hard to turn away from that. Thank you, Gideon. Veronica also worries that if she gave the bird away, the bird would die. They mate so fiercely that sometimes when their mate vanishes, that can happen. I know, Gideon. It's upsetting. And then there's this story. When Veronica was 18 and barely owned Gideon for a year, she took Gideon outside like she did every day, and Gideon flew away. Veronica hadn't been careful enough clipping her feathers. She was wrecked. Every night, Veronica cried herself to sleep. Every day she sat on the roof, watching the sky. After six days, a kid on his way to school spotted the bird. And I went quickly, ran to where he said she was, and I saw her in probably the tallest tree. And immediately scaled the tree. Got all the way to the top, which was about, I was up about 50 feet. She was on the end of the branch, all the way out. And so I inched my way out. And about three quarters of the way out-- I was only a foot away from her-- the branch snapped, and I fell straight down without hitting anything on the way, and just fell 50 feet and landed on my feet on hard ground. And I suffered a multiple compression fracture of my spine and I had a collapsed lung. I should have died, according to the orthopedic surgeon. Do you think the fact that you nearly died trying to save Gideon is one of the things that makes it impossible for you to give Gideon up? That's something I've thought about, yeah. It's quite possible. I feel like it's brought us closer. It's not a pleasant thing that happened. But I feel like, um-- she would have died out there. You say that "it brought us closer," but you're the only one who actually understands that you went out and you got injured trying to save Gideon. Gideon doesn't understand that. No, she doesn't understand that. But I know she understands something. She's very bonded to me. She became so close to me at one point that her hormones produced an egg. And that's something that happens only between couples. So I know she feels something. I don't really need to know much more than that. In the end, I think this is only partly a story about Veronica's love for Gideon. It's also a story about her family's love for her, that they put up with the bird. Now, we all want to believe that the people who love us will at least accept the parts of us that are not so appealing. And in Veronica's case, the unappealing part just happens to have physical form and be a bird. Every day that her kids and her husband put up with that, they prove to her just how much they love her. I don't know why you had to buy her. Like, how much bucks was she? She cost a lot of money. But how much money? She cost, like, $1400. Whoa. Just for a parrot? Why would they do that? Why? The most remarkable thing, I think, about the phrase "I love you" is how rarely it's used literally to mean I love you. That I have a feeling of love for you. It's used much more often, I think, to mean 100 other things. "Tell me that you love me," or "I need to get off the phone now," or "Things are fine between us, right?" or "Yes, it's fine that we keep the parrot." Coming up. Yet another way to use the word love. 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. Today on our program, stories of love, and people trying to better understand their own actions in love. We've arrived at act two. On the Border Between Good and Bad. In this act, we have this short story from Russell Banks, which he was kind enough to read for us. A warning to listeners that he mentions sex in the story. Nothing explicit. Here's Russell Banks. To begin, then, here's a scene in which I am the man and my friend Sarah Cole is the woman. I don't mind describing it now because I'm a decade older and don't look the same now as I did then, and Sarah Cole is dead. That is to say, on hearing this story, you might think me vain if I looked the same now as I did then. Because I must tell you that I was extremely handsome then. And if Sarah were not dead, you'd think I was cruel, for I must tell you that Sarah was very homely. In fact, she was the homeliest woman I have ever known. And I knew her well, because for three and a half months, we were lovers. Here is the scene. You can put it in the present, even though it took place ten years ago, because nothing that matters to the story depends on when it took place. And you can put it in Concord, New Hampshire, even though that is indeed where it took place, because it doesn't matter where it took place. So it might as well be Concord, New Hampshire, a place I happen to know well, and can therefore describe with sufficient detail to make the story believable. Around six o'clock on a Wednesday evening in late May, a man enters a bar. The bar, a cocktail lounge at street level with a restaurant upstairs, is decorated with hanging plants and unfinished wood paneling, butcher block tables and captain's chairs, with a half dozen darken and thickly upholstered booths along one wall. Three or four men between the ages of 25 and 35 are drinking at the bar, and like the man who has just entered, wear three piece suits and loosened neckties. They are probably lawyers-- young, unmarried lawyers-- gossipping with their brethren over martinis so as to postpone arriving home alone at their whitewashed townhouse apartments, where they will fix their evening meals in microwave ovens, and afterwards, while their TVs chuckle quietly in front of them, sit on their couches and do a little extra work tomorrow. They are, for the most part, honorable, educated, hardworking, shallow, and moderately unhappy young men. Our man-- call him Ronald, Ron-- in most ways is like these men, except that he is unusually good-looking, and that makes him a little less unhappy than they. Ron is effortlessly attractive, a genetic wonder. Tall, slender, symmetrical, and clean. He is beautiful the way we usually think of a woman as being beautiful. And he is nice, too-- a consequence, perhaps, of his seeming not to know how beautiful he is to men as well as women, to young people, even children, as well as old, to attractive people, who realize immediately that he is so much more attractive than they as not to be competitive with them, as well as unattractive people. Ron takes a seat at the bar, unfolds the evening paper in front of him, and before he can start reading, the bartender asks to help him, calling him "sir," even though Ron has come into this bar numerous times at this time of day. Especially since his divorce last fall. Ron got divorced because after three years of marriage, his wife chose to pursue the career that has interrupted-- that of a fashion designer-- which required her to live in New York City, while he had to continue to live in New Hampshire, where his career got its start. They agreed to live apart until he could continue his career near New York City. But after a few months, between conjugal visits, he started sleeping with other women, and she started sleeping with other men, and that was that. "No big deal," he explained to friends who liked both Ron and his wife, even though he was slightly more beautiful than she. "We really were too young when we got married. College sweethearts. But we're still best friends," he assured them. They understood. Most of Ron's friends were divorced by then, too. Ron orders a scotch and soda with a twist and goes back to reading his paper. He lights a cigarette. He goes on reading. He takes a second sip of his drink. Everyone in the room-- the three or four men scattered along the bar, the tall, thin bartender, and several people in the booths in back-- watches him do these ordinary things. He has got to the classified section, is perhaps searching for someone willing to come in once a week and clean his apartment, when the woman who will turn out to be Sarah Cole leaves a booth in the back and approaches him. She comes up from the side and sits next to him. She's wearing heavy tan cowboy boots, and a dark brown suede cowboy hat, lumpy jeans, and a yellow T-shirt that clings to her arms, breasts, and round belly like the skin of a sausage. Though he will later learn that she is 38 years old, she looks older by about 10 years, which makes her look about 20 years older than he actually is. "It's not bad here at the bar," she says, looking around. "More light, anyhow. What you reading?" she asks brightly, planting both elbows on the bar. Ron looks up from his paper with a slight smile on his lips, sees the face of a woman homelier than any he has ever seen or imagined before, and goes on smiling lightly. He feels himself falling into her tiny, slightly crossed dark brown eyes, pulls himself back, and studies, for a few seconds, her mottled, pocked complexion, bulbous nose, loose mouth, twisted and gapped teeth, and heavy but receding chin. He casts a glance over her thatch of dun-colored hair, and along her neck and throat, where acne burns against gray skin, and returns to her eyes, and again feels himself falling into her. "What did you say?" he asks. She knocks a mentholated cigarette from her pack and Ron swiftly lights it. Blowing smoke from her large, wing-shaped nostrils, she speaks again. Her voice is thick and nasal, a chocolate-colored voice. "I asked you what you're reading, but I can see now." She belts out a single loud laugh. "The paper." Ron laughs too. "The paper. The Concord Monitor." He is not hallucinating. He clearly sees what is before him and admits-- no, he asserts to himself that he is speaking to the most unattractive woman he has ever seen, a fact that fascinates him, as if instead he was speaking to the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. So he treasures the moment. Attempts to hold it as if it were a golden ball, a disproportionately heavy object which, if he does not hold it lightly, with precision and firmness, will slip from his hand and roll across the lawn to the lip of the well and down, down to the bottom of the well, lost to him forever. To keep this moment here before him, he begins to ask questions. He buys her a drink. He smiles until it seems even to him that he is taking her and her life, its vicissitudes and woe, quite seriously. He learns her name, of course, and she volunteers the information that she spoke to him on a dare from one of the two women sitting in the booth behind her. She turns on her school and smiles brazenly, triumphantly, to her friends-- two women, also homely, although nowhere as homely as she-- and dressed like her in cowboy boots, hats, and jeans. One of the women, a blonde with an underslung jaw and wearing heavy eye makeup, flips a little wave at her, and as if embarrassed, she and the other woman at the booth turn back to their drinks and sip fiercely at straws. Sarah returns to Ron and goes on telling him what he wants to know. About her job and Rumford Press, about her divorced husband, who was a bastard and stupid and sick, she says, as if filling suddenly with sympathy for the man. She tells Ron about her three children, the youngest a girl in junior high school and boy crazy, the other two boys in high school and almost never at home anymore. She speaks of her children with genuine tenderness and concern, and Ron is touched. He can see with what pleasure and pain she speaks of her children. He watches her tiny eyes light up and water over when he asks their names. "You're a nice woman," he informs her. She smiles, looks at her empty glass. "No. No, I'm not. But you're a nice man to tell me that." Ron, with a gesture, asks the bartender to refill Sarah's class. She's drinking White Russians. She asks him about himself, his job, his divorce, how long he has lived in Concord, but he finds that he is not at all interested in telling her about himself. He wants to know about her, even though what she has to tell them about herself is predictable and ordinary, and the way she tells it unadorned and cliched. He wonders about her husband. What kind of man would fall in love with Sarah Cole? That scene, at Osgood's Lounge in Concord, ended with Ron's departure alone after having bought Sarah a second drink and Sarah's return to her friends in the booth. I don't know what she told them, but it's not hard to imagine. The three women were not close friends-- merely fellow workers at Rumford Press, where they stood at the end of a long conveyor belt, day after day, packing TV Guides into cartons. They all hated their jobs, and frequently after work, when they worked the day shift, they put on the cowboy hats and boots, which they kept all day in their lockers, and stopped for a drink or two on their way home. This had been their first visit to Osgood's, however, a place that prior to this, they had avoided out of a sneering belief that no one went there but lawyers and insurance men. "We'll have to come in here again," Sarah said to her friends, her voice rising slightly. Which they did, that Friday. And once again, Ron appeared with his evening newspaper. After a few minutes, Sarah was once again at his side. "Hi." I said earlier that I'm the man in this story and my friend Sarah Cole, now dead, is the woman. I think back to that night, the second time I had seen Sarah, and I tremble-- not with fear, but in shame. My concern then, when I was first becoming involved with Sarah, was merely with the moment. Holding onto it. She talked more easily than she had the night before, and I listened as eagerly and carefully as I had before, again with the same motives-- to keep her in front of me, to draw her forward from the context of her life, and place her, as if she were an object, into the context of mine. I did not know how cruel this was. When you've never done a thing before, and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing. You just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you'll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you'll know. One night several weeks later, Ron meets Sarah at Osgood's, and after buying her three White Russians and drinking three scotches himself, he takes her back to his apartment in his car, a Datsun fastback coupe that she says she admires-- for the sole purpose of making love to her. I'm still the man in the story and Sarah is still the woman. But I'm telling it this way because what I have to tell you now confuses me, embarrasses me, and makes me sad. And consequently, I'm likely to tell it falsely. I'm likely to cover the truth by making Sarah a better woman than she actually was while making me appear worse than I actually was, or am. Or else I'll do the opposite, makes Sarah worse than she was, and me better. The truth is, I was pretty-- extremely so. And she was not-- extremely so. And I knew it, and she knew it. She walked out the door of Osgood's determined to make love to a man much prettier than any she had seen up close before, and I walked out determined to make love to a woman much homelier than any I had made love to before. We were, in a sense, equals. No, that's not exactly true. I'm not at all sure she feels as Ron does. That is to say, perhaps she genuinely likes the man, in spite of his being the most physically attractive man she has ever known. Ron unlocks the door to his apartment, walks in ahead of her, and flicks on the lamp beside the couch. It's a small, single bedroom, modern apartment, one of 30 identical apartments in a large brick building on the Heights just east of downtown Concord. Sarah stands nervously at the door, peering in. "Come in! Come in!" Ron says. She steps timidity in and closes the door behind her. She removes her cowboy hat, then quickly puts it back on, crosses the living room, and plops down in a blonde easy chair, seeming to shrink in its hug out of sight to safety. Behind her, Ron, at the entry to the kitchen, places one hand on her shoulder, and she stiffens. He removes his hand. "Would you like a drink?" "No, I guess not," she says, staring straight ahead at the wall opposite, where a large, framed photograph of a bicyclist advertises in French the Tour de France. Around the corner, in an alcove off the living room, a silvery gray 21-speed bicycle leans casually against the wall, glistening and poised, slender as a thoroughbred racehorse. "I don't know," she says. Ron is in the kitchen now, making himself a drink. "I don't know. I don't know." "What? Change your mind? I can make a White Russian for you. Vodka, cream, Kahlua, and ice, right?" Sarah tries to cross her legs, but she is sitting too low in the chair, and her legs are too thick at the thighs, so she ends, after a struggle, with one leg in the air and the other twisted on its side. She looks as if she has fallen from a great height. Ron steps out from the kitchen, places one hand on Sarah's shoulder. And this time she does not stiffen, though she does not exactly relax, either. She sits there, a block of wood staring straight ahead. "Are you scared?" he asks gently. And he adds, "I am." "Well, no. I'm not scared." She remains silent for a moment. "You're scared? Of what?" She turns to face him, but avoids his blue eyes. "Well, I don't do this all the time, you know. Bring home a woman I--" he trails off. "Picked up in a bar." "No, I mean. I like you, Sarah. I really do. And I didn't just pick you up in a bar. You know that. We've gotten to be friends, you and me." "You want to sleep with me?" she asks, still not meeting his steady gaze. "Yes." He seems to mean it. He does not take a gulp or even a sip from his drink. He just says "yes," straight out and cleanly. Not too quickly, either, and not after hesitant delay. A simple statement of a simple fact. The man wants to make love to the woman. She asked him and he told her. What could be simpler? "Do you want to sleep with me?" he asks. She turns around in the chair, faces the wall again, and says, in a low voice, "Sure I do. But it's hard to explain." "What? But what?" Placing his glass down on the table between the chair and the sofa, he puts both hands on her shoulders and lightly kneads them. He knows he can be discouraged from pursuing this, but he is not sure how easily. "You and me, Ron-- we're real different." She glances at the bicycle in the corner. "A man and a woman," he says. "No, not that. I mean different, that's all. Really different. More than you think. You're nice, but you don't know what I mean, and that's one of the things that makes you so nice. But we're different. "Listen," she says. "I gotta go. I gotta leave now." The man removes his hands and retrieves his glass, takes a sip, and watches her over the rim of the glass, as, not without difficulty, the woman rises from the chair and moves swiftly toward the door. She stops at the door, squares her hat on her head, and glances back at him. "We can be friends, though. OK?" she says. "OK. Friends." "I'll see you again down at Osgood's, right?" "Oh, yeah. Sure. "Good. See you," she says, opening the door. The door closes. The man walks around the sofa, snaps on the television set, and sits down in front of it. He picks up a TV Guide from the coffee table and flips through it. He does not once connect the magazine in his hand to the woman who has just left his apartment, even though he knows she spends her days packing TV Guides into cartons that get shipped to warehouses in distant parts of New England. He'll think of the connection some other night, but by then, the connection will be merely sentimental. It will be too late for him to understand what she meant by "different." But that's not the point of my story. Certainly it's an aspect of the story-- the political aspect, if you want. But it's not the reason I'm trying to tell it in the first place. I'm trying to tell the story so that I can understand what happened between me and Sarah Cole that summer and early autumn ten years ago. To say we were lovers says very little about what happened. To say we were friends says even less. No, if I'm to understand the whole thing, I'll have to say the whole thing. For in the end, what I need to know was whether what happened between me and Sarah Cole was right or wrong. Character is fate, which suggests that if a man can know and to some degree control his character, he can know, and to that same degree, control his fate. The next time Sarah and I were together, we were at her apartment in the south end of Concord, a second floor flat in a tenement building on Perley Street. I'd stayed away from Osgood's for several weeks, deliberately trying to avoid running into Sarah there, though I never quite put it that way to myself. I found excuses and generated interest in and reasons for going elsewhere after work. Yet I did meet her-- inadvertently, of course. After picking up shirts at the cleaner's on South Main and Perley Streets, I'd gone down Perley on my way to South State and the post office. It was a Saturday morning, and this trip on my bicycle was part of my regular Saturday routine. I did not remember that Sarah lived on Perley Street, although she had told me several times, in a complaining way. It's a rough neighborhood. Packed dirt yards, shabby apartment buildings, the carcasses of old, half-stripped cars on cinder blocks in the driveways, broken red and yellow plastic tricycles on the cracked sidewalks. But as soon as I saw her, I remembered. It was too late to avoid meeting her. I was riding my bike wearing shorts and T-shirt, the package containing my folded and starched shirts hooked onto the carrier behind me, and she was walking toward me along the sidewalk, lugging two large bags of groceries. She saw me and I stopped. We talked and I offered to carry her groceries for her. I took the bags while she led the bike, handling it carefully, as if she were afraid she might break it. At the stoop, we came to a halt. She leaned the bike against the banister and reached for her groceries. "I'll carry them up for you," I said. I directed her to loop the chain lock from the bike to the banister rail and snap it shut, and told her to bring my shirts up with her. "Maybe you'd like a beer?" she said as she opened the door to the darkened hallway. Narrow stairs disappeared in front of me into heavy, damp darkness, and the air smelled like old newspapers. "Sure," I said, and followed her up. "Sorry there's no light. I can't get them to fix it." "No matter. I can follow along," I said. And even in the dim light of the hall, I could see the large blue veins that cascaded thickly down the backs of her legs. She wore tight, white dot Bermuda shorts, rubber shower sandals, and a pink sleeveless sweater. I pictured her in the cashier's line at the supermarket. I would have been behind her, a stranger, and on seeing her, I would have turned away and studied the covers of the magazines-- TV Guide, People, the National Enquirer. Yet here I was inviting myself into her home, eagerly staring at the backs of her ravaged legs, her sad, tasteless clothing, her poverty. Picture this. The man enters the apartment behind the woman. She waves him toward the table in the kitchen, where he sets down the bags and looks good naturedly around the room. "What about the beer you bribed me with?" he asks. The apartment is cluttered with old, oversized furniture, yard sale and secondhand stuff-- neat and arranged in a more or less orderly way, however-- and the man seems comfortable there. He strolls from the kitchen to the living room and peeks into the three small bedrooms that branch off a hallway behind the living room. "Nice place," he calls to the woman. He studies the framed pictures of her three children, arranged as if on an altar, atop the buffet. "Nice looking kids," he calls out. When he returns to the kitchen, the woman is putting away her groceries, her back to him. "You sure are quiet today, Sarah," he says in a low voice. "Everything OK?" Silently, she turns away from the grocery bags, crosses the room to the man, reaches up to him, and holding him by the head, kisses his mouth, rolls her torso against his, drops her hands to his hips and yanks him tightly to her, and goes on kissing him, eyes closed, working her face furiously against his. The man places his hands on her shoulders and pulls away, and they face each other, wide-eyed, amazed, and frightened. The man drops his hands and the woman lets go of his hips. Then after a few seconds, the man silently turns, goes to the door, and leaves. Sarah appeared at my apartment door the following morning-- a Sunday, cool and rainy. She had brought me the package of freshly laundered shirts I had left in the kitchen, and when I opened the door to her, she simply held the package out to me as if it were a penitence gift. She wore a yellow rain slicker and cap and looked more like a disconsolate schoolgirl facing an angry teacher than a grown woman dropping a package off at a friend's apartment. I invited her inside and she accepted my invitation. I had been reading the Sunday New York Times on the coach and drinking coffee, lounging through the gray morning in bathrobe and pajamas. I told her to take off her wet raincoat and hat and hang them in the closet by the door and started for the kitchen to get her a cup of coffee when I stopped, turned, and looked at her. She closed the closet door in yellow raincoat and hat, turned around, and faced me. What else can I do? I must describe. I remember that moment of ten years ago as if it occurred ten minutes ago. The package of shirts on the table behind her, the newspapers scattered all over the couch and floor, the sound of windblown rain washing the side of the building outside, and the silence of the room as we stood across from one another and watched while we each, simultaneously, removed our own clothing. My robe, her blouse and skirt, my pajama top, her slip and bra, my pajama bottoms, her underpants, until we were both standing naked in the harsh, gray light, two naked members of the same species. A male and a female. The male somewhat younger and slightly less scarred than the female, the female somewhat less delicately constructed than the male. Both individuals, pale-skinned, with dark thatches of hair in the areas of their genitals, both individuals standing slackly as if a great, protracted tension between them had at last been released. We made love that morning in my bed for long hours that drifted easily into the afternoon, and we talked, as people usually do when they spend half a day or half a night in bed together. During the next few weeks, we met and made love often, and always at my apartment. On arriving home from work, I would phone her, or if not, she would phone me, and after a few feints and dodges, one would suggest to the other that we get together tonight, and a half hour later, she'd be at my door. Our lovemaking was passionate, skillful, kindly, and deeply satisfying. Then one hot night, a Saturday in August, we were lying in bed atop the tangled sheets, smoking cigarettes and chatting idly, and Sarah suggested that we go out for a drink. "Out? Now?" "Sure. It's early. What time is it?" I scanned the digital clock next to the bed. "9:49." "There. See?" "That's not so early. You usually go home by 11, you know. It's almost 10." "No, it's only a little after 9. Depends on how you look at things. Besides, Ron, it's Saturday night. Or is this the only thing you know how to do?" she said, and poked me in the ribs. "You know how to dance? You like to dance?" "Yeah, sure, sure. But not tonight. It's too hot, and I'm tired." But she persisted, happily pointing out that an air-conditioned bar would be as cool as my apartment, and we didn't have to go to a dance bar. We could go to Osgood's. "As a compromise," she said. I suggested a place called the El Rancho, a restaurant with a large, dark cocktail lounge and dance bar located several miles from town on the old Portsmouth Highway. Around 9, the restaurant closed and the bar became something of a roadhouse, with a small Country and Western band and a clientele drawn from the four or five villages that adjoined Concord on the north and east. I had eaten at the restaurant once, but had never gone to the bar. And I didn't know anyone who had. Sarah was silent for a moment. Then she lit a cigarette and drew the sheet over her naked body. "You don't want anybody to know about us, Ron. Do you." "That's not it. I just don't like gossip, and I work with a lot of people who show up sometimes at Osgood's. On a Saturday night, especially." "No," she said firmly. "You're ashamed of being seen with me. You'll sleep with me, all right, but you won't go out in public with me." "That's not true, Sarah." She was silent again. Relieved, I reached across her to the bed table and got my cigarettes and lighter. "You owe me, Ron," she said suddenly as I passed over her. "You owe me." "I don't know what you're talking about, Sarah. I don't owe you anything." "Friendship you owe me, and respect. Friendship and respect. A person can't do what you've done with me without owing them friendship and respect." "Sarah, I really don't know what you're talking about," I said. "I am your friend. You know that. And I respect you. I do." "You really think so, don't you." "Yes, of course." She said nothing for several long moments. Then she sighed, and in her low, almost inaudible voice, said, "Then you'll have to go out in public with me. I don't care about Osgood's or the people you work with. We don't have to go there or see any of them," she said. "But you're going to have to go to places like the El Rancho with me, and a few other places I know, too, where there's people I know. People I work with. And maybe we'll even go to a couple of parties, because I get invited to parties sometimes, you know. I have friends. And I have some family, too, and you're going to have to meet my family. My kids think I'm just going around bar-hopping when I'm over here with you and I don't like that. So you're going to have to meet them, so I can tell them where I am when I'm not at home nights. And sometimes you're going to come over and spend the evening at my place." Her voice had risen as she heard her demands and felt their rightness until now she was almost shouting at me. "You owe that to me, or else you're a bad man. It's that simple, Ron." It was. The handsome man is overdressed. He is wearing a navy blue blazer, taupe shirt, open at the throat, white slacks, white loafers. Everyone else, including the homely woman with the handsome man, is dressed appropriately-- that is, like everyone else. Jeans and cowboy boots, blouses or cowboy shirts or T-shirts with catchy sayings or the names of Country and Western singers printed across the front. And many of the women are wearing cowboy hats pushed back and tied under their chins. The man doesn't know anyone at the bar, or if they're at a party, in the room, but the woman knows most of the people there, and she gladly introduces him. The men grin and shake his hand, slap him on his jacketed shoulder, ask him where he works, what's his line-- after which they lapse into silence. The women flirt briefly with their faces, but they lapse into silence even before the men do. The woman with the man in the blazer does most of the talking for everyone. She talks for the man in the blazer, for the men standing around the refrigerator, or if they're at a bar, for the other men at the table, and for the other women, too. She chats and rambles aimlessly through loud monologues, laughs uproariously at trivial jokes, and drinks too much, until soon she is drunk, thick-tongued, clumsy, and the man has to say her goodbyes and ease her out the door to his car, and drive her home to her apartment on Perley Street. This happens twice in one week and then three times the next. Ron no longer calls Sarah when he gets home from work. He waits for her call, and sometimes, when he knows it's she, he doesn't answer the phone. Usually he lets it ring five or six times, and he reaches down and picks up the receiver. He has taken his jacket and vest off and loosened his tie and is about to put his supper, frozen manicotti, into the microwave oven. "Hello?" "Hi." "How are you doing?" "OK, I guess. A little tired. "Still hungover?" "No, not really. Just tired. I hate Mondays." "You have fun last night?" "Well yes, sort of. It's nice out there at the lake. Listen," she says, brightening. "Why don't you come over here tonight? The kids are all going out later, but if you come over before eight, you can meet them. They really want to meet you." "You told them about me?" "Sure, a long time ago. I'm not supposed to tell my own kids?" Ron is silent. She says, "You don't want to come over here tonight. You don't want to meet my kids. No, you don't want my kids to meet you, that's it. "No, no. It's just, I've got a lot of work to do." "We should talk," she announces in a flat voice. "Yes," he says. "We should talk." They agree that she will meet him at his apartment and they'll talk, and they say goodbye and hang up. While Ron is heating his supper and then eating it alone at his kitchen table, and Sarah is feeding her children, perhaps I should admit, since we are nearing the end of my story, that I don't actually know that Sarah Cole is dead. A few years ago, I happened to run into one of her friends from the Press, a blond woman with an underslung jaw. Her name, she reminded me, was Glenda. She had seen me at Osgood's a couple of times, and we had met at the El Rancho once, when I had gone there with Sarah. We were standing outside the Sears store on South Main Street, where I'd gone to buy paint. I had recently remarried, and my wife and I were redecorating my apartment. "Whatever happened to Sarah?" I ask Glenda. "Is she still down at the Press?" "Jeez, no. She left a long time ago, way back. I heard she went back with her ex-husband. I can't remember his name. Something Cole. Eddie Cole, maybe." I asked her if she was sure of that, and she said no. She'd only heard it around the bars and at the Press. But she assumed it was true. People said Sarah had moved back with her ex-husband and was living for a while with him and the kids in a trailer in a park near Hooksett, and then when the kids, or at least the boys, get out of school, the rest of them moved down to Florida or someplace, because he was out of work. He was a carpenter, she thought. "He was mean to her," I said. "Oh, well, yeah. He was a bastard, all right. I met him a couple times and I didn't like him. Short, ugly, and mean when he got drunk. But you know what they say." "What do they say?" "Oh, you know. About water seeking its own level and all." "Sarah wasn't mean, drunk or sober." The woman laughed. "Nah, but she sure was short and ugly." I said nothing. "Hey, don't get me wrong," Glenda said. "I liked Sarah. But you and her-- well, you sure made a funny-looking couple. She probably didn't feel so self-conscious and all with her husband," she said somberly. "Well. I loved her," I said. The woman raised one plucked eyebrow in disbelief. She smiled. "Sure you did, honey," she said, and she patted me on the arm. "Sure you did." Then she let the smile drift off her face, turned, and walked away from me. When someone you have loved dies, you accept the fact of her death, but then the person goes on living in your memory, dreams, and reveries. You have imaginary conversations with her. You see something striking and remind yourself to tell your loved one about it, and then get brought up short by the fact of her death. And at night, in your sleep, the dead person visits you. With Sarah, none of that happened. When she was gone from my life, she was gone absolutely, as if she had never existed in the first place. It was only later, when I could think of her as dead, I could come out and say it-- "my friend Sarah Cole is dead"-- that I was able to tell this story. For that is when she began to enter my memories, my dreams and reveries. In that way, I learned that I truly did love her, and now I have begun to grieve over her death, to wish her alive again, so that I can say to her the things I could not know or say when she was alive, when I did not know that I loved her. The woman arrives at Ron's apartment around eight. There was a soft knock at his door. He opens it, turns away, and crosses to the kitchen, where he turns back, lights a cigarette, and watches her. She closes the door. He offers her a drink, which she declines, and somewhat formally, he invites her to sit down. She sits carefully on the sofa, in the middle with her feet close together on the floor, as if being interviewed for a job. He comes around and sits in the easy chair, relaxed, one leg slung over the other at the knee, as if he were interviewing her for the job. "Well," he says. "you wanted to talk." "Yes. But now you're mad at me. I can see that. I didn't do anything wrong." "I'm not mad at you." They are silent for a moment. Ron goes on smoking his cigarette. Finally she sighs and says, "You don't want to see me anymore, do you." He waits a few seconds and answers. "Yes. That's right." Getting up from the chair, he walks to the silver gray bicycle and stands before it, running a fingertip along the slender crossbar from the saddle to the chrome-plated handlebars. "You're a son of a bitch," she says in a low voice. "You're worse than my ex-husband." Then she smiles meanly, almost sneers, and soon he realizes that she is telling him that she won't leave. He's stuck with her, she informs him with cold precision. "You think I'm just so much meat, and all you've got to do is call up the butcher shop and cancel your order. Well, now you're going to find out different. You can't cancel your order. I'm not meat. I'm not one of your pretty little girlfriends who come running when you want them and go away when you get tired of them. I'm different. I got nothing to lose, Ron. Nothing. So you're stuck with me, Ron." She sits back in the couch and crosses her legs at the ankles. "I think I will have that drink you offered." "Look, Sarah. It would be better if you go now." "No," she says flatly. "You offered me a drink when I came in. Nothing's changed since I've been here, not for me and not for you. I'd like that drink you offered," she says haughtily. Ron turns away from the bicycle and takes a step toward her. His face has stiffened into a mask. "Enough is enough," he says through clenched teeth. "I've given you enough." "Fix me a drink, will you, honey?" she says with a phony smile. Ron orders her to leave. She refuses. He grabs her by the arm and yanks her to her feet. She starts crying lightly. She stands there and looks up into his face and weeps. But she does not move toward the door, so he pushes her. She regains her balance and goes on weeping. He stands back, and places his fists on his hips, and looks at her. "Go on. Go on and leave, you ugly bitch," he says to her. He says the words again, almost tenderly. "Leave, you ugly bitch." Her hair is golden, her brown eyes deep and sad, her mouth full and affectionate, her tears the tears of love and loss, and her pleading, outstretched arms, her entire body, the arms and body of a devoted woman's cruelly rejected love. A third time he says the words. "Leave me now, you disgusting, ugly bitch." She is wrapped in an envelope of golden light, a warm, dense haze that she seems to have stepped into as into a carriage. And then she is gone and he is alone again. He looks around the room, searching for her. Sitting down in the easy chair, he places his face in his hands. It's not as if she has died. It's as if he has killed her. Russell Banks, reading from his short story "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story." The full, unedited version of this story is in his collection The Angel on the Roof. You know you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife. with other 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 Malatia. You know, you don't want to be around him when he's mad. Listen to him. Torey. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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John Podesta used to see a lot of classified documents in his old job as White House Chief of Staff under President Clinton. You go from the range of, you slap your head and say, holy cow, I can't believe we know this, and you absolutely know why it's classified, all the way down the stream to-- I've seen, literally, newspaper reports classified. AP wire copy classified. Wait, wait. Literally, the report from the paper? Yeah. Yeah, that's then been classified and forwarded on to the president, for example. Even back then, during an administration that declassified 800 million documents, that tried to release any government document possible under the Freedom of Information Act, even back then a lot of stuff that stayed secret just did not really need to be secret. It's just the way government works. And so, under the current administration, the Bush administration, there's probably also stuff that does not really need to be classified. In putting together today's radio program, I've tried to compile a list of all the new things the government is keeping secret. And there are so many of them, I do not even know if I've got them all. Are you ready? There is the vice president in a lawsuit over whether he has to release the names of people that he met with in forming his energy policy. There's the executive order that lets former presidents keep more of their old documents secret. There's the official Bush administration policy not to release any document under the Freedom of Information Act if there is any legal way to avoid it. Committee chairmen in Congress-- these are Republicans, mind you, Republicans-- are complaining publicly that they cannot get information out of the administration, out of the agencies that they are supposed to be overseeing. And all this stuff is before you get the stuff that has to do with the War on Terror. Add that, and you've got the federal government pulling information from its own websites and removing its documents from public libraries. There are the secret trials and deportations of suspected terrorists. To people being held without any charges at all in military brigs, as many as 400 people being held as material witnesses because the government wants to get information out of them. The new kinds of wiretaps that have been authorized. There is the Total Information Awareness Program, in its pilot stage, which will be able to monitor all of our credit card and bank transactions, our phone calls, our email, our medical records. The part of government that is secret is growing. And so we thought today we would step back, take a look at exactly how far it's gone. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Today on our program, The Secret Government, A Beginner's Guide. Our program today in three acts. Act One is about disappeared persons, American citizens held without charges. Act Two is about people thrown out of the country after secret trials. Act Three is about a secret court made of conservative judges that got so upset about what the current Justice Department was doing in secret that for the first time in the court's history it broke its veil of secrecy and went public. Stay with us. Act One, Until the End of the War. There are at least two American citizens being held without charges, unable to see lawyers, in military jails in the United States. There could actually be more. Jack Hitt tried to find out everything he could about one of these guys, who you may remember from the news a while back, Jose Padilla. Here's the way most of us remember it, if we remember it at all. A Monday morning last June, all the major networks broke from their programming to go to a live satellite broadcast by Attorney General John Ashcroft, from Moscow of all places. Here's CNN. Ethan, I'm sorry. I need to interrupt you there. We do have some breaking news and we need to go to Moscow. This is Attorney General John Ashcroft talking about a terrorist capture. --United States in his capacity as commander-in-chief determined that Abdullah al-Mujahir, born Jose Padilla, is an enemy combatant. In apprehending al-Mujahir as he sought entry into the United States, we have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb. And then, an hour after that press conference, the administration launched a series of other press conferences. Right away, they were backing off Ashcroft's spine-tingling sense of alarm. Paul Wolfowitz from the Pentagon said it probably wasn't a plot, just some, quote, "loose talk." And here's what FBI director Robert Mueller had to say about it. It had not gone, as far as we know, much past the discussion stage. But there were substantial discussions undertaken. The timing of all this was curious, because they'd actually nabbed Padilla a month before, but chose to announce it on a day when Washington was reeling over FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley. It pushed her off the front pages. You remember Rowley. She was testifying in Congress about all the FBI bungling and miscommunication that made us miss the clues pointing to 9/11. More than a few people noticed that the Padilla announcement applied a certain emphasis on bureaucratic efficiency and inter-agency cooperation. Because of the close cooperation among the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Department, and other federal agencies-- --was a result of the close cooperative work of FBI agents and CIA agents here and-- --demonstrates the successful sharing of information and close cooperation among US government agencies that will be key to winning the war against terrorism. The administration was furious with anyone who noticed these coincidences. Here's a White House press conference just after the Padilla story broke. How do you now respond to critics who are trying to draw a link, fair or unfair, between the announcement of that arrest to the intelligence [UNINTELLIGIBLE]? Look, these very few people who want to make such an outlandish political accusation represent the most cynical among the most partisan. And they're not to be taken seriously. In the days afterwards, we learned a little of Padilla's life. His rap sheet as a gang member in Chicago. His involvement in a murder-- it was a gun charge in Florida. He worked at a Fort Lauderdale Taco Bell, where he converted to Islam. Later he traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan. There, according to two Al-Qaeda informants, he met with terrorist leaders and learned about dirty bombs. In one court filing, the government admitted that their prime source on Padilla, Al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah, had frequently fooled them with false information. The other informant, the government said, had recanted part of his testimony. With that hovering in the air, the story disappeared, and with it Padilla-- literally. The government did something to him it has never done to anyone. They transferred him from a civilian jail to a military brig outside Charleston, South Carolina. They refused to let him see a lawyer and they never charged him with anything. His own mother can't visit him. He will stay in his cell with the lights burning 24 hours a day, according to Ari Fleischer, quote, "for the duration of the war." This was achieved by redefining Padilla with a new term that everyone heard for the first time that Monday morning. He is being detained under the laws of war as an enemy combatant. Enemy combatant. The rules of war talk about "unlawful combatants," but that term applies to soldiers caught on the field of battle. Enemy combatants can be American citizens seized in America and held without a lawyer or charges, or without much explanation from the government itself. If you try to get the Justice Department to talk about Padilla, here's what they say. We're not doing any on-the-record interviews in connection with Padilla. They wouldn't do an off-the-record interview about him either, and on the rare occasions when officials have had to talk about it in public, here's the sort of thing you get. This question was asked at the joint press conference, of Larry Thompson from the Justice Department. Beverly? Does he have legal representation at the moment? He was being held under the authority of a federal judge. And he had legal representation in connection with that, yes. Does he now? Does he now? Larry, how far did they get-- Does he now, she's asking. Does he have legal representation now? Thompson ignores her, takes one more question, and then ends the press conference. The answer to the question, of course, is no. Padilla lost his lawyer only a few hours before this press conference, when he was redefined as an enemy combatant. A word now about that lawyer. For the month prior to the Ashcroft press conference, Padilla had been held in jail as a possible material witness for some kind of crime. We don't know what it was. For the indigent, though, there's a round robin of good working lawyers who donate their time. For Padilla, the wheel spun and turned up a defense lawyer who hangs her shingle across the street from the courthouse in Jersey City, New Jersey. Located just above a bail bondsman office, it's a two-woman shop-- a secretary named Angela and a lawyer, Donna Newman. Newman works the standard criminal defense beat-- fraud, money laundering, mobsters, drugs. Not the sort of lawyer who usually ends up suing the Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, and the President of the United States. I don't think so. I don't know. They'd be surprised. I did well in law school, a good student, but I certainly would not have been the one they would have chosen. I'm certainly not a radical. And it's a joke to think I am, because that's how unradical I am. I'm very conservative in my lifestyle, in my children. I'm older. I have grown children. I didn't even picket in the '60s. When Newman first got the case, it was like dozens she'd seen. File a bunch of papers contesting the warrant, seeking bail-- routine stuff. And the judge sets a hearing date, in this case June 11. June 11 was also the day John Ashcroft broke into regular television programming around 10:00 AM with his Moscow conference about Padilla. Not everybody was in front of a TV to hear, people like Padilla's lawyer, Donna Newman. I'm in my car and I'm going to court. I hadn't had the radio on. And I receive a call on my cellphone from the assistant United States attorney. And he advised me that my client was taken by the military to a naval brig. I thought he was kidding. Needless to say, if you're hearing this and you hadn't listened to the radio, you would also think that this was a joke. Ashcroft-- I mean, giving this statement, it's just like, what are you talking about? To explain what happens next, I have to talk about something so basic, a principle that's so ingrained in what this country is, that most of us don't even know it exists-- habeas corpus. We've all heard that phrase, although let's be honest, we don't quite know what it means. Actually, it's the most fundamental routine of all Western law. It's 700 years old. Its meaning in Latin, "you hold the body," sounds like a challenge, and it is. At every criminal arrest, it orders the government to show the body-- in other words, show me the guy you're holding, so I can see he's OK, and second, tell us the charge against him. Known as "the great writ of liberty," its suspension was, along with unfair taxation, the primary reason for the American Revolution. The founding fathers enshrined habeas in Article I of our Constitution, declaring it could be suspended only during, quote, "rebellion or invasion." When a government starts tossing out things as foundational as habeas, the proceedings quickly grow strange. Soon after the Ashcroft press conference, Newman went to court to find out what happened to her client. She was told she no longer had a client, because her client no longer had a lawyer. But Newman wouldn't hear it. She kept on filing motions as if the old routines of the law were still in place. That said, she was in uncharted terrain, and the problems she encountered were often surreal. For habeas to be filed, the petitioner-- in this case, Mr. Padilla-- has to sign it. They have the audacity to complain that he can't sign it. So it's not a valid petition because he can't sign it. Well, of course, you're the one who took him away. So that's mind-boggling, that they make that argument. They said, in the beginning of one of their briefs, that we did not dispute his enemy combatant status or the facts leading up to the government's declaration. Well, that's another Catch-22. How can I dispute it? Can I meet with my client? So you're saying I concede this because you've made it so that I can't meet with him. And I wonder, who is writing the brief? Aren't they embarrassed to write that? I mean, I couldn't write that. I would be going, what is the judge going think of me by my writing that? Because it's so clear. Well, of course she can't hand in an affidavit. He's not around, remember? You're the one who took him away. The government did cite legal precedent for its right to hold Padilla, specifically two cases. There's clear Supreme Court and circuit court authority for such a detention. What is the Supreme Court precedent? It's a 1942 case, Ex parte Quirin. And there's a 9th Circuit case, and I forgot the name of it. It's In re Territo. It's a 1946 case. Let's talk about those cases. The Territo case involved a man who was born an American citizen but who grew up in Italy. He was captured on the battlefield in World War II, fighting on the side of fascist Italy. Unlike Padilla, he was charged, given a lawyer and a trial. The Quirin case involved eight Nazis, including one American citizen, who actually landed on Long Island in 1942 with plans to blow up US factories. They were all given lawyers and had trials, even though the war was on. The only question in both cases was what kind of proceeding, in a civilian court or a military tribunal? There was no question that they'd get lawyers and trials. We do have Mr. Padilla, or Mr. al-Mujahir as he called himself more recently, in military custody. Even though the Justice Department won't speak on the record to journalists, there have been rare occasions where certain officials have tried to explain what has happened. Here's assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff at a public forum at the New York University law school. He says the question raised by the Padilla case is this one. --the issue of, what do you do when you apprehend people in the field of battle? Let me go back to World War II. We captured a lot of Germans and Japanese and Italians in the battlefield in the course of the war. Those people didn't get lawyers. Do we really think, in the battlefield, that we should lawyer up everybody who's captured? Chertoff takes for granted the assumption that since planes flew into buildings on 9/11, everywhere in America is now a battlefield. And on some level, we all know there's some truth in this. But still, there are distinctions. No one is talking about providing lawyers to the Al-Qaeda terrorists in Guantanamo. They're prisoners of war captured in Afghanistan. Padilla is an American citizen seized in Chicago. And then there's that phrase he used, "lawyer up," as if this involves someone who spilled hot coffee on her lap at McDonald's, and not the suspension of habeas corpus that dates back 700 years and is one of the core principles of our Constitution. America was founded on the proposition that when we get in trouble, we get lawyered up. And part of what's so confusing about Padilla is that so many other defendants have been lawyered up. Remember John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban? He was actually captured on the field of battle in Afghanistan. Now that's an enemy combatant. He got lawyered up. The Buffalo Six, those young Muslims who slipped into Afghanistan and then came back to America? Arrested and lawyered up. How about Zacarias Moussaoui? He's not even an American. He's a French Moroccan, and was allegedly the 20th guy on September 11. Lawyered up. In the end, it may be that the real reason Padilla has been refused a lawyer is not the alarming evidence against him, but the opposite. They have less evidence against Mr. Padilla, so they can't bring charges. See, they don't have probable cause to bring a charge. They certainly couldn't prove a charge. So their solution, which is really frightening, is if we can't prove a case, we simply get rid of the individual. We simply lock them up. And that just turns our criminal justice system upside-down. Warning. Restricted area. Keep out. Authorized personnel only. Man, this thing is huge. Over the Christmas holiday, I was in Charleston, South Carolina, visiting my mom. One morning, my nephew and I drove over to the Navy facility where the government's holding Padilla. I got turned away, of course, told that the closest I could get was the fence, so I pulled over. Behind the barbed wire was, strangely, nothing more than acres and acres of low-country pine forest, the kind I grew up in. Deep in it, somewhere, was the brig and Jose Padilla. Just before this, the New York Judge who was hearing Donna Newman's motions, Michael Mukasey, issued his ruling. It was a Solomonic one. He said Padilla could finally meet with his lawyer to challenge his status as an enemy combatant. But he also said President Bush had the power to declare American citizens on home soil to be enemy combatants. Finally, he also said the court should oversee it all. The tone of Mukasey's opinion is nervous. He's nervous. At one point he opines about the kind of case, quote, "a judge is unqualified for but must decide." And if you read all those old opinions, like the World War II cases, all the judges write in the same nervous tone. They don't toss off habeas very easily. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who supported the Quirin decision when it came down, groaned later, "It's not a happy precedent." In comparison, the Bush administration is not agonizing about suspending this basic right, at least not publicly. While in the Persian Gulf, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld complained about folks who are concerned with Padilla's right to see a lawyer. Quote, "Our normal procedure is that if somebody does something unlawful, that the first thing we want to do is apprehend them, then try them in a court, and then punish them. In this case, that is not our first interest. Our interest, really, in this case is not law enforcement. It's not punishment. Our interest at the moment is to try to find out everything he knows." Maybe Donald Rumsfeld is right, that the War on Terror is so important that we do need to lock people up without charges for the duration of the war just to find out what they know. Maybe it's true that the new battlefield is not just in Afghanistan but extends everywhere and anywhere on our own soil. Maybe it's true that even though in every previous war the courts have permitted some kind of trial, this war is different. And maybe it's true that we have to trust the government when it says, the secret evidence against these Americans can't be revealed in a court of law. Maybe we need to be rethinking our basic Constitutional rights. But if so, it's not to be done lightly, not to be done off the record. We should, as a people, talk about all this and agree on it first. This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the government is preparing to declare some more American citizens here at home to be enemy combatants and remove them to military bases. So start talking. Jack Hitt in New Haven. One quick footnote to that story, before you start talking. Late this week, the government went to the judge in Jose Padilla's case and asked the judge to consider changing his recent decision about Padilla, specifically his decision to let Donna Newman meet and confer with Padilla as lawyer and client. The reason the government gives for this? They're interrogating him, they say. And the government says that if he sees a lawyer and has any hope of getting out any time soon, he won't give any information in the interrogation. OK. You have one minute to start talking. Coming up, a sneaky way to get some answers about secret deportations. That's in one Chicago 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 show, The Secret Government, a beginner's guide to all the new secrecy in our country. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Secret Trials and Secret Deportations. In the current war, the War on Terror, the government has been rounding up foreigners, checking their immigration status, and then sometimes deporting them. David Kestenbaum tried to find out everything that can be found out about who they are and what happened to them once they were arrested and put on trial in secret. In the months after September 11, the US government rounded up over 700 immigrants, 700 people, and refused to talk about them, even in court. Civil rights groups sued to get the names, and as part of the filings, here's how far things have gone. The government submitted a 118-page list of people who had been detained, their names, one by one, inked out with a black marker. [DIAL TONE] Good morning. Public Affairs. Today, the Department of Justice will only talk round numbers. You're about to hear just about everything the government has to say on the subject. I talked with Jorge Martinez, a spokesperson for the DOJ. Can you tell me how many people were detained on immigration charges in the sweep after September 11? 765. How many people ended up being deported? 478 people have been deported to date. Do you have any sense for how many of them had ties to terrorism? We don't, and because it is classified and sensitive information, I am precluded by our regulations from talking about it. What if I have the names of some of the people? Can you then discuss their cases with me? No, unfortunately, I can't, again, because it is part of an ongoing investigation. And I am precluded from talking about it. And there are six people still in custody? Yes. Can you tell me anything about them? No, unfortunately, I can't. What is the government hiding? If you want to know who was deported, why they were fingered in the investigation, how long they were held, did they get a fair trial, did they get to make a phone call, you have to try somewhere besides Washington, D.C. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome on board our Swiss flight bound for Karachi. Swissair Flight 246 to Pakistan. Coach class, unwatchable movie starring Robin Williams. Our mission: to meet some of the 400 people who got kicked out and find out what happened. Let me say up front that the people you're going to hear were tracked down by the American Civil Liberties Union, which thinks the government behaved very badly here. Emily Whitfield from the ACLU is also on the plane. She's sitting up in business class. When the feds wouldn't release the names, the ACLU did something clever. It did an end-run around our government and wrote letters to foreign embassies requesting the names of deportees, letters to the countries where the people had been sent back to. United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India, et cetera. And we heard back from some of them, just a polite "thanks for getting in touch." But the Pakistan consulate called us back. And they said, oh, yeah, we have a list. And we said, do you, now? Can we see it? And they said, sure. And that was extraordinary, because another country was giving us something our own government would not give to us. The plane takes a weird turn to fly around Iraq, and lands in Karachi, Pakistan. This is where Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and decapitated. Bin Laden himself may be hiding in Pakistan. I think about this, getting off the plane. To find out what the Justice Department is hiding, I've gone somewhere the State Department warns not to. Non-emergency personnel at the embassy here have been ordered to leave. Over the course of a week, I visit a handful of people who have been deported from the United States. Here's the deal. The Pakistani embassy's list had over 100 people on it. The ACLU, with the help of a Pakistani civil rights group, tracked down about 35 of those. 19 were willing to talk to the press. Of these, the ACLU people set up interviews with five whose cases they thought were compelling. And yes, in some instances, the US government seems to have behaved in ways I think many Americans would think was pretty unfair. But I have to say, other times things didn't seem so bad, even in these hand-picked cases. But you can judge for yourself. Also there was one nagging question every deportee had. I'll get to that later. The cab driver on the first day has a long white beard and says he was a big fan of the Taliban, but he seems perfectly nice. He stops to ask directions a few times and pulls into a dusty street where a man named Ansar Mahmood lives. Until recently, Ansar and his family lived 7,000 miles west of here in New Jersey. Ansar's story begins like this. One morning, three weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center, his doorbell rang. Ansar looked out the window and saw 25 or 30 FBI agents. He says he knew they were FBI because they had FBI on their jackets just like on TV. The FBI arrested him. His wife, Uzma, says that for 25 days, she had no idea at all where he was. He just vanished, like that. They didn't give me any hint, where is he and where they take him and when he will come back, and this and that. He was just gone away from our life. What about the kids? Yes, they were very upset. They were very aggressive at the time, after some times that they were out of control. I cannot control them after four, five months. They wanted to kill everybody. They hit me twice. Here's what Ansar says happened to him. When the FBI came by, the agents asked if he knew anything about Osama Bin Laden. They also asked about Ansar's brother-in-law, who they suspected was involved in credit card fraud. Ansar says the FBI eventually took him into custody for a different reason, because he had overstayed his visa. This, he admits, is true. He was working in the country illegally, using a fake Social Security card. They put him in a jail near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He says he was told not to ask any questions or he would be killed, and he was placed in solitary confinement for four months. The size of the cell is six feet wide and about 12 feet long. What I can see from the window-- I can see the sky. I can see the traffic. I can see the BQE. Or sometimes, they transfer us to a different cell-- I can see the Statue of Liberty too. In cells 19 to 25, you can see the Statue of Liberty from there. Those are sort of the good rooms. Yeah, they are good rooms. Because at least you can see the sea. You can see the river and you can see the Statue of Liberty in front of you, which is the symbol of liberty of the United States. After a month, jail personnel painted over the window, possibly for security reasons, possibly to avoid quotes like the one you just heard. Ansar says the cell became like a grave. Seven months after he was taken into custody, the INS took him out of jail and deported him to Pakistan. A word of caution here. If you feel like you've heard stories like Ansar's before, you may have actually heard his. His family has become a poster child for groups who oppose the government's secret deportations. I've been on ABC. I've been on CNN, BBC, PBS, UPN-9. Ansar's son, Uzer, who's 14. We've been on an Italian TV show. We've been in a Spanish newspaper. All the newspapers you can imagine, we've been in them. So does that make you maybe think that your father's case was unusual? Yes, it was unusual. His dad's case was unusual. Ansar was detained for seven months. The average time seems to be about two months. And the fact that his family didn't know where he was for weeks-- that seems to be very unusual. Uzer's dad did get his time before a judge. He was convicted of a felony for using an altered Social Security card and deported for overstaying his visa. It's worth mentioning that these are pretty common offenses. By the government's own estimates, there are over a quarter million people in the United States who have overstayed their visas and have been told to leave. So what brought 25 FBI agents to Ansar's door and not others? That's a mystery. But still, an overstayed visa is a deportable offense. As for all the secrecy, Uzer thinks it's because the government is embarrassed. It doesn't want to be seen picking on families like his. The government don't want to show its face. It doesn't want to get screamed at. It doesn't want to say sorry. Like people, when they hit somebody, somebody's going to say, say sorry to that guy. And they say, oh, I'm sorry. Even if they hate the person. They say, I'm sorry. Why can't you just say sorry? That's my question to the Bush administration right now. If they listen to this, I want to ask them to say sorry and give my house back and give my life back. It's not hard for them. They have a lot of money. Uzer says life in Pakistan sucks. Neither he nor his brothers really speak the language. Kids at school have thrown rocks at them, calling them Americans, though of course they weren't real Americans, American citizens. Uzer and his brothers played basketball when they lived in New Jersey. I ask if they need a new ball. I can send them one. Uzer looks at me and says, man, what we need is a court. This is the part of the story where you would typically hear the US government's side of things, the government's take on what happened to Ansar and why they were investigating him in the first place. But of course, it refuses to discuss any of these cases. As a lousy second choice, I've brought along a tape recording of someone from the Department of Justice who spoke at a debate a while back. I'll play some of it for you in a little bit. The next deportee on the list is Huram Alta. I meet him at his parents' house in Islamabad. We sit on a couch and look over some family photos. There's a few photos they sent me after-- that's my wife. That's my middle daughter and this is my son, the youngest one. They're all sitting in a toy race car at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. While Huram and I talk, a guy named Wassim walks in. He's big and adorable. You could put him on a teen pinup poster. Wassim and Huram met in jail. Wassim is also on the ACLU list of appealing, mediagenic people kicked out of the United States. And he also has an ironic looking-out-the-jail-window story. And especially, I remember those little ducks. I saw six or seven little-- ducklings, right? Ducklings, and their mother duck. And I was like, aha, they are better than me right now. But here's the thing. Talking to these guys, it seems like what they went through is no worse than the sorts of hassles immigrants in America have gone through with the INS for decades. Their stories don't explain the secrecy. In some ways, the two were treated well. Their families knew where they were. They got to make phone calls. Huram says the people in jail weren't mean or abusive. In the end, he was detained for two months, Wassim for one. And did they get a fair hearing? Here, things get a little fuzzy. The Justice Department will tell you how all detainees are given lists of lawyers who will take their cases pro bono. And they all have access to law libraries and courts. And that's all true, except in practice, both men-- and a lot of these guys-- never got to see a judge. Huram and Wassim are what the INS calls absconders, people who according to its records had been sent letters ordering them to leave the country. The thing is, Wassim and Huram say they never got those letters. Wassim's lawyer later told me that these are the sort of cases that can go either way. To prevent deportation, a lawyer has to convince an immigration judge to issue a stay and reopen the case. Wassim had some things in his favor. He's married to an American citizen and was working toward a green card, but since September 11, judges seem to be increasingly strict. I think it's fair to summarize the current US policy like this: if we can deport you, we will, just to be safe. Another guy I met in Pakistan says the INS told him his papers weren't in order and give him a choice-- go to jail, maybe for a year, and fight it, or get on a plane right now. He chose the plane. Huram pulls out another picture of his family. He and his wife have been lying to his kids, telling them that he's away working, that he had to go overseas. For the first two months when I was in jail, we never told our kids that's where I was. But this thing is going to go in a bad impression on our kids. Now they know I'm in Pakistan, and they ask me, Papa, when are you coming home? Papa, when are you coming home? And I told them I'll be coming home soon. Huram has been keeping up the lie for eight months now. I get Wassim and Huram to pose for a picture, ask them to make their best sad-immigrant, please-let-me-back-in-the-United-States faces. They try, but can't stop laughing. When I try to imagine the government's point of view, I think about the plane that carried these guys back to Pakistan. Maybe most of the seats were filled with people like them. But what if, on the last seat in the back row, there was a terrorist. Was it worth it? After all, three of the September 11 hijackers were in this country illegally. On one of the last days, I go to meet Asma Jahangir, who works with the Pakistan Commission on Human Rights in the United Nations. It was some of her people who helped track down the deportees. She's a small woman who doesn't joke around much. This is a country where two women a day are killed, some burned alive, for dishonoring their families. Where it's illegal to speak ill of Islam. Where posters have been put up in phone booths, calling for Asma's death. 1/5 of Asma's employees are security guards, all carry big guns. I pull out a second tape recorder and play her part of the debate I've brought. This is Michael Chertoff, an assistant Attorney General of the United States. You heard him briefly in Jack Hitt's story. He makes a pretty powerful argument. She stares at the tape while it plays. There's the old expression in the context of the traditional criminal law that it's better that 10 guilty people go free than one innocent person should be imprisoned. And that's simply maybe an aphoristic way of making the point that we want to have the risk of error fall in favor of the one innocent person, even if it means that by mistake 10 guilty people don't get punished. But what do you do when the question is different? Is it worth having 1,000 innocent people killed to avoid having one innocent person suffer? Suppose you have Mohamed Atta, and you have some information about him. And you're sitting there and you decide, well, we don't have proof beyond a reasonable doubt yet, so we're going to let him out on bail until we collect it. And then he drives a plane into the World Trade Center. Would you really be willing to say it is worth the lives of 1,000 innocent people to keep one person from being detained for three or four months? Asma taps a pack of Benson and Hedges on her desk. Mr. Chertoff, I can send you a tape, but here's her rebuttal. Your assistant Attorney General is very much sounding like our assistant Attorney Generals. He is giving an emotional example, which is not necessarily correct. It's like our Attorney General telling us all the time, we don't know who did it. We just have an idea that it is this place, so you round up 300 people and detain them and don't tell anybody about it. And we find that obnoxious. And I'm surprised that that kind of logic is being given to the people in the US and they are taking it. Then Asma says something that catches me off-guard. She says this bothers her for another reason. When the US starts having secret trials and secret deportations, when human rights erode in the United States, it becomes harder for her to make the case for human rights here. If democracies don't respect human rights, she says, why should dictatorships? The one central question all the deportees had while I was in Pakistan, the one thing that drove everyone crazy, was the question, why investigate me? Why was Wassim pulled over at 7:00 AM? Why did 25 FBI agents appear at Ansar's door? Most of the deportees felt the US government had singled them out, but this doesn't seem to be quite true. When I got back, I spoke with Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Immigration Policy Institute at NYU's law school. His group has been scouring the newspapers, talking to lawyers, to gather data on as many of these secret detentions as possible. They've now got information on some 400 people, about half the number picked up. You know what a lot of them want to know? A lot of them want to know, why me? Why was I rounded up? Do you have an answer for them? I mean, you've looked at a bunch of cases. Do you know how it was the INS got onto most of these people? One would have to say that the bulk of these people were arrested on the basis of tips. Wow. Which is, frankly, very unfortunate. I think what that shows is that people are called on people. Frequently neighbors called on neighbors. Frequently people who had business disputes with people called on people. People who had competitive business situations with people called on people. So it wasn't like the police were running around, and the INS were running around, picking up anyone who looked like they might be a Muslim. I can't say that was the dominant story. I think the dominant story was people were calling in with tips. So it was us. I think it frequently was us. And that obviously is another unfortunate tale about how we behave in a crisis and in an emergency like this. Why do you think the government was so secretive about this, if what they were doing is not something maybe they're terribly embarrassed about? I really don't know. I mean, I think we-- I have to say that I felt like what they were hiding was not as bad as it might have been. Exactly, which is all the more reason to say that there was probably no reason to hide, except government agencies' arrogance that they don't have to reveal things. Here's what I've been thinking. Secrecy is like a shot of Novocaine. It keeps you from having to feel anything. It blurs the chain of responsibility. We all want to believe our government is doing a fair job, that it's balancing the needs of security and fairness. We want to believe that someone from another country who's determined enough can make a life here, that those words engraved by the Statue of Liberty actually mean something. The secrecy saves us from having to think about it. It keeps the names and stories inked out. David Kestenbaum is filling in as a producer on our show for a few months. Act Three, Secret Wiretaps From a Secret Court. We've had a secret court here in the United States since way before 9/11. It's called a FISA court. FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It's a whole court system designed to do one thing: authorize wiretaps on people who may be foreign spies or foreign agents of some sort. And for 24 years since the court's creation, it has never said no to the government on any wiretap request, as best as anyone can figure out. Then this past year, the court finally did say no, for the first time ever possibly, with an opinion that said that Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Bush Justice Department were going way too far. Note that the judges who said this were all conservatives, appointed to their positions by Chief Justice Rehnquist of the Supreme Court. The judges said that the Justice Department was trying to squeak its way around rules on wiretapping citizens that have been in place for decades now. They cited scores of abuses all done in the name of the War on Terror. The Justice Department, as you might expect, disagreed. A legal fight broke out. Blue Chevigny tells the whole story. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this fight is that for the first time, it gives us a glimpse inside the FISA court. Up until now, we've known next to nothing. We didn't know where the secret court met. We didn't know when. We didn't know which government agencies were responding to wiretaps, or what they did with the information they got from the tapes. We didn't know who was getting tapped or exactly why. We did know, because it was part of the original law creating the court, that there were seven judges on the court at any time. They served a seven-year term and they were regular district court judges from around the country. This is Ann Beeson, a lawyer at the ACLU and one of the people who's tried over the years to figure out what's going on inside FISA. Our understanding is that one judge would randomly get assigned to review an application for a surveillance warrant. And that judge would just look at the warrant-- I don't know whether he changed his robe, probably not-- and decide whether or not it was justified, under the standards in the FISA law. Some quick background. The FISA statute itself was a compromise that came out of the last big battle between privacy and national security in the 1960s and '70s. In the aftermath of Watergate and other scandals, a Senate investigation known as the Church Committee found that intelligence agents were routinely spying on and wiretapping people they shouldn't be-- like, famously, Martin Luther King, Jr.-- all in the name of national security. Congress set up the FISA court to make sure that the people that were spied on were actually agents of a foreign power, but in a compromise with the Justice Department, the court was allowed to meet in secret. And also, the standard to get a wiretap through FISA was much lower than in a regular court. Specifically, the Fourth Amendment did not apply. You didn't need to show probable cause that a crime was being committed before you could do FISA surveillance. The USA PATRIOT Act, which was passed quickly and mostly without opposition through Congress after September 11, changed everything. It altered the language in the FISA act by just one word, a familiar little word we use every day-- the. Before, FISA had stated that foreign intelligence gathering had to be the purpose of the surveillance. And now, it only had to be a significant purpose of it. What this wording change meant varied depending on who you talked to, but a lot of people feared that it gave the government too much spying power. Because of the the USA PATRIOT Act, they can listen in. If they really want you, they can just wiretap you without any probable cause that a crime has been committed. This is Congressman Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia. He sits on the House Judiciary Committee and opposed the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Now, I had an amendment, when it was being considered, that simply said that when the target stops using the phone, you have to stop listening. So if somebody else is using the phone, you can't just listen in on that conversation. My amendment was defeated, which means that if they know you're volunteering in the Democratic National Headquarters, they can drop a bug there and keep listening. But law-abiding citizens don't expect their meetings to be infiltrated. They don't expect their phone calls to be wiretapped. The fact that the amendment was defeated should alert people that there's more to this than fighting terrorism. Because the bill in the USA PATRIOT Act is not limited to terrorism. Congressman Scott and others were afraid that the Justice Department would use the FISA court to get these easier secret FISA wiretaps and use them to spy on people who aren't terrorists or spies. But because none of their proceedings were public, nobody was sure how the FISA court was reading the word change. In August, a few members of Congress, most vocally Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Chairman of the Senate's Committee on the Judiciary, decided to try to find out. He and other members of Congress wrote a letter to the FISA court, asking them for their take on the word change. And they got a reply. Ann Beeson of the ACLU tells the story. The court said, oh, we're so glad you asked. It turns out that we issued a very important decision on precisely this point, of what the meaning of the PATRIOT Act is back in May. And now we've decided, now that you've asked us, that we should probably made that public, because it is really quite an important decision. And in fact, we denied the government's request for very broad new powers based on new PATRIOT Act language. What the senators had uncovered was the biggest courtroom drama you never heard of. It went like this. Attorney General John Ashcroft had interpreted the USA PATRIOT Act language as broadly as possible. That is, he said that now, under the new wording, the FISA court should authorize wiretaps in cases where criminal investigation was the main purpose, not national security. But the FISA court judges disagreed with his interpretation of the PATRIOT Act, and for the first time in history issued an opinion which said no. And the opinion itself is a remarkable document. Never before has there been a public opinion of the FISA court, ever. And the opinion documents a whole series of events leading up to it, which nobody knew anything about. They said, we think it's quite relevant to recite a history of abuses even before the government got new powers. In other words, even before it got this new power, it was doing things improperly. And we have documented that, and we have reprimanded some FBI officers, and in some cases even refused to let an FBI officer ever appear before the FISA court again because they were so distressed at this abuse of the power. The court cites 75 cases of abuse of the system. And to understand those abuses, remember that the original purpose of the FISA court was to prevent scenarios like this one. Let's say a criminal investigator thinks a guy is involved in drug activity, and he wants to do a wiretap on the guy, but he doesn't have enough evidence under the fourth amendment to do it through the criminal courts. So the criminal division guy calls up a friend, somebody in intelligence-- in the FBI for example-- and says, this guy is up to something and he might have ties to a foreign country anyway. Do me a favor and go to the FISA court and get them to authorize a wiretap. To guard against that scenario, for 20 years the FISA court had put up what they called a wall. Regular criminal investigators and prosecutors couldn't go to foreign intelligence investigators and tell them who to tap. The 75 cases of abuse that the FISA court cited in its ruling were all instances where government officials had tried to breach that wall. So the FISA court ruled against the Justice Department, and on the same day in August that they made their ruling public, they revealed something else. John Ashcroft and the Justice Department had not accepted the FISA court's ruling. There was an appeals process in the FISA statute, written in, in case of a major disagreement like this. But remember, there had never been a major disagreement before. The FISA court had never turned down a Justice Department request before. And so, for the first time ever, the FISA appeals court met. It's made up of three judges also convening in secret. Here's Ann Beeson. Again, a remarkable situation. Because here we have a decision that's on appeal to a secret court that, whether it does so directly or not, clearly involves the constitutionality of a major federal statute, giving the government new powers to spy on people all over the United States. And there's no one representing the side of the Constitution, because the only actual party in the proceeding and in the case is the federal government. For that reason, of course, the ACLU and a number of other groups immediately got together and knew we had to file some kind of brief. Sounds simple enough. But consider for a second, this is a court whose operations are completely secret as a matter of national security, a court that no outside lawyer has ever filed a brief with. Normally, in any other case, there are actually rules and very specific deadlines for when you can file this kind of a brief. The court's address and the clerk's name and everything is right there on the internet. In this case, nobody knows where it physically exists, even. Nobody knew. And therefore we had to go take this radical step of actually calling one of the judges directly, which is normally not even really proper, for lawyers to talk to judges directly. So we called. And it wasn't myself, actually, it was another colleague here at the ACLU. And he said, we're the ACLU and we know you're one of these FISA judges, and we want to file a brief. What do we do? And the judge said, I can't talk to you about this at all. He was sympathetic to the fact that we needed to communicate with someone. But he couldn't do it himself, and so he basically just got off the phone. About a week into this process, we learn that the court had set a secret hearing to hear the government's argument in the case. And we learned of it-- I think I remember it being on a Monday. The hearing was done, and the only oral argument the court heard was from the government. No one on the other side. Then the day after the secret hearing, Ann got a call from a woman identifying herself as a designated clerk of the FISA court, telling her the case wasn't over, giving her permission to submit the ACLU brief, and giving her an address for the court in a Justice Department building. Ann sent in their brief, and the court sent back an official letter, an order, saying they'd accepted it. She fished the order out of a stack of papers on her desk and showed it to me. So here's the order. And off to the left, it says, Number 02-001, showing that this is the first case that the FISA court of review has ever heard before. And I had this image of this court having never really issued public orders before, and of the judges directing their secretary to create a new template for the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, for the first time ever, because they'd never issued an order. And it bears some resemblance to normal court orders. Normally, at the very top of a court order it would say the name of the court, and have their address and phone number and contact information. This order just says at the top, United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. She pointed to the top of the page. And I was really amused, because whoever produced this order put the name of the court in this very gothic font. So it just looks like a parody of a secret court to me. Two months went by. Then in November, on the 18th, the Court of Appeals issued its decision. It overturned the lower court and sided with the Justice Department's interpretation of the USA PATRIOT Act. The ACLU had, in essence, lost the case. The court at least engaged in an analysis about whether or not the law was unconstitutional. But they did so in really quite a cursory way. And they only dealt really superficially with the argument that we made in our brief. The most remarkable thing about the decision is, after they engage in this superficial analysis of how, oh, it's really not a problem that this doesn't meet the requirements of the fourth amendment, the decision actually says at the very end, that they realize the question is really hard and that it's probably true that FISA doesn't meet the standards of the fourth amendment. But it comes close enough, the court says. And it's just remarkable, this notion that it's OK for the government to just be close enough to the Constitution, but they don't actually have to comply with it. Do you have that right in front of you? Yeah, I do. Can you actually read it? Yeah. It says, "We think the procedures and government showings required under FISA, if they do not meet the minimum Fourth Amendment warrant standards, certainly come close." And that's all they say. The court of review's action revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts. Attorney General John Ashcroft, of course, sees things differently. This is from a press conference on the day of the appeals court decision. This will greatly enhance our ability to put pieces together that different agencies have. I believe this is a giant step forward. In his press conference, he didn't say much about the Constitutional questions raised by the decision, though he was asked. We wanted to hear more of the Justice Department's reasoning, so we decided to give them a call. Obviously, you want to do this to put on the radio, right? Well, yeah. OK. Let me check to see if I might-- This proved a lot more difficult than you'd think. --and I'm sorry, I should have done this for you before, but I might be better off-- It took two months of continuous phone calls. Finally an interview was set up with David Kris, a lawyer who worked on the Justice Department's brief before the FISA appeals court. We asked about the possibility that criminal investigators will start to label everyday Americans as threats to national security just to get a wiretap. And here's how he explained that it shouldn't be a big concern. This appeal does not change who may be a target of FISA searches or surveillance. That is the same now as it was before, and if you are not a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, you may not be targeted under FISA. David Kris made this point several times. He slowed down when he said it. What has changed, he said, is something different, that the intelligence side and the criminal side can share information about cases and potential targets more freely. In other words, the wall is down. Which is fine if you trust the government will do the right thing with this power, or dangerous if you don't. The ACLU has tried to figure out if there's any way to appeal the decision, to the Supreme Court, for example. It's a constitutional question at stake, after all But they can only bring a case if they find someone who thinks they were unfairly wiretapped under FISA, and there's not much chance of that, since virtually everyone tapped under FISA will never know they were. Blue Chevigny, from New York City. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself with Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Dave Kestenbaum, and Starlee Kine. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Jane Golombisky. Music help from consigliere Sarah Vowell. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, visit our website, where you can get tapes or you can also listen to our programs for free, 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 keeps calling me at 3:00 in the morning to say: We're the ACLU and we know you're one of these FISA judges, and we want to file a brief. What do we do? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Sure, back when they were freshmen, Kim and Tiffany and Laura were starstruck when they saw the older kids who took the leads in all the high school plays. There was Sean Bayer, who played Fagin in Oliver. There was Kathy Ferraro, who played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and actually hugged Tiffany, who was then just a chorus member, during the big scene when says goodbye to Munchkinland. There was Robin S. Clark, who was just a freshman like them. Robin S. Clark has been the lead in Cabaret and Singing in the Rain. And when I first met her and I saw her in Cabaret, I was like, oh my god. I can't believe she's a freshman. My god, she's so good. And then I had her in a few of my classes and we got to know each other. And I wouldn't say that we're best friends or anything. But I know her. I had Human Behavior with her. And we were in the same group or whatever, and it was just like, oh, she's in my group. Yeah! These days, Tiffany, Laura, and Kim are upperclassmen at Oak Park and River Forest High School, just outside Chicago. Now they get the lead roles in the school plays. Now Kim would never be thrown by one girl who she remembers. And oh wow, she was just the lead in 42nd Street and Anything Goes. Yeah. I really got starstruck with her too. But she was not very nice. And I thought she was so cool. And then the times that I'd meet her, she would just totally blow me off like I wasn't even important. And that just really hurt. That just really knocked me down. But you know, Oak Park and River Forest is a big school. And in reality, most students do not get knocked down if the lead from 42nd Street ices them. Most students at Oak Park couldn't care less. Drama is uncool. Drama is to be ignored. But at Oak Park, as in high schools all across Chicago-land, all across our great Midwest, hundreds of miles within the sound of my voice right now, as I speak to you from Chicago, in every high school there's a small cadre of students, and they're in all the plays. They can discuss at length which show was Melky Boyle's best one. They're the ones who notice the newspaper clipping, taped up in the nurse's office, about Robin S. Clark, who's now in college. But it said, "Robin S. Clark, the new funny girl." Oh my god. And I was just like, [GASP], I know her. I know her. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it is This American Life. I'm Ira Glass back for another week, documenting everyday stories of these United States. Today's show is about the drama bug, people who get it. Act One, David Sedaris tells his mom that he wants to be an actor. Act Two, a month of rehearsals for a real high school play outside Chicago. Act Three, dying for Shakespeare. Stay with us. Act One. David Sedaris is the author of Barrel Fever and of many plays, including most recently, One Woman Shoe in New York City. His plays get critical acclaim in the New York Times and elsewhere. He is a Morning Edition commentator. And it was this story of his that he's about to read for us, this story about getting the drama bug, that gave us the idea to do an entire program on the drama bug. We're going to divide up this story into two parts. Here's the first. The man was sent to our school in order to inspire us. And personally speaking, I thought he did an excellent job. After introducing himself in a relaxed and casual manner, he started towards the back of the room, only to be stopped midway by what we came to know as "the invisible wall," that transparent barrier realized only by mimes, drug addicts, and certain varieties of rapid cycling psychotics. I sat enthralled as he righted himself and began investigating the imaginary wall with his open palms, running his hands over the hard, smooth surface in hopes of finding a way out. Moments later he was tugging an invisible rope, then struggling in the face of a violent, fantastic wind. You know you're living in a small town when you can reach the ninth grade without ever having seen a mime. As far as I was concerned, this man was a prophet, a genius, a pioneer in the field of entertainment. And here he was in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was a riot the way he imitated the teacher, turning down the corners of his mouth and rifling through his imaginary purse in search of gum and aspirin. Was this guy funny or what? I went home and demonstrated the invisible wall for my infant brother, who pounded at the very real wall beside his bed, shrieking and wailing in disgust. When my mother asked what I'd done to provoke him, I threw up my hands in mock innocence, before lowering them to retrieve the imaginary baby which lay fussing at my feet. I patted the back of my little ghost in order to induce gas and was investigating its soiled diaper when I noticed my mother's face assume an expression she reserved for unspeakable horror. I had seen this look only twice before-- once when she was caught in the path of a charging, rabid pig and once again when I told her I wanted a peach-colored velveteen blazer with matching slacks. "I don't know who put you up to this," she said, "But I'll kill you myself before I watch you grow up to be a clown. You want to diaper a baby? Make yourself useful and wipe up the genuine article." She handed me my brother before turning to leave the room. Because I respected her opinion, I did as I was told, ending my career in mime with a whimper, rather than the silent bang I had hoped for. The visiting actor returned to the classroom a few months later, removing his topcoat to reveal a black body stocking worn with a putty-colored neck brace, the result of a recent automobile accident. This afternoon's task was to introduce us to the works of William Shakespeare. And once again, I was completely captivated by his charm and skill. When the words became confusing, you needed only pay attention to the actor's face and hands to know that this particular character was not just angry, but vengeful. I loved the undercurrent of hostility that lay beneath the surface of this deceptively beautiful language. It seemed a shame that people no longer spoke this way. And I undertook a campaign to reintroduce Elizabethan English to the citizens of Raleigh. "Perchance, fair lady, thou dost think me unduly vexed at the sorrowful state of thine quarters," I said to my mother as I ran the vacuum over the living room carpet she was inherently too lazy to bother with. "These foul specks, the evidence of life itself, have sullied not only thine shag-tempered mat, but also thine character. Be ye mad, woman? Were it a crime to neglect thine dwellings, you, my feeble-spirited mistress, would hang from the tallest venerable tree in penitence for your shameful ways. Be there not linens to both launder and iron free of turbulence? See ye not the porcelain plates and hearty mugs waiting to be washed clean of evidence? Get thee to thine work, damnable lady, and quickly, before the products of thine very loins raise their collected fists in a spirit born of rage and indignation, forcibly coaxing the last breath from the foul chamber of thine vain and upright throat. Go now, wastrel, and get to it." This time my mother, a high school dropout, was caught off guard. Members of her immediate family had done time in some serious mental institutions. And something suggested I might be next. I could tell by the state of my room that she spent the next day searching my dresser for drugs. The clothes I took pride in neatly folding were crammed tight into the doors with no regard for color or category. I smelled the evidence of cigarettes and noticed the coffee rings left on my desk. I loved my mother dearly. But mess with mine drawers, and ye have just made thineself an enemy. Tying a feather to the shaft of my ballpoint pen, I quilled her a letter. "The thing that ye search for so desperately resideth not in mine well-ordered chambers, but in the questionable content of thine own character." I slipped the note into her purse, folded twice and sealed with wax from the candles I now used to light my room. I took to brooding, refusing to let up until I received a copy of Shakespeare's collected plays. Reading them, though, just didn't provide the kick I'd hoped for. I found it more enjoyable to simply carry the book from room to room, occasionally skimming for fun words I might toss into my ever-fragrant vocabulary. The dinner hour became either unbearable or excruciatingly, depending on my mood. "Me thinks, kind sir, most gentle lady, fellow siblings all, that this barnyard fowl be most tasty and succulent, having simmered in its own sweet juices for such a time as it might take the sun to pass, rosy and full-fingered, across the plum-colored sky for the course of a twilight hour. 'Tis crisp yet juicy, this plump bird, satisfied in the company of such finely roasted neighbors. Hear me out, fine relations, and heed my words. For me thinks it adventurous, and fanciful too, to saddle mine fork with both foul and carrot at the exact same time, the twin juices blending together in a delicate harmony which doth cajole and enliven the tongue in a spirit of unbridled merriment. What say ye, fine father, sisters, and infant brother too, that we raise our flagons high in celebration of this hearty feast, prepared lovingly and with tender grace by this dutiful woman we have the good fortune to address as our wife, wench, or mother?" My enthusiasm knew no limits. And as a result, it quickly reached the point where my mother literally begged me to wait in the car while she stepped into the bank or the grocery store. I was at the orthodontist's office, placing a pox upon the practice of dentistry, when the visiting actor returned to our classroom. "You missed it, my friend Lois said, the man was so indescribably powerful that I was practically crying. That's how brilliant he was. I can't describe it any better than that," she placed her chain in her hand and stared out the window into the parking lot. "There's absolutely nothing left for me to say about it, nothing. I could try to explain his realness, but you'd never be able to understand it." Lois and I had been friends for six months when our relationship suddenly took on a competitive edge. I'd never cared who made better grades or had the most spending money. We each had our strengths. The important thing was to honor one another for the thing they did best. Lois complained better than I did. And I respected her for that. Her grotesque excess of self-confidence allowed her to march into school wearing a rust-colored Afro wig. And I stood behind her 100%. She had more records than I did. And because she was a year older, she also knew how to drive a car and did so as if she were rushing to a fire. Fine, I thought, good for her. I was genuinely happy for Lois until she questioned my ability to understand the visiting actor. I was the one who identified his brilliance in the first place. Me, not her. Sure, she'd been there beside me in the classroom, but she didn't even realize that was an invisible wall until I told her. When he'd come in with his Shakespeare, she'd been just like the rest of them, laughing at his neck brace and rolling her eyes at the tangerine-sized lump in his tights. Now she was telling me that I couldn't understand him? Me think not. "Honestly woman," I said to my mother on our way to the dry cleaner, "To think that this low-lying worm might speak to me of greatness as though it were a thing invisible to mine eyes is more than I can bear. Her words doth strike mine heart with the force of a punishing blow, leaving me both stunned and highly vexed too. Hear me though, for I shall bide my time quietly and with cunning, striking back at the very hour she doth least expect it. Such an affront shall not go unchallenged. Of that you may rest assured, gentle mother. My vengeance will hold the sweet taste of the ripest berry. And I shall savor it slowly and with gusto." "You'll get over it," my mother said. "Give it a few weeks and the whole thing will blow over." This would become her answer to everything. She'd done some asking around and concluded that I'd been bitten by what her sister called, the drama bug. My mother was convinced that this was just a phase like all the others. A few weeks of prancing and I'd drop show business just like I had the guitar and my private detective agency. I hated having my life's ambition reduced to the level of a common cold. This wasn't a bug but a full-fledged virus. It might lay low for a year or two, but this little germ would never go away. It had nothing to do with talent. Rejection wouldn't weaken it and no amount of success could ever satisfy it. The drama bug strikes hardest with Jews, homosexuals, and plump women who wear their hair in bangs. These are people who, for one reason or another, desperately crave attention. I would later learn that it's a bad idea to gather more than two of these people in an enclosed area for any amount of time. "Stage" is not an actual place but rather a state of mind related to one's whereabouts during the time you're not asleep. "Audience" defines anyone pausing long enough for you to interrupt. We were a string of light bulbs left burning 24 hours a day. And as a result, our exhausted public soon stopped wondering what all the fuss was about. David Sedaris' story of getting the drama bug will continue later in our program after another story documenting everyday life in these United States. This recording, by the way, is Cybill Shepherd, 1974, an album called, Cybill Does it to Cole Porter. Act Two. "Lost in Yonkers." There are only 13 rehearsals left for the Oak Park and River Forest High School production of Neil Simon's play, Lost in Yonkers. And still people do not know their lines. Maybe he's a thief too, mama. But at least he loved me enough to want to help me. Yeah, we're alive but that's all we are. Aaron and Rose are the lucky ones. No, don't say that to me, Bella. God. To play grandma, Tiffany Moore uses this metal cane during rehearsals. And it's become this all-purpose prop that she uses for expressing her moods, waving it around in the air, pointing it at people. At this point, she slams it against the ground. The assistant director, the stage manager, and the director, Mr. Simon, sit in the audience with scripts in hand and feed lines. Not that hard a line. No, don't say that. Please god. Don't say that to me, Bella. No, don't say that to me. Please god. Don't say that to me, Bella. I'm sorry, Mama. I didn't mean to hurt you. Yes you do. Actually, the show's not in bad shape. The actors are mastering their accents, blocking, basic characters, they're all down. Tiffany's on stage with Laura Lopardo and both of them are old pros, veterans of seven other high school plays. Laura plays Bella, a slightly retarded 35-year-old woman. Laura is one of the strongest performers in this cast. She's very soulful. But she's also Mr. Simon's biggest worry. When he critiques the actors at the end of each rehearsal, he mostly tells the other actors to watch their accents or try some little moment a little differently. But at rehearsal after rehearsal he has the same criticism for Laura. Her character is still not there, he says. It just-- it just-- she's just still too smart. You're too smart and she's coming out too smart. There needs to be more of-- I try to think about it. It's easier when I say [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE], lines like that are a little more easier. Right, exactly. That sort of represents her level. But then when it's the whole, I'm not crying. That's so hard. I don't really know how to work in stupidity. Play it more childlike all the way through, Mr. Simon tells Laura, and those moments will come. So your first line, for instance, Jay? It's me, Aunt Bella, can I come in? Guess who forgot how to open the door? I forgot my key. Let us in. Hey, Charlie. Come on, let us in. Thank you. Bye, you guys. Let me in. You're a goof. School is officially closed. But finally, someone comes to open up the door for the cast of Lost in Yonkers. They rehearse three times over spring break and two times the weekend before the show. And although it is a gorgeous spring day outside, everyone shows up in the dimly lit school hallway. And they seem happy about it. You have to look-- Look at this. --To understand the pulp in this orange juice. Check out the rim of my glass. Look at this. Mr. Simon bought of the wrong kind of orange juice for his cast this particular day. And Laura and Tiffany are teasing him about that. The cast has been together for five weeks. And they're getting so familiar with each other that they're beginning to function as a kind of hilarious, dysfunctional family. You don't understand that-- you know orange juice really has pulp. Not this much. It is slime. Before rehearsal can begin there have to be, of course, announcements. Katie has ordered Lost in Yonkers t-shirts for the cast. T-shirts from the various plays that they've been in seem to make up a significant part of the daily high school wardrobe of this cast. And don't stiff me on this. Because I don't want to put $15 in for people who say they're going to buy a t-shirt. There will not be-- if you do not leave your $15. When do you need it? Tuesday at the latest? Monday. Monday at the latest. This is not a bank. This is not a bank, that's right. This is actually a little joke. "This is not a bank," is a line from the play. As the cast spends more and more time together, they're starting to form their own little subculture full of references to the play and jokes that only they get. The Lost in Yonkers actors can get a laugh out of each other simply by saying the phrase, General Erwin Rommel, or, who was the friend? Who was the friend? And, touchingly, it's hard for them not to use these phrases out in their regular lives as well with people who don't know that these are lines from the play. They don't know that these are jokes. That when I yell at my mom these days I use lines from the show. We were talking about my grandma and I go, Grandma's crazy, mom. Where did that horse fall, on her head? I was quoting the show. It's getting really scary. And if all this just makes the drama kids seem like obnoxious weirdos, well you try reciting the same text over and over, three hours a day, for five weeks. And see if it isn't running through your head all the time, laying in wait for some conversational gap into which it can drive its powerful force. At one point, Kim got the idea that they should all go out to eat together at a restaurant in character. As Tiffany explains, they did drive together in one car, piling into somebody's tiny compact whatever, asked for a table for seven for the Kurnitz family, which is their name in the play. But then they kind of lost their nerve. They didn't really play the characters. Instead we just did our accents when we ordered the food. And the waitress kind of looked at us funny. And that was about it. She didn't really care. But we all thought it was funny. We all thought we were really pretty funny. The youngest members of the cast are Ben Myers and Max Stewart. They're freshmen. Though, Max is quick to tell you, if you should ask him, that he's been in lots of plays, drama club shows in grade school, stretching all the way back to his role as Joseph in his first grade Christmas pageant. And then I went to junior high. And they have a much more elaborate, much more professional program at the junior high. And I did a whole bunch of shows there. I got kind of discouraged after I didn't make West Side Story. But I just bounced right back and went to the next audition. Max, when you talk about this, you sound like such an old pro. Well, I don't want to sound like I've been in the business for that long. But it's been a few-- it's been a few years. I've seen a lot. I've done a lot. But I've still got a long way to go. I actually-- I don't like to get all cocky and toot my own horn here, but I did just-- I got asked by someone to understudy for a role at The Village Players theatre, which I was very, very honored to do. It was really a lot of fun. The Village Players. Sure, they're not a real professional company. Sure, they're out in the suburbs, they're not down in the city. Sure, they're all volunteers. But they're adults. Not many boys go out for drama at Oak Park and River Forest high school. And directors often have trouble filling the male roles. And part of being in high school drama means putting up with friends who do not look too kindly on the entire endeavor. I think a lot of guys-- almost all the guys see it is a real wussy thing to do, maybe. You know what I mean? Have you felt that, Max? That people are like that? Like Ben said, they think it's a wussy thing because they think theater is one step away from like ballet. There's a terrible stereotype about all guys in theatre are gay. And it's just-- it's awful because-- Because we're not gay. An awkward silence falls amongst the three of us for a moment. Ben seems to know that what they've just said is a little strange, maybe a little offensive, because he makes a noise as if he's about to say something else. Then he looks at Max, looks down, rocks in place moment, and decides that he's not going to say anything. This show, it's definitely probably the smallest part I've ever had. So it's a lot of waiting around, which can be difficult, and just kind of watching everybody else and wishing that I was up there with them. Kim Plostina plays Aunt Gertie in the show. It's a small role, but the kind of small character part that can steal entire scenes. Kim wants to be an actress. And, while most of the cast is considering acting and theater as one option for their lives, Kim is certain. But she suffers from a handicap that the others do not. Her father is a professional actor. He does a lot of college industrial films. Actually, he discourages me from it because he doesn't want me to get hurt, is his reason. But if anything, that's just harder. Because then I always feel like I have to prove myself to him too. I really wish he'd encourage me since it's kind of hypocritical since he does the same thing. Maybe he seems how hard it is for him. Oh yeah. Oh he's definitely had a hard time at it. Especially since a couple of his friends have made it big time, and then he hasn't. So that's hard for him to watch. Years ago, at the Shady Lane Theater in Marengo, Illinois, her father was in shows with a young David Hasselhoff. And seeing his daughter fall in love with the theater-- it must be a kind of ordeal for him, the kind of test that every parent dreads. Should he discourage her in the thing she loves if it worries him so? But lately, Kim says, he's gone through a big change. He told her that he's going to introduce her to an agent. He's going to help her get auditions. And then, my dad has said to me that he's been watching me on stage and sometimes tears come to his eyes. Just for him to say that, and since he always is discouraging me. For him to tell me that, it means a lot. Tell me where. Well, you have a problem. I know I have a problem. I'm trying to solve it. And I'd appreciate any help you might give me from standing back there. No that's worse. That's worse. Six days before opening night, they run the play for the first time on the stage with the beginnings of a set, chairs representing where furniture will go. And there is a problem, there seems to be no way to put a table and sofabed on the stage and still have room for entrances and exits. So the cast converges on stage. OK, I'm as tall as my arms are, right? And I know I'm exactly as tall as-- This is where the sofabed ends. This would be the furthest corner down. Jeff. Jeff, come here. Come here. You need some male assistance? No, I need somebody that's the largest person that's going to be on this bed. OK, lay on the floor. Put your head under the chair. At this point, a surreal scene gets even more surreal. For the next eight minutes, Jeff lays on the floor, his head under a chair, as six people walk around him arguing. He is placid. He is happy. He is the consummate professional. And this is part of why you do theater in high school. It's not just the place where you can get applause and approval. As Tiffany says, this is the most intense problem solving, the most serious, concentrated work that she does in high school. But for example, do things happen in class that are as intense as that little discussion in your real classes? No, never. The most debated thing that ever has happened in any of my classes is whether or not everyone did the homework or not. It's just so much more intense because it's a thinking and a physical thing and you just do it. And you do it over and over and over again until it's perfected. Trixie, can you hear me? I've been giving warrants. He gave you a warrant. I'm not hearing you. You're not? No. In the sound closet are the crew guys, the techies, who run the lights and the sound and build the set and handle the props. Anybody who's ever done theater anywhere will tell you about the ancient rivalry between cast and crew. There are 45 crew members for three theaters at Oak Park and River Forest High School. And they constitute kind of a permanent government. Actors come and go. Shows come and go. But crew members, they're there every week. And frankly, it can be a little irritating to them that the actors think that they're all that, when the crew really runs the show. At this school, they all have special hall passes. They all answer to a teacher that they all refer to simply as, "Boss." They all insist that you spell crew, C-R-U-E, as in Motley Crue. And don't forget that umlaut. Senior Jon Huber has done 57 shows. Everything on crue is tradition. Everything. In our yearbook pictures we have pictures of our arms crossed right over left with a cut-out of a dinosaur and a stand-up light. And the dinosaur's name is Ralph. And the stand-up light's named Stanley. And we have literally turned around and walked out of pictures for our yearbook because they said we couldn't have it. Jon says there's a lot of prejudice against crew. Some teachers think that they're slackers, and smokers, and drug users. People don't notice the charity work crew does. People haven't noticed that so many more girls are now on crew. Though that does threaten some crew traditions. Some of the problems that we've had is female crew members have coddled some of the younger-classmen. And usually it's been our intent to kind of rule with an iron fist. Do you think there's anything positive about the way the girls want to do it? Oh yeah. They work a whole lot more than we do. At that point, he turned back to his own work. Cues were being missed and opening night was just a few nights away. We arrive there in a minute when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our story about the Oak Park and River Forest High School production of Lost in Yonkers continues with opening night. Aahhh. Yeah I know. My hands are sweating. Minutes before the curtain rises, Laura is still being made up. She's sick with what turns out later to be pnemonia. Mr. Simon has given her another set of pep talks about making her character childlike and not too smart. She shivers and runs to the stage. No opening night is complete without some kind of small crisis. For Lost in Yonkers, it involves a form-fitting, sleeveless t-shirt that Jeff is supposed to wear on stage. Jeff, get used to the idea. You're wearing it. You're wearing the dego tee. You have to. I can't, come on. You have to. It's tighter than hell. I don't care. You have to. There are two types of actors, the kind who'd love nothing more than to reveal more of their own bodies on stage and the kind who can get a little self-conscious. Jeff is squarely in that second camp. He thinks he's too big for a tight t-shirt. And on the side of the dressing room, he sits, muttering bitterly that wearing the t-shirt will hurt his performance. Everyone goes backstage. It's all shadows and darkness and the dim, blue work lights. For six weeks, they've planned for this moment and practiced for it and wondered about it. And now, for the first time, they get to see if they were right about what would make sense to the audience. And early in the first scene, it happens. They get their first laugh. They laughed. They laughed. Yes. A few scenes later, Jeff, who's playing a small-time Jewish gangster, is supposed to strip to his sleeveless t-shirt. He unbuttons his outer shirt, revealing the tight t-shirt underneath. And there he stops. He never takes off his outer shirt. His character, Uncle Louie, simply decides to climb in bed wearing a dress shirt. Backstage, I catch up with him. Mr. Simon is going to kill me but-- that's not a Louie-like thing to do. But you know what? I don't think anybody out there really cares and is paying that much attention to me wearing a dress shirt when I go to bed. If it makes me do better, I'm going to do it. During intermission, Mr. Simon came backstage and congratulated all the actors. And he told Jeff that he looked ridiculous. Still, Jeff got more laughs than anyone in the cast. And Mr. Simon resolved to get him a looser-fitting t-shirt for future performances. Opening night, by any measure, was a wildly successful night of theater. They all got laughs. Everyone kept their accents. Everyone remembered their lines. And while everyone was good, Laura, Tiffany, and Jeff were stand-outs. Bella, sweatheart, don't go to that movie anymore. And don't see that fella again. He may be very nice. But he sounds like he's got a lot of wacky ideas. Do you know what I mean, sweetheart? Jay, Arty, you said you'd support me. You said you'd back me up. You promised. Back you up with what? The restaurant? The money? Is that what this guy is after? He wants more than that. What could possibly be more than that, Bella? Me. He loves me. He wants to marry me. I want to marry him. I want to have his children. I want my own babies. Jesus Christ. During the big dramatic scenes between Laura and Tiffany, it was just like Mr. Simon predicted. You could hear a pin drop. The audience was that quiet. And after the last scene, after the bows, they run from the dressing room, up some stairs, through a door, and out into the lobby where their friends and families are. You were so good. Mr. Simon found them all. He told them the show went just as he'd dreamt of. And when he spotted Laura, he hugged her. Well-- oh my god-- I don't know what to say to you. You were so fabulous. That scene with you and Mama was-- you blew me away. Every moment tonight was perfect. It was the best you've ever been. I mean, I was crying through half of it. I'm so grateful. You have come so far. It really was-- it really was. And while they stood in the lobby, a pair of young girls, someone's sisters, ran up to the different performers, thrilled, starstruck. They said a few words and ran off, nervous and excited. It's This American Life, our special drama bug edition. And now we continue our dramatic little presentation with David Sedaris, the second half of his story. I had the drama bug and Lois had a car. This being the case, I quickly forgave her when informed that the visiting actor had scheduled a production of Hamlet set to take place at the amphitheatre of the Raleigh Rose Garden. He, himself, would direct and play the title role. But the other parts were up for grabs. We went to the audition, and, because we were the youngest, Lois and I were assigned the roles of the traveling players Hamlet uses to bate his Uncle Claudius. It wasn't the part I was hoping for, but I accepted it with a quiet dignity. I still had a few speeches and planned to use them to the best of my ability, outshining the other actors who were all much older than I. They were in their 20s and 30s and carried years of experience in such long-running outdoor dramas as The Lost Colony and Tender is the Lamb. These were professionals and I hoped to benefit from their experience, sitting literally at their feet as the director paced the lip of the stage, addressing his clenched fist as, "poor Yorick." I worshipped these people. Lois slept with them. By the second week of rehearsal, she had taken up with Laertes, who she claimed had a real way with the sword. Unlike me, she was embraced by the older crowd, attending late-night keg parties with Polonius and Ophelia, driving to the lake with the director while Gertrude and Rosenkrantz made out in the backseat. The killer was that Lois was nowhere near as committed as I was. Her drama bug was the equivalent of a 24-hour-flu. Yet there she was, swimming naked with the director himself, while I practiced lines alone in my room. As traveling players, it was decided that we would make our entrance tumbling onto the stage. When Lois complained that the grass was irritating her skin, the director examined the wee pimples on her back and decided that, rather than tumbling, the players would enter skipping. I had practiced my tumble until my brain lost its mooring and could be heard rattling in my skull. And now, on the basis of one complaint, we were skipping. He'd already cut out all of my speeches, leaving me with one line, "Aye, my Lord." While the other actors strolled the rose gardens memorizing their vengeful soliloquies, I skipped back and forth across the parking lot whispering, "Aye, my Lord. Aye, my Lord." Lois felt silly skipping and spoke to the director, who praised her instincts and announced that henceforth, the players would enter walking. The less I had to do, the more my fellow actors used me as a personal slave. I would have been happy to help them run lines. But instead, they wanted me to polish their crowns or trot out to the car and search the floorboards for their dagger. "Looking for something to do? You can help Dugan glow tape the stage," the director said. "You can chase the spiders out of the dressing room, or better yet, run to the store. Who wants drinks?" Not only did Lois lay in the shade doing nothing, but she was the first one to hand me a $20 bill when placing an order for a $0.30 candy bar. During rehearsal breaks, she huddled with the actors while I was off anchoring ladders for one of the technicians. When it came time for our big scene, Lois recited her lines as if she were reading the words from the surface of some distant billboard. She squinted and paused between syllables, punctuating each word with a question mark. If the director had a problem with her performance, he kept it to himself. I, on the other hand-- I needed to remove the sweater from around my neck, walk slower, and drop the accent. It might have been easier to accept the criticism had he spread it around a little, but that seemed unlikely. She could enter the stage with a slice of pizza in one hand and a Dr. Pepper in the other and that was fine, Lois, just great. By this point, I was finding my own way home from rehearsal. Lois couldn't give me a ride if she was always rushing off to some party or restaurant with, what she referred to as, "the gang from Elsinore." I would wave them off and wait in the parking lot for one of my parents to drive me home. "The thing to remember," my mother said, "Is that 10 years from now, you could wake up underneath one of these people and have no idea you'd ever even seen them before. Time passes. You'll see. Enough liquor and people can forget anything. Don't let it get to you. If nothing else, it's taught you to skim the change while buying their drinks." I didn't appreciate her casual attitude. But the business with the change was insightful. My mother had the vengeful part down. It was the craft of acting I thought she knew nothing about. We were in dress rehearsal when the director approached Lois in regards to a production he had planned for the fall. This was to be a musical based on the lives of roving gypsies, and he had her in mind for the role of a lusty bandit. Lois couldn't sing. Everybody knew that. Neither could she act or play the tambourine. I watched the man kneel down in the grass and literally beg her to accept the part. When I expressed an interest, he suggested I might enjoy working behind the scenes in some backstage capacity. He meant for me to hang lights or lug scenery, to turn into one of those guys with low-riding pants and a belt burdened with wrenches and thick roles of gaffer's tape. Anyone thinking I might be trusted with electrical wiring had to be a complete idiot. And that's what this man was. I looked at him clearly then, noticing how his tights made a mockery of his slack calves and dumpy little basket. If he was such a big, stinking deal, what was he doing in Raleigh, North Carolina? His blow-dried hair, the Cuban-heeled shoes and rainbow-striped suspenders-- it was all a sham. Why wear tights with suspenders when their only redeeming feature was that they promised to stay up on their own? And acting? The man performed as though everyone around him sported a shrimp-sized hearing aid clamped to their ear. He shouted his lines, grinning like a jack-o-lantern and flailing his hands as if he were fighting off gnats. His was a form of acting that never fails to embarrass me. It's the same feeling I get when watching someone hawk a vegetable slicer or deliver a singing telegram. You know it's supposed to sound convincing. But you can't get beyond the sad fact that this person actually thinks he's bringing some joy into your life. Somewhere he's got a mother sifting through a shoe box of mimeographed playbills, pouring herself another drink and wondering when her son is going to come to his senses and swallow some drain cleaner. I saw Hamlet for the man he was and, in the process, saw myself as a sort of sad sack Yorick who would blindly follow along behind him. My parents attended the opening night performance. Following my, "Aye, my Lord," I laid on the grass as Lois poured a false vile of poison into my ear. As I lay dying, I opened my eyes enough to see my father sleeping, my mother stretched out beside him fighting off the moths who, along with a few dozen humans, had been attracted by the bright light. There was a cast party afterwards, but I didn't go. I changed my clothes in the dressing room where the actors stood congratulating one another. Horatio asked me to run to the store for some cigarettes and I pocketed his money, promising to return with lightning speed. "You were the best in the whole show," my mother said, stopping for frozen pizza on her way home. "I mean it. You walked onto that stage and all eyes went right for you." It occurred to me then that my mother was a better actor than I could ever hope to be. Acting is different than posing or pretending. When done well, it bears a striking resemblance to lying. I didn't envy my mother's skill. Neither did I contradict her. That's how convincing she was. It seemed best, sitting beside her with a frozen pizza thawing on my lap, to simply sit back and learn. David Sedaris lives in New York City. He's the author of Barrel Fever. "Drama Bug" is from an upcoming book. I know this song is just getting better and better. But we don't have time to play the whole thing, and we have to spin head towards the end so you can hear this. This is just too good. Hold on. Here we go. Again just spinning ahead on our little tape machine so you can hear the end of this. Here we go. The song stylings of Mr. Anthony Newley here on This American Life. Act Three, "From the Audience Seats." OK, so you mean to go to the theater. That was so Baltimore, the way I just said that. OK, so you know you want to go to the movies. So you mean to go to the theater-- I'm from Baltimore so the accent creeps out sometimes-- so you mean to go to the theater. But it's so much trouble. And it's so much time. And tickets are expensive, and you have to pay the sitter, and there's parking, and yeah, yeah, yeah. Mark O'Brien faces obstacles even more harsh than this to attend the theater. Because he had polio when he was a kid, he's in an iron lung. He can come out of the iron lung for a limited amount of time, though, and for a while-- as unlikely as this sounds-- he would use that time to go to plays. We offer this little piece of writing as an extreme example of what some people will go through, as audience, when they get the drama bug. The first time I attended a performance of the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, they did Hamlet in the round. It began when a man pushed a wheelbarrow on stage, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] through a trap door that trundled down a ramp three feet from me. The guards ran onstage dressed in Green Beret uniforms. I was hooked. After that, I went to every performance I could. The festival allowed a friend in for free. So every summer, I rented vans equipped with wheelchair lifts to take us to the park. The season's tickets cost more than $100, expensive for someone living on SSI. But as a friend told me, culture is what we live for, the reason we put up with bills, smog, and [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. The stage, surrounded by tall trees, faced a natural amphitheatre. I sat right next to the elevated stage [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. One of the light stands. One year, I bought two tickets for each performance. During a night performance of Coriolanus, the actor, the lead, dressed like a 20th century admiral, tore off his epaulets and hurled them offstage, nearly hitting me. The following week, the actor approached me before showtime. "I'm surprised you're back," he said, "I thought I might've killed you with those epaulets." I was so excited to meet him that I forgot to ask for his autograph. Every performance was exciting because it was live and things might go wrong. Things seldom went wrong, but still there was always that chance. You [UNINTELLIGIBLE] that advantage from the deadly perfect land of movies and television. I love seeing the same actor take on different roles. One actor, who imitated Johnny Carson, who played the clown, Touchstone, for As You Like It-- the following week he was Richard II, the tyrannical, blustering king who becomes more eloquent, more human, after he's overthrown and imprisoned. After many years in the park, the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival moved to a new amphitheatre in the suburbs. The stage area is half a mile from the entrance. When we reached our seats, I saw there wasn't a speck of shade. At 4:00 in the afternoon, it was well over 80. We often suffer for the things we love. This could be as true of Shakespeare as anything else. As an English major accustomed to the five-word sentences and flat inflections of Californians, I found Shakespeare's heightened sense of language intoxicating. It's not just the thees and thous. It's the metaphors, the jokes, the rhythms of the poetry and the jostling, bubbling, prose. So I thought I would suffer gladly for these pleasures. I stayed in that blast furnace of language too long. The heat made me so weak that I couldn't drink any water. I became ill and had to be hospitalized. In the hospital, I clapped [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I turned blue whenever the iron lung was off for more than three minutes. My doctor thought I would die. It took me six weeks to become well enough to leave the hospital. I told people I nearly became the first person to die from Shakespeare. It could be worse. Abraham Lincoln died from a lousy comedy. Mike O'Brien lives in Berkeley, California. He's a writer and poet, author of a book of poems called Breathing. His email address, Marko-- that's M-A-R-K-O-- @well.com. I noticed my mother's face assume an expression she reserved for unspeakable horror. I had seen this look only twice before. Once when she was caught in the path of a charging, rabid pig and once again when I told her I wanted a peach-colored velveteen blazer with matching slacks. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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I don't know if you've seen this guy Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, on TV, heard him on the radio, but that is one charming man. A year ago this week, in January 2002-- not long after the Taliban were driven from power in Afghanistan-- he came to the United States, partly to be on hand for the State of the Union address last year. And while he was here, he spoke with an audience that was mostly Afghan-Americans at Georgetown University. And he said to them, in Pashto and then in English, come back. Come back to Afghanistan. He directed this especially to the young people. Work hard. Learn well. Study well, and make money. Bring it to Afghanistan. He grinned at the audience. Then read from this card that had been handed to him with a question on it. OK, specifically, how would you suggest the younger generation of Afghans living in US-- OK. Specifically, your areas in which you have studied. Those of you who have gone through university and have acquired degrees in various fields-- medicine, engineering, computers, management, banking, business administration, all that. These are the areas-- statistics, by the way. We need that very much. Accounting, auditing. So do come. In addition to that, if somebody wants to be the president, she or he is also welcome. So all are welcome. Afghanistan had been at work for 22 years. There were the Soviets, then the ten-year fight to expel them. Then the war between the Afghans. Then the Taliban took over. As a result, an entire generation of Afghans has grown up in the United States. Teenagers today who are much more American than they are Afghan. Many of them have never seen their country. And it's possible that the very first teenager to take Hamid Karzai's invitation to heart and return to Afghanistan was a 17-year-old from Northern California named Hyder Akbar. And, as luck would have it, before he went, he met a radio producer named Susan Burton, and she urged him to take a tape recorder along on the trip. Well, today we feel lucky to bring you the recordings that he made. As you'll hear, Hyder's father had moved back to Afghanistan-- months before Hyder went-- to work for Hamid Karzai in the new government of the country. And because of his father's position, which was pretty high up in the government, Hyder gets an insider's look at everything going on in the country. It is a very unusual glimpse at a country that most of us still do not really have much sense of. Of course, this is This American Life from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. For most of our show today, you're going to be hearing the recordings that Hyder made himself. But to give you a sense of who Hyder was before he went on his trip to Afghanistan, Susan Burton begins Hyder's story before the trip at his home in Concord, California. When Hyder goes to Barnes and Noble, the first thing he does with any new book they have in about Afghanistan is turn to the index and look up Kabul Radio. It's pretty much always in there, because on the night in 1979 when the Soviets took Kabul, they stormed two places. One was the palace and the other was Kabul Radio. Kabul Radio was headed by Hyder's dad. During the years of the resistance, Hyder's dad had two close friends. One was Hamid Karzai, now the President of Afghanistan, and the other was a legendary commander named Abdul Haq. After he looks up Kabul Radio, the next thing Hyder looks up in any book is always Abdul Haq. In his favorite book, Soldiers of God by Robert D. Kaplan, there's an entire chapter, chapter five, completely and totally devoted to Abdul Haq. One time Hyder told his mother what Kaplan said about Abdul Haq's headquarters in Peshawar. And then he describes how he went into his office, and how he was always busy, and he had one hand on the phone, another one looking at some maps. And you always felt like you were wasting time when you were [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. And my mom was like, wait. He wasn't that busy. He was at our house every single day. Hyder's dad worked with the resistance. For years, Hyder didn't see his dad and didn't know his hero, Abdul Haq. When Abdul Haq suddenly showed up at the family's house in California a couple weeks before September 11, Hyder was speechless. That day, Abdul Haq told Hyder's dad that he was scheming to topple the Taliban. Not long after September 11, he got in touch again. He was going in. He was ready. Days after Abdul Haq snuck into Afghanistan, Hyder came home from school and found his mother crying in her bedroom. Abdul Haq had been captured and killed by the Taliban, shot with dozens of bullets, then hung from a tree. Hyder wrote about the execution in his current events journal at school the next day, and a teacher wrote a check mark, and then, in red ballpoint pen, "Sorry." Just weeks after Abdul Haq's death, the Taliban were defeated by the American forces. The next month, Hyder's dad had a long talk with his old friend Hamid Karzai, sold his business, and left for Afghanistan. OK. This is my room. To the right is the TV, and I have a couple of video games and stuff like that. When I first meet Hyder, he shows me around his house. We sit down in the living room and look at family photos, like a snapshot of Hamid Karzai at Disneyland maybe 20 years ago, baby-faced, standing next to Goofy. Well, this is an issue, September 1968, it's a National Geographic issue. Hyder opens the old magazine, which he bid for off of Ebay, and shows me a favorite picture of Afghanistan. Actually, I really, really, really like this picture. This is more of the countryside of Afghanistan. And it's green, green grass and trees, and then there's just like blue, blue water flowing through. Yeah. There's a shepherd here, and then there's a cow but I'm sure. That house looks pretty neat, too. In the middle of the river, there's a rock, and there's a house built on top of it. I don't know how he gets back to the land, But I think he would probably goes through these rocks or something. We look at the picture for so long that it starts to seem to me almost like a fairytale picture you can enter inside. Like when the movie camera goes in for a closeup on a color plate in a storybook, and then all of a sudden, the wagons are rolling and the animals' tails are swishing in Dolby stereo, and the action is actually happening right there. Before Hyder's dad left for Afghanistan, he owned a hip hop clothes store in Oakland. A few months ago, he was selling FUBU pants to teenagers. Now he spends his days with the people running Afghanistan. Hyder shows me a picture taken just a couple weeks before of his dad sitting near Karzai at a medieval-looking dining table in the palace in Kabul at a meeting about peacekeeping troops. When I see this, I'm really, really happy for him. Because it's kind of like his dream. I could tell how bored and how frustrated he was living here, and having to just be at the store and just live everyday life. I remember for a couple years, my mom was telling him, don't even interact with people. I think it's pretty much because he had lost hope. It was weird. I mean, a lot of people have been effected by September 11, but like, our family's literally turned upside down. Even me. My whole plan of my life has changed. Before September 11, Hyder thought he'd study business, maybe become a mortgage broker, like his older brother. But after, Hyder felt like he had found his mission in life. He would do something big to help Afghanistan rebuild, like become a politician or an engineer. The one problem was, all of his dreams took place in a country to which he'd never been. So he convinced his dad to let him join up with him in Afghanistan for the summer. Like, I read a lot about it, and I learn a lot. By now I know a lot about it. But I've never visited it. So that's another reason I really want to go. Because it's easy to talk, but then to actually do it is much harder, you know? That's what my father was telling me, too. Right now it's easy to talk about going back, but once you have to, like, take a glass of water, cold water, and put it over your head, and that's how you take the shower, and on mountains, and you have like a biscuit in your hand, it's not as easy. When your dad said that to you, was that kind of sobering? No, it actually made me more hard-headed, and even want to go back even more, you know? Just to prove it, and just to get the doubts out of my head. It's almost like a test, you know? I want to pass it. It's almost like a test on how much I can take. OK, on the test, or quiz, I should say-- There are a lot of Afghan kids at Hyder's high school, but he tries not to talk too much about his trip with them, or with anyone. The whole thing means so much to him that it's difficult to explain. On the day I visit his English class, the teacher shows the movie version of Frankenstein, and after, everyone's supposed to list five differences from the book. But instead, everyone's just talking. And a girl eating saltines one by one out of a package on her desk asks Hyder how come he's going, and if he's ever coming back. How come you're going back? [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, I'm coming back. But I don't know. It's a pretty long answer, so I really can't summarize it in-- Hyder's friend Alex jumps in. He's really deep with his roots. Let's just say that. He's going to get his education here, and then move back to Afghanistan and help rebuild it. Really? Wow! That's cool. That's a pretty good summary. Oh, I'm his manager. Alex is not Afghan, but everyone calls him "Halfghan," because he can recite his cell phone number in Dari. A lot of these kids saw a picture Hyder's father sent of Hamid Karzai sitting at his desk in the palace holding a satellite phone,. And today they joke with Hyder about the various devices he might use to keep in touch with them over the summer. Oh, you should get a two-way from here to Afghanistan. Why don't you bring a laptop? Wireless internet! Yeah. You'll be like, hey, Hyder, how's Afghanistan. "I met the greatest girl--" "I haven't seen her face yet, but." "I haven't seen her face yet," the boy says. Hyder loves his friends, but says it's weird, because they're interested in all the regular stuff. Girls, cars, different kinds of sneakers. Where Hyder wishes that he could zoom ahead to being a grown up and moving back to Afghanistan. That's another thing. Unlike most of his friends and cousins, he doesn't feel American. I do feel like somewhat of an outsider here. It's really weird. I've never been in my own country. I think that's one of the reasons I really want to go now, is just to see. And I almost feel I have like an insecurity. There's so much more that could have happened to me, you know? If I wasn't so fortunate, I could have easily been growing up there right now. Growing up in a generation that literally doesn't know anything but war. I think anything could happen to me and I would still almost always not try to complain about it, because of what Afghans have been through, especially in Afghanistan. Hyder's been toughening up for this trip. Before leaving for Afghanistan, his dad made a deal with him. If he wanted him to buy him a ticket, he had to lose weight. Hyder started running on a treadmill in his garage wearing a sweatshirt, plus another shirt, plus a garbage bag, to help him sweat more. In two months, he's lost 65 pounds. And there's another detail to take care of. The other day, my mom told me to make sure you get your shots before going to Afghanistan. And I actually don't want to take them. Because I don't know, it kind of adds on more to the foreigner, an American, going to Afghanistan. It might seem silly or childish or too much testosterone or whatever, but I just don't want to go in and get shots to make sure I don't get sick or malaria or anything. Because my father never had to. I'm kind of like, it's my own country. I'm just going to go in there. I don't want them to think of me as a foreigner. Hyder's trip is just six weeks away. He's hoping that instead of flying straight to Kabul, he can arrange to travel over the Khyber pass. That's the right way to do it, he says. That's the way everyone's done it. The Mongols, the British conquerors, the mujahideen. He's planning what to pack-- traditional Afghan clothes, his books about Afghanistan, and batteries so that he can listen to his U2 CDs. He picks up the remote control for his stereo. You know, that's a pretty famous U2 song. It's the one they sing on top of the roof, "Where the Streets Have No Name." You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. It's hard to explain. I think it's in the CD player right now, so one sec. Yeah. And it's kind of like, when I picture that place, "Where the Streets Have No Name," I picture something like Afghanistan, you know? And I think it's a song, it's pretty much tired about how set and systematic the world is. Yeah. Like, "I want to run, I want to hide, I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside." So it's kind of like at the point where I am right now. Just, I feel really-- held down. Before I leave, I show Hyder how to work the tape recorder he'll be taking to Afghanistan. Hello, hello. It's 8:40 in the morning, Monday, May 27. And I'm leaving today. This is my last day here. I was listening to the radio the other day, and they had a funny commercial. They're promoting some contest to go to a trip anywhere. and they were naming all these countries. Italy, France. And then they're like, Afghanistan. And then they started like, ha, they make like this funny music. And they're like, OK. Well, maybe not Afghanistan. And it just hit me as weird since I'm going there today. I'm going today. I just got done speaking to my dad about 15 minutes ago, and he confirmed that somebody's going to come and pick me up in Peshawar. I'll probably spend the night at a relative's house over there. And from there I'm going to drive to Kabul, which is like a six hour drive from Peshawar. Then he told me to shave my goatee. So I'll go ahead and shave that. That's about it. I'm just really, really excited. I just feel like going, "ahhhh!" I'm just really, really, really, really, really, really, really excited. Signing off from San Francisco. Next recording you'll hear will probably be from Peshawar. Goodbye. Hello, hello? I'm actually on my way to Torkham right now, the border station between Afghanistan and Pakistan. I arrived at the house in Peshawar. I knew I had arrived when I saw an AK-47 in the living room, just lying up against the cabinet. Fully loaded and ready to go. I got stopped by police and got checked and everything. Because they saw the microphone. But I turned it on really quick. We're at the Kyber Pass right now, and it's pretty incredible. There's two mountains down there. It's right between mountain ridges. I don't want to attract unwanted attention, but I am passing through the Khyber Pass right now. This is the Khyber Pass. So I was going through the Khyber Pass. And we reached Torkham, finally. I didn't really have that sense of wow, this is my country, you know? I'm finally in Afganistan. None of that kiss the ground stuff. You know, I just saw a lot of poor kids running around, a lot of burkas, beards. I felt like a total outsider. My dad kept on telling me, the road to Kabul is horrible. It's really bad. It's really bad. It's really been destroyed. So I'm thinking, fine. A bad road. Potholes here and there. A lot. Probably have to slow down, go around them, et cetera. No. I mean, he said road. This is the key was there. So I was thinking there would be a road there. What he should have said is from Jalalabad to Kabul, there's no road. I think my head probably hit the top of the car about like 30 times through the whole ride. And towards the end of the trip, I was starting to get motion sickness, and I was feeling like I was going to throw up, and I was getting really sick and dizzy. This whole place is so barren and so-- To tell you the truth, I kind of had regret for what I had done. I was like, wow. You know, maybe I wasn't ready for this. I'm at the doorway of the Kabul Hotel right now. We're actually invited somewhere for lunch. We're going to go there right now. That's my dad. All right. The hotel, Kabul Hotel. Let me describe the hotel to you. Me and my dad, we're in same room. It's a pretty small room. There's two beds, a little, like, area where you can sit, balcony where probably like three people could stand. There's actually a huge place where a missile had hit Kabul Hotel, and it's still like that, you know? There's like this huge hole, all, like, four stories, on one side. And this is probably one of the nicest hotels here. Hello, hello? I think it's my fourth day in Kabul. Anyway, I was just coming out of the bathroom after I cleaned myself for evening prayers, and I just heard a couple of rockets outside. I ran to the balcony real quick just to see what was going on. And everybody-- except for like a few people who jumped up, just trying to see where it was coming from-- the rest of the city was functioning pretty normal. It was pretty weird. Let me ask my dad if he saw that too, that the whole city was pretty normal. My dad, I think, listened to the news. Yeah, my dad said the same thing. He said that everybody's just going about their own business. That's basically what he just said in Pashto. I've seen plenty of rockets here in Kabul. I'm going to go do my evening prayers. Go downstairs. Today was a really interesting day. I went to the palace today, and there was this incredible, like-- it was almost like going through a movie. Like this old, the gates and how they open, and the huge locks. It almost looked like you're visiting someplace in Disneyland or Universal Studios. But it was the real thing. All of a sudden Karzai comes out, sees my dad, and he says hello. And my dad introduces me to him, he's like, this is my son. I got kind of nervous, actually. You know? It's hard not to be, meeting him. You know, that queasy feeling in your stomach. Felt my, you know, like, heart rate go up. And he walks so fast. He's so busy right now. It's just there's like four days to the [SPEAKING PASHTO]. He doesn't even walk. He practically runs. After that, somebody else was just entering the palace, and it was Rashid Dostum, probably the most infamous warlord. He's uh, pretty out there even by Afghan standards. I've heard stories about this guy rolling over people with tanks. Strapping people down to tanks and, like, crushing them. So it was weird to shake hands with that kind of a fellow. It's just really interesting, just being in the palace at a time like this, you know? This is the future of the country, right here. You have, like, infamous warlords walking this way and famous ministers walking that way. It's pretty exciting. I mean, it's like equivalent, I think, of Lollapalooza or something. Going backstage and getting to meet all of these rock stars going back and forth. It was kind of like that. As nerdy and dorky as that sounds, that's pretty much how it was like for me. So my dad has been appointed the governor of Kunar, but he really can't go there yet. There's still some resistance. In the morning, there's usually a lot of people from Kunar that come over to see my dad. 5:30 in the morning, completely dark outside, 30 people from Kunar are already lined up at the door. One time they left and my dad, he sat down and he actually told me almost everything that's been going on. And there's a lot going on and there's so many-- Politics is really dirty. That's all I can say. There's so much going on. There's so much against my dad, so much for my dad, so much up to my dad. It's really a big deal, you know, to trust me with all that. He warned me, too. Like, in this documentary, or when talking to other people, not to say anything. I can't even tell my mom on the phone about it, because you know how phones are listened. And when he said that to me, it really made me feel like his son. I'm always there. Right by his side. And like, all these tribal elders he meets, all these people he talks to like the most intimate stuff, and I'm just standing with him every second, you know, like this major commander, North Americans, and everything. And it's really amazing, I mean, how much he trusts me with everything. I've got to be careful and not ruin it. I'm traveling to Parwan right now. God, this road is horrible. Parwan was a really interesting place. It was a sort of this vacation place for Afghans living in Kabul when it got a little hot. There was actually a lot of people there. A lot of people there. It was really packed. It's almost a sign of things getting back to normal again. Like, people being able to visit Parwan again. Because ever since the jihad and the resistance, it was a key area of fighting. And it's really interesting to see all these people coming back after so many years. The Taliban had banned music for six years. And I think it's only been like five or six months since music has come back. So it's also really new. And then at this one point, there was actually these men started dancing, and all these people gathered around and they were all watching and clapping. And all of a sudden, some chump with a Kalashnikov came over, and he stopped the drummers and he stopped the dancing. He was like, what are you doing, blah blah blah, not Islamic, et cetera. It wasn't even, you know, like girls and boys dancing, or anything like that. That would be unthinkable. It was just a guy dancing. And then later on, all of a sudden I see this huge mob running. And a Sikh was in front, and they were like dragging him forward with a Kalashnikov. A Sikh-- you know who Sikh are. They're the ones with the turbans and the beard. My dad was like, what's going on? They're like, oh. We caught him drinking alcohol. And I don't know what they were going to do to him. But whatever it was, it kind of put a damper on the whole thing. I am in my hotel room. It's around 9:30 AM. And my uncle came in. He's bought dye for his beard. He's laughing right now. He knows a little bit of English, and he figured out I was talking about him. He has this coloring device in his hand. "Prime Cream Hair Color With Conditioner, 45 Black." And there's this lady with like wavy hair and a smiling face. A couple of white hairs growing, so he's going to get young again. And it's really funny, because he's this like big, macho commander. Probably the biggest commander in the Kunar Province area, which is a major fighting area. He's lost an eye, you know? Always walking around with an AK. He went to the bathroom to go and color his beard. Yesterday he was showing me all these parts in his body that metal just left, you know, his arms-- "touch this, touch this." And I was touching it, and there's metal there, and there's metal in his head, and forehead, and upper arm, and elbow-- just, you know, shrapnel and bullet wounds, et cetera. He came out right now. He's closing the lid or something. I think he's working on it. He colors his beard. Testing, one, two, three. Testing. I'm sitting in my hotel room outside on the balcony. It's about nine o'clock at night. Today Haji Abdul Qadir, the vice president of Afghanistan, was assassinated. And he was Abdul Haq's brother, and Abdul Haq was my dad's best friend. We were actually taken to see-- me and my dad-- my dad took me with him. He was taken to go see the body. They had put him in a coffin and everything, and it was a-- I don't know what you call the room. I mean, is it, like, the frozen-- I mean, kind of like the cold room where they keep bodies, I guess. And to be honest with you, I have never really seen a dead body like that. And my dad-- I mean, this is the first time I realized how going through a war must change you. Because he totally just jumped at the body, I mean, as if he was alive, and he just grabbed the towel that was on him, and you could see-- it almost like scratched his face. There were scratch marks on his face. My dad actually touched his face and was like, oh, I see. There's f here, and here. I mean, totally cool. And my dad asked if he was shot in the face. And they were like, no, he wasn't shot in the face. He was shot in the heart. And my dad was like, OK. He just casually unwrapped the towel a little more, and there was a bullet wound there. My dad touched that, too, and he was like oh, OK. And he said a little prayer and we left the room. It was happening way too quick to sink in. I think I'll age about five years in these three months. So I was up pretty late this morning. 7:30, 8 o'clock. I had a hard time sleeping last night again. Knowing, you know, my dad could be assassinated just like Haji Qadir. I mean, there are-- our driver Sotor-- somebody had come, I think, who was sent from the opposition. He started asking our driver questions like, so how many people who are with them at night, sleeping? Me and my dad. Do you guys have any Kaloshnikovs, AKs, guns? I don't know. A lot of times, just like driving in the car, the whole scene plays out in my mind. Some guys jumping out and shooting at my dad. Coming up. What happens when your father becomes the official government spokesperson for a country that is barely holding together? Hyder's first person account continues in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. If you're just tuning in, today we're devoting our show to the story of a teenager who was raised in Northern California who got a chance to live in the country his parents came from, the country he considers his real home, Afghanistan. Hyder Akbar took a tape recorder to make an audio diary of his time in Kabul. His father had moved back to Afghanistan a few months before him, back when the Taliban fell, to work in the new Afghan government. Up until this point in our story, his father was officially the governor of Kunar Province. But then, the day the vice president was assassinated, July 5, Hyder's father got a new job. He became the official spokesman for the entire Afghan government. Hyder became his unofficial assistant. If there had ever been a chance that Hyder would put his father into his audio diaries, that chance kind of vanished with the new job. After the new job, anything his father would say to him about Afghanistan would be essentially the government's official line on it. Imagine Jenna Bush trying to interview her dad about, say, the politics of the Senate, and you can see how delicate the whole thing would be. Hyder's diaries continue with his father, Said Fazal Akbar, in his new job as government spokesman. OK. We're heading north to work, to the palace. [SPEAKING PASHTO] It's 9 o'clock. We're going down the stairs, leaving the hotel. OK. We're heading off to the car. People stopping my dad on the way. This is basically how every morning of ours starts. In the morning, my dad usually just goes to meet up with Karzai and see what's going on, gives me the phone to take messages, et cetera. Stuff like that. That's what I basically do, is help my dad out. The interesting parts are usually when there's something happened, like the President of Iran is coming. They started to play the national anthem of Iran and sounded really out of tune. 23 years of war. If you think about it-- wow, it's a bad thing. But when you actually go see it, I mean, it really hits you. It's only been like six, seven months, and you can still almost be proud of them, that in that little time, they've achieved this much, at least. And just even seeing that they have the heart to go on with the band makes you proud. Standing outside on the balcony. I see our car parked. My driver's here. Me and my driver are going to go to Jalalabad today. Jalalabad. We started walking through this place. My driver knows a friend, and we're staying at his house. And we got to talk to him a little bit, and he's an really interesting character. And I can't even begin to tell his story. He's managed to be arrested in Africa, he's been arrested in Singapore, and he's been arrested in Malaysia. You might ask what he was arrested for. He's been trying to come to America or London. He's trying to get to the West. He was actually in Rwanda before he was going to go to London, and 9/11 happened. And this guy was in jail for four months in Rwanda. You know, he was like, I couldn't speak the language or anything, and they'd call me al-Qaeda, and they'd say bin Laden's name, and that's the only thing we could understand. And whenever, when we heard bin Laden's name, we would be like, no, no, no. In Malaysia, he was as close as getting on the plane. The doors were about to close, and they came in after him, and they were asking questions about his passport, et cetera, and they caught him. And he's going to still try to smuggle his way to America. I don't know. I thought sometimes maybe once I come down here, live here for a little bit, a couple months, do my part to see the country and try to help out a little with my dad-- et cetera, I won't feel so guilty about the situation in Afghanistan. But now I don't know if I'll feel more guilty or less guilty when I come back. When I see firsthand what's going on here, knowing that I can get away from it but other people can't. I got really sick last night. Think I've thrown up about three times and probably gone to the bathroom about another eight or seven times. There's this kebab. It's called Shami kebab. It's basically made of a kind of ground beef. People tend to stay away from Shami kebab. Like, not even my driver would eat it, you know? And he's totally used to the food here, and he doesn't eat that, and I eat it almost on a nightly basis. Man. I really like it. And it got me last night. So I was eating it, and then halfway through it, I noticed that one of the kebabs was like-- the inside was just totally red. I was like, oh, well, screw it. I've already ate half of it now. I think I purposely don't-- I'm not careful, you know? I drink tap water, sink water, unbottled-- I guess it's sort of trying to adapt. Just like I didn't take any vaccination shots, et cetera, before I got here. I think I'm paying the price for it now, too, because I get sick almost every week. I have grown up in the States most of my life. And a lot of times, I almost feel like I'm in denial of it. Or I don't want to accept it, that I am a little bit American. Not a little bit. A lot American. Another thing that has to be noted is the-- I don't know. It's just a total lack of the whole female species. I could go like a week without seeing a lady's face. Like, out of a hundred women, like, 95 still wear burkas. Kabul market is pretty bustling. at home it would be like Times Square. It's full of ladies in burkas that are-- the rest are all men. Like, literally. Here. I'll start counting, and I'll look for a woman's face, and I'll tell you how long it takes. Burka, burka, burka. Man. Burka. Burka. Still no woman. Since I've been here-- I think it's been like a month and a half or two months-- I don't think I've talked to a girl or to a woman, to a lady, about anything for more than ten seconds. I'm surrounded by men. At home, at the hotel room, in the office. Everywhere we go, it's just men, men, men, men, men. And it's really weird. And it has had an effect on me. You know? Like when women are around you-- I don't know. You're more civilized? They hold you back a little. But you know, here, it's sort of like, how I used to look at violence, or like killing-- it's almost become normal to me now. It's really weird. OK. I'm in my room. I mean, not in my room. In the balcony. And it's about 2:30 in the afternoon. And I've got some weapons in front of me. Here's a Makarov pistol-- a brand new pistol. We got this as part of our security. But next to me is the infamous Kalashnikov. I just like this noise a lot. [GUN COCKING] Let me take this apart. First you take the top off, and then you take this out. The bullets. My uncle has a rift with his own family. Like, I think it's, I'm not sure. But it's something like that. His younger brother actually killed Sotor my driver's, first cousin. And they have like no shame, you know? They come to the room-- like, he came in, he greeted us, he shook hands. He shook hands with my driver. The younger brother. This is the younger brother, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Totally normal and nonchalant. And he left the room, and when he left the room, Sotor told me, he's like, you know, that guy killed my first cousin. I was like, what? OK. These are the bullets. I have one bullet in my hand and it-- I'm hitting the mike with it. It's really sharp. The first time Sotor when he told me that story about him killing his cousin, and now it's a big deal-- I pretended like it was something normal, you know? Then more stories and more stories now, and somebody tells me, you know, that guy needs to kill them, I'm like, mm, OK. They should probably kill them. I'm not like, hm, killing, bad, or something. Just being in this-- just for a month and a half, being here, and going through so many changes, it's really weird. I can only imagine what it would be like if I lived here for like a year. I would say it's about 3:30 in the afternoon. We were in our room, and I was listening to U2. Had my head down, trying to go to sleep. And the bed shook, and I heard a loud boom! I came outside real quick, and I noticed all this smoke coming out from behind the Ministry of Communications, which is the building right in front of us. So another bomb explosion in Kabul. Just one of a bunch recently. OK, hello? I just went to find out what the explosion was all about. And apparently it's a lot more serious than I thought. I start heading out and I ran into someone I know, and he said-- he was just coming from there, and he was like, don't go there. You don't want to go there, trust me. You don't want to see it. It happened in the middle of a really crowded marketplace. Probably the most crowded place in Kabul at this time. And I just saw some of the ambulances that are come back. I think they already took the first injuries. My driver pointed out to me, he's like, there, look over there. And there was actually blood all over the ambulance, the headlights in the front of the car. You can see the car from here, outside of my building, actually. Oh. There's some peacekeepers coming along, and I see some more-- I don't know. I'll probably listen to the news soon. Hello? OK. You can hear the BBC in the background. This is reported. And it was pretty quick, actually. It was probably about five minutes later. The BBC just reported, "Breaking News-- Explosion In the Center of Kabul." And they say, the interior minister spokesman actually said, it could be in Kabul Hotel, which is where we're staying. So I know once my mom, if my mom was watching the news right now, she'd be freaking out. But it's not in Kabul Hotel, because we are in Kabul Hotel. Oh, there's more. More peacekeeping troops. But you can hear the chatter in the background and interviews on the TV. --it's an explosion in central Kabul. Some reports say at least 22 are dead. So we're here. Right where the wreckage is. I'm standing in front of the wreckage. It's a closed-off area, but my dad got through, saying he's Karzai's spokesman. He needs to check out what's going on. Sorry about this. That's a French reporter. He knows my dad. He recognized him and started talking to him. I hope it is the first and the last. I hope, really, deep in my-- I'm standing in front of the car that blew up. It's completely destroyed. You can hear me hitting the metal. And I think this place should be sealed off better. Everything is evidence, all around me. And it's being tampered with, it's being moved around. In front of me there's a building. It's about four stories high. Glass broken completely, all around. You can hear the glass being piled up. There's all these-- tainted red water. You can tell they've been trying to wash away the blood. [SPEAKING PASHTO]? OK, we're going to go. I'll get back in the car. OK. I'm at the-- I'll be right back. I'm going to close the door. OK. Well, so far there's a bombing earlier in the day. Now my other uncle, who works in the Foreign Ministry, just got a call that there's been an assassination attempt on Karzai. Karzai had gone to Kandahar for his brother's wedding, and my dad was going to go with him too, but he stayed for me. So it's kind of nerve-wracking. Because the guy was actually crying, and saying, if you want to come, go ahead. If you don't-- but you don't know yet. I think there's a pretty good chance Karzai has been killed. And if Karzai is gone now, it will be totally the end of it. Because I can't see anybody replacing Karzai. Well, our correspondent, Lyse Doucet, was traveling with President Karzai when that assassination attempt was made. She has this exclusive eyewitness report. The president was back in Kandahar for a family wedding. He waved from his car. Then the man out to kill him made his move. [GUNS SHOOTING] American bodyguards rained rapid fire from the car behind. And hooked their mark. And the president was quickly swept away. Lyse Doucet, BBC News. My dad is talking to my mom on the phone. I just spoke to her too, so. My mom was like, please come home. I'm getting a lot of calls from these agencies that want a comment out of my dad. And my dad can't, because he just doesn't have enough information about what's going on. And it's very frustrating, because I'm screening the calls. And they just won't take no for an answer. There's like two satellite phones Karzai has. He called both of them. Both of them are off the hook. They're not working. And that's that. September 5, 2002. A black day for Afghanistan. Today, it's the day after the assassination. And I'm going downstairs. I'm in front of my dad's office. I just got out of there. Karzai's in a meeting with him, and after that, there will be the press conference. He's holding a press conference. He told my dad to hold a press conference. OK, I'm entering the palace. OK. That's Lyse Doucet from the BBC. She was actually with the president in Kandahar yesterday, and she's, I think, going to do another report from here. OK, the gate's open. Here's the president. Huge crowd. Lyse, I saw your footage this morning. It's your footage sir. My footage is your footage. I'm literally the first person standing here, right next to Karzai. I'm about five feet away from him. They are saying it is extremely dangerous for you to move out of Kabul among your people. It is always dangerous Lyse. Come on! I've been through this before. I've been hit three times when we were fighting the Soviets. Did that stop us from fighting the Soviets? My father was assasinated in the Kremlin by the Taliban interers. Did that stop him from fighting against them? I was almost killed in [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Did it stop him from fighting? I will not stop. I will continue. I'm more concerned about the lot of life yesterday in Kabul than of one assassination attempt against me. Every time I hear Karzai speak in an interview or at a press conference, I get hopeful. And I'm like, it's going to happen. He's going to make it. Look at him talk. There's no way he's not going to make it. But then I see what's going on, and then I'm like, OK. I just woke up. I've gotten sick again and I have stomach pain, diarrhea. I just feel out of it. At night, sometimes I sleep outside. There's a bed in the balcony. And I usually have to cover myself in a blanket from head to toe. You can hear the birds chirping in the background. It's almost trying to fool you, in a sense. Birds chirping. It's such a peaceful sound, you know? I don't know. When I hear birds chirping, I get a sense of, you know, rise and shine. Good morning. Sunny day outside. And it's nothing like that. I hate to be like the grumpy pessimist, but pretty sure another bomb's going to go off. It's not stable. I mean, in the last two weeks, there's been over a dozen explosives. A lot of little ones so far. And I know they've been hushed up, and you know, this creates a sense of tension in the air. They're starting to realize, hey. They really don't have control as much as they like to pretend they do. You know, I was a lot more optimistic and hopeful about the future of Afghanistan before I came. Now it's like, I'll be happy if it doesn't burst into civil war again for five years. Birds chirping. Rise and shine. Stomach's cramping up. I really honestly feel that Afghanistan would not have the problems it's having right now if Abdul Haq was alive. It's almost like, you know, a person walking, and you know, Karzai was one leg, and Abdul Haq could have been the other leg, and one leg's cut off now. Karzai's trying his best to hobble along, but he can't, because one half is missing. He's definitely somebody I look up to, somebody I'd like to follow. I mean, he did the Kalema, which is, you know, professing your faith. You know "There's no God but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." And you know that when you're a newborn and a person whispers that in your ear to sort of make you officially Muslim. It's almost like, you know, how Catholics get baptized. My dad, my family, picked Abdul Haq to do it. He was chuckling while he was doing it in my ear, too, because he couldn't believe it, that they were asking him to do it. Because usually you ask an older person to do it. Like almost a religious elder to do it. But they wanted Abdul Haq to do it, because they're like, we want him to follow in your footsteps. So even from the beginning, I've always sort of looked up to him. I told my dad the last thing I wanted to do before I left Afghanistan was to visit Abdul Haq's grave. OK. I'm going up the road to Abdul Haq's grave. OK. Road ends here. Now we're walking. Me and my driver. We're going to walk the rest of the way. Do you hear a little low wind blowing? I'm covered in dust. It was a terrible journey getting here. We're walking around, trying to find it. No, it's not here. Why don't we ask somebody. Here we go. We found some guy walking. OK. It is the graveyard. OK. Here we are. I'm sitting here next to a bunch of rocks piled up. And there's not even a board or anything that says Abdul Haq. I mean, we walked right past it a second ago, and I was like-- me and my driver were both like, no, this is not it, and we kept going forward. It's a quiet place. You don't hear much. It's the middle of nowhere. Mountains all around me. I'm sitting down on the gravel. I'm sitting down on the dirt. I can't believe I'm sitting down next to his body. I don't know how to explain it. Just like the whole legend behind him-- jihad hero, and freedom fighter, and visiting Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and all the media that was around him. And now he's in like this little [BLEEP] cemetery. Not even a sign that [BLEEP] says "Abdul Haq." Hello, hello? OK. Today's September 11, 2002. It's actually my last night in Peshawar. I'm at a relative's house. I'm spending the night here. And you can hear the food cooking here in the kitchen. I'm really excited about coming home. Anyway, I'm going to, I should probably go to the other rooms. I think some September 11 anniversary is going on. I think it's kind of ironic that I am coming back on the the day of September 11. Here's Afghanistan. In a statement read at the ceremony, Afghan president Hamid Karzai said the al-Qaeda terrorists behind the September 11 attacks had also wreaked havoc on his country. At times, I almost wish I hadn't come. It was almost better when I was away from it all, and it was still I looked up to it. Now I think about it, and I'm like, why? Why bother with them here? Maybe I should just go back to the States. Study Business. Start working with my brother. Be a loan officer. Go and open up my brokerage. Live a comfortable life. I don't think I could live comfortably like that. Now I'll just be thinking about what's going on in Afghanistan and what I could do to help. Hyder Akbar is now a freshman at Diablo Valley college in California. He's planning on returning to Afghanistan with his next school break. Susan Burton is the one who gave him a tape recorder and produced this story for our program. Funding for her radio stories comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It's my equivalent, I think, of Lollapalooza or something. Going backstage and getting to meet all of these, like, rock stars. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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It was one of those jobs that could either fill you with a sense of despair, or make you feel like you love the world and fill you with a sense of mission every day. Michael Beaumier chose the second path. I always ask people, are you married? Are you dating? Is it serious? What are you looking for? Michael Beaumier runs the personals ads for a weekly paper, the Chicago Reader. And he takes it so to heart that he is constantly talking to people who place the ads. He not only tells them how to fix their ads so they can find the kind of person they might want, he remembers them. If he talks to somebody else who might like them, he tells that person to look up their ad. If somebody called me and said, is there an ad that I should answer this week? And they told me a little bit about what they're looking for. I think that off the top of my head I could say, yeah, here are three people that you should respond to. How many of the people in the personals do you know personally, have you talked to yourself? Well, I try really hard to not be involved. Dozens. Dozens, yeah. And I keep lots of notes in my office too, in terms of, well, here's this woman. And she's looking for a date. So I'll give her a call and go, hey, you know, here is this guy. He's in this week. You should call him. I'm not supposed to do that. But I do it anyhow because I just can't help myself. In a way, it's hard to believe that the perfect person ended up in that job. A few years back, Michael noticed in the missed connections section of the personals-- you know that section where people say, I saw you on the Clark Street bus. Our eyes locked. Call me. There was this guy who was taking out one missed connections ad after another. Five of them, 10 of them, 15 of them. He had people that he would see on the train. You were the Asian woman in the purple dress. You were reading Ayn Rand. Or I saw you at Gamekeepers. You were the brown-haired girl. Your hair was in a pony tail. You were wearing an Ohio State sweatshirt. 15 ads like this. 15 ads. He would see women all over town, Wicker Park, Bucktown, the trains out to O'Hare, at O'Hare, on flights back from places to come back to Chicago. And it was just getting crazy. And he really, really meant them. They were very, very earnest ads. He would come in sometimes. Usually he would email ads to me or he would give them to me over the phone. I would talk to him over the phone at least twice a week. Did you ever see him? Oh, yeah. I saw him a couple of times. Cute? Oh, yeah. Yes, very cute. But just really, really quiet. And I think some people find quiet to be creepy. But he was quiet kind of like he didn't want to impose on anybody by having conversation with them, that he felt that he wasn't an interesting person. And I think that he was a very interesting person. Michael would give him these little pep talks, encourage him to start speaking to these women instead of just seeing them and then taking out an ad. And weeks passed of this. And months passed. And finally, Michael just got tired. And he wrote him this letter. He told him to make 20 copies and carry them with him wherever he goes. This is what I wrote. It reads, "To whom it may concern. My name is Mike Beaumier. I run the personal ad department at the Reader, the matches. The gentleman who handed you this note is named Bill. I've come to know Bill very well. In many ways, he reminds me of my father, quiet, decent, dedicated, someone who probably falls under the radar for most people. He neither drinks nor smokes. He is close to his parents and siblings. He has a job, a home, a car, and some place to be in the morning, and many friends who, like me, think highly of him. Once you get to know the guy, you'll wonder why nobody snapped him up yet. I often do, and romance is my business. Anyway, here is why I'm writing this letter. Bill is very shy. I'm not sure why. He's very smart and really funny. I'm asking you, someone I do not know, to please, please, please save us all a lot of trouble and let this man buy you a cup of coffee. Because if you don't, Bill is just going to put in another missed connections ad in my paper. And I will once more have to give him another lecture about having the courage to approach interesting women. If Bill doesn't give you his home phone number, I will. Please feel free to call me at my office number below. Sincerely, Mike Beaumier, matches coordinator, Chicago Reader. And I think that he used it, because I had maybe one more ad from him after this. And then it stopped. OK. By any standards, that is above and beyond the call of duty. And there are so many people out there like this, little guardian angels in all sorts of walks of life, trying to save the world one person at a time. Today on our radio program, stories of people like that. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. In collecting the stories for today's radio show, it became clear to all of us who work on the program that not only did most of these stories have to do with people saving the world, in every story people have these sudden moments of truth delivered to them by complete strangers. Act One of our show today, The Rundown. In that act, the story of one girl's mission to bring people together everywhere by eliminating small talk forever. It can happen in our lifetimes, friends. Act Two, Heather Help Me. The story of some teenagers, a telephone, and a man who only answers to a name that is not his. Act Three, Fools Rush in Where Mommies Fear to Tread. In that act, an art history professor tries to talk with his fists. Act Four, The Science of Good and Bad. The story of a simple test, just two lists of 18 items each, designed to tell you who you are, increase good, identify evil, one person at a time. When our reporter takes the test herself, the results spook her for weeks. Stay with us. Act One, The Rundown. Well, one of the producers of our radio show, Starlee Kine, in addition to her many duties here at the public radio station, has been going around giving a lecture, proselytizing on behalf of something that she invented that she calls The Rundown. Her idea is this. Very, very simple. Small talk is not bringing us together. Small talk is the enemy. Small talk must end. And she proposes replacing small talk with The Rundown. A warning to more sensitive listeners. She refers to the idea of virgins and sex in this brief lecture. This was recorded at one of her public lectures. I know a lot about small talk, because I worked in an office. And there is a lot of small talk that goes on. There are like all these different forms of it. There is like water cooler small talk. And there's elevator small talk, which actually isn't even that bad, because most people think elevator small talk is the worse kind. But actually, I think it's OK, because it is finite. You know it's going to end at a certain point, which I appreciate very much. There's even bathroom small talk where I work, which is like the worst thing you're ever going to experience in your entire life. There will be people small talking through the stalls. I actually have some audio of small talk to play for you. Coffee is on its way. Here is a special selection of the Viking blend. And I have to get back to work. That's what happened in my office. Almost every day that seems to happen, actually. We know we are drinking coffee. It's being made. But for some reason, when you do small talk-- when you're caught in the trap of small talk-- you feel you just have to talk about what's immediately happening in front of you, even though it's so obvious. And it's not even his fault. You know what I mean? Everyone does it. And so I can't take it anymore. So I devised The Rundown to eliminate small talk forever from the world. I want it to be done with. The Rundown, the goal of The Rundown is it's supposed to turn conversations from the conversations you're supposed to be having to the conversations you want to be having. And so I also have an example of The Rundown. I went to a movie. And there's a ticket guy selling tickets. And I just started talking to him. So it can be done on anyone. I had ramen noodles for breakfast. The $.25 ones or the fancy ones? I didn't pay for them. My girlfriend bought them. OK. So if you're thinking small talk, you're going to go after the ramen noodles, right? Like what kind of ramen noodles, hot water, meat, something like that. But if you're doing The Rundown, you just seize on the most interesting part of the conversation. And so he did give me a very, very valuable clue. He gave me this wonderful girlfriend character to work with. From that, you can proceed to-- Are you in love? I love her. But you don't know if-- you're not in love? Oh, well, I think yeah. I am definitely in love. OK. So that's a little bit more to go with. Now we know he's capable of love, which is a lot more than knowing that he just had ramen noodles. And from there the possibilities just open up wide. You can pretty much go for anything now. So then you just keep going. So how many one night stands have you had? Well, I know how many girls I've been with. But I never really counted which of them were one night stands exactly. How many girls? 34 and 1/2. 34 and 1/2. How many virgins? Estimate? Roughly, probably four or five. So you might think how many virgins is an inappropriate question. But I actually think it's like the perfect fallback if you have nothing else to ask. You know I mean? Because as you can see, it's totally OK. He doesn't mind telling you. People are just wait-- they love to talk about themselves. And that's what people want. And they also like to be asked questions that they have answers for. He completely knows the answer to how many virgins. So then they feel good about themselves. And they'll keep going. And from there it is pretty smooth sailing. The first one that came along was for two and a half years. That was the first girl I was ever with though. That was? She was a virgin too. We were both virgins. It was good. But it was weird. It was kind of like an all day all around town sort of thing, because it started at her grandparents' house, which was in this all yellow room. The sheets were yellow, the window curtains were yellow. And it just wasn't working out. It was kind of-- So then we drove out to this spot by a drive in movie screen that was abandoned. But it was a good experience altogether. I enjoyed it. So that was a minute and 26 seconds. And now, after a minute and 26 through The Rundown, I know what he's had for breakfast, that he is capable of love, how many girls he has slept with, how many of them are virgins, who he first lost his virginity to, and even the color wallpaper of her grandmother's house. So that's pretty good. That's a pretty successful Rundown. And there are a few simple rules for everyone to be able to do it just like this, eventually. So the first rule is, number one, small talk is the conversation you're supposed to be having. And The Rundown is the conversation you want to be having. Number two is, why chew the fat, when you can chew the meat? Also very important. Number three is, if you can think it, you can ask it. And then, if all else fails-- or even if all else doesn't fail-- number four is, how many virgins? So, that's The Rundown. Starlee Kine, speaking at The Little Gray Book Lectures at the Galapagos Art Space in New York. Well, this brings us to Act Two, an act we're calling Heather Help Us. It is this story of people reaching out and giving the rundown of their lives to a complete stranger. Jessica Riddle tells the tale. Recently, I remembered this thing that happened back when I was in high school. And it was so incredible that I sort of wondered whether it really happened. What it was was when I was around 15, my friends and I used to call this number. It was our area code plus the name Heather, H-E-A-T-H-E-R. An old man would answer the phone and talk to you about anything. It was kind of creepy, I remember. So I checked around. It turns out my friend Kirsten had the same memory too. Well, it started out as sort of an urban legend. We'd be at parties or something, and they would just be like, yeah, you know when you dial Heather, H-E-A-T-H-E-R. And you can talk to him about anything. And I think at parties or something people would call him and be like, so, how many little boys have you got locked in your basement? And they would just mess with him. I remember sort of sicking Heather on people, like them being like, you know, I wish that so and so would just get off my back. And I'd be like, call Heather. You know? Just call Heather. Well there was a fair amount of passing the phone around, just to get your words in or just hear what he had to say. But I think it was more like sleepovers and things. It was more like crank calling him at first. But over time, it seemed like the prank conversations evolved into more regular conversations. I remember friends of mine calling and asking questions like, hey, Heather, what's 44 down? Heather, what do you think? Should I join the lacrosse team? Heather, what do you think of the color green? But I didn't realize how serious the conversations were until Kirsten told me this story. One night I came home late. And things were really screwed up with the family at that point. My sister was in either the hospital or boarding school. And my parents had separated at that point. And I was just feeling awful. And it just occurred to me that I could call Heather. What had you been out doing? Do you remember? Well, I was probably out drinking somewhere. So yeah, you probably dropped me off at home. And I went up to my room. And well, I probably sulked for about 20 minutes. But then I decided to call him. I think I just needed someone to talk to. I really was just trying to think. Should I call my grandmother? Should I call that girl I was friends with that summer four years ago or something? Like who can I talk to? And we had probably-- maybe we had prank called him that evening. And so I decided to call him back. And I am not quite sure what my motives were for doing it. It was just I knew that he would pick up the phone, even though it was probably 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock in the morning. And I knew that he would listen to me. And he wouldn't change the subject. Kirsten's life was pretty bad around this time. Besides her parents' divorce, one of her sisters had a fatal brain disease, had lived in a hospital almost all her life and was never able to walk or talk or be part of the family. And her other sister had recently tried to kill herself. I just started telling him about it, and that I felt really helpless and hopeless when it came to my sister who was in the hospital. And that she didn't realize how much we loved her. And she didn't value her own life. And that was something that Heather and I discussed, feelings of guilt and feelings of anger towards people that you're supposed to love. Just to repeat to somebody over and over again, I'm guilty. I feel guilty. I feel awful. Because Heather-- because I couldn't see his face, because I didn't have to run into him at the grocery store or on the street, I think that made it a lot easier to tell the truth, be honest with myself and honest with my feelings, just because he was some guy on the other line who was just listening to me. And he didn't say, well, this is what I would do or this is what you should do. It was just brief statements, just like, oh, that must have been terrible, or it sounds like your mother has really tried hard to get your sister well, or something. Then when I told him that my oldest sister had never been able to talk to me, he was like, oh, that must be devastating. Tiny little statements that were just sympathetic. I couldn't believe Kirsten could actually confess like this to Heather. Prank call Heather? That weird old guy we make fun of at parties? I hope he knows that what he did for me, that I really appreciate him listening to me. And I just hope that he knows that he's not a scumbag and that he's helped me. It would be nice to tell him thank you again. I almost don't want to hear what he has to say about it, because it was something that was really personal for me. And I couldn't bear it if he won't think it's as special as I do. I wonder if he really cares, or if he just wanted to listen just to hear about different people. Whatever happened to Heather? Was he still alive? Did he still have the same number? I picked up the phone and dialed H-E-A-T-H-E-R. Sure enough, he answered. And he agreed to talk to me for this story, so long as I didn't give out his real name. We arranged for me to call him the next day from the radio studio. Hello. Hi, Heather. It's Jessica. How are you? I'm pretty good. How are you doing today? I'm very good. Do you remember our conversation last night? Yeah, a little bit of it. OK. Well, I'm calling you back from the radio now. And I wanted to go ahead and ask you some questions. Is that all right? I'll try. OK, great. There's something I'm dying to know about, which is how did this start? It started way back in 1951, when some kids were having a sleepover. And one of them happened to have the name Heather. And she said, well, call my name and see if anybody answers the phone. So when they did I answered the phone, and carried on a nice conversation with them. And it has been going on ever since. You've been talking to people on the phone for over 50 years? Yeah, I guess so. I never did figure it that way. But time flies by too fast. During our conversation, I found out a lot of things about Heather that I had never thought to ask as a kid. He became less mysterious and more like a normal old guy. He fought in World War II and the Korean War. When he got out, he got a job with the government on a military base. He's retired now. He still likes to hunt and fish. He says the number of calls he gets fluctuates. But during peak times it's like 100 a day. He says he never asks for anyone's last name or phone number. He doesn't accept collect calls, doesn't call people back. He does have caller ID. He does not have call waiting. Over the years, he says he has talked to thousands and thousands of people. Most just call him Heather. What most people do when they call, they say, is Heather home? And sometimes they hang up, because they expect a woman's voice. You know, I was just thinking that it's improbable, in a way, that these many people called you. I mean, Heather, you said thousands and thousands. That's incredible. But I think, to me, it's even more crazy that you talk to them, that you decided that you should respond to all these calls. Well, since my wife died I've just been by myself here. And it helps pass the time. And a lot of them are nice to talk to. Like I say, a lot of them are latch key kids. They come home, and nobody's home. Both the father and mother are working. And they don't have anybody to talk to. So they call up and talk to me. With the people who call you who are older, do they usually want to talk about something different than the teenagers? I don't get too many of what you call older people. I don't get anybody my age. And I don't know how old I sound on the phone. I don't think I sound anywhere near as what my age actually is. Can I ask what your age is? It's three quarters of a century plus one. That's amazing. You'd be surprised how many people don't even know what a century is or what three quarters of it is if they did know it. You know what I mean? So you wonder how much schooling some of these people got. Heather, we were talking yesterday about how you said you thought maybe there were like a dozen people who had called you contemplating suicide. And you said you were able to talk them down, talk them out of it. Well, they were just full of tears, and sobbing, and stuff like that. And they just blurted it right out when I answered the phone. They just said, I'm going to kill myself. I tried my best to calm them down and just say, hey, the good Lord put you on this Earth for some reason. Don't kill yourself, because you might be planned down the road for something great. That's about it, I guess. Some of them called me back three or four days later, and said, boy, I'm sure glad I talked to you. And things are good. So that makes the day. The ones that never called back, I never know if they really did it or didn't do it. Heather, do you have kids? No, we weren't that fortunate. Do you know what percentage of the people who call you are girls and boys? No. I would say it's close to about the same. If they're at a big party or something like that, there are boys and girls together. And they seem like they all want to talk and say hello. You know what some kids do nowadays? And I know they're real young. They'll call up and say, oh, I feel terrible today. Would you do me a favor? Would you sing me a song? Really? Yeah, so I sing a song to them. Could you sing a song for us now? Well, let's see. [SINGING] Let me call you sweetheart. I'm in love with you. Let me hear you whisper that you love me too. Let that love light glowing in your eyes so true, please let me call you sweetheart. I am in love with you. Oh, Heather. Thank you. You know, I never thought I could really sing. So I'm glad I'm able to sing some anyway. Heather, I want to ask a question. What do your friends think about-- do they know about this? Do they know about people calling you? Do you talk about it? No, I don't advertise it. I figure if people want to call me, fine. But I don't advertise it. I don't tell them nothing. So your friends don't know. Have they ever been over and wondered why the phone was ringing so much? Yes. But I just tell them, that's nobody special. So it's a secret. Well, it's my secret. Why is that? Well, I guess maybe pride. Some people are smart, They just want to laugh at you or something like that. They might say why bother or something like that. I don't know. I'm not going to tell them, so I'm not going to worry about that. It's none of their business. What do you look like? I'm about five seven. I weigh around 170. I have got snow white wavy hair. I've still got it all. And I still got all my teeth, but I've got a few crowns. I used to play a lot of sports, so I still look kind of muscular. I don't have anything hanging over my belt. How many people ask you that question, I wonder. What I look like? Just some girls. Just the girls, huh? Yeah. Sometimes I ask them what they look like and stuff like that. And I say, gosh, you remind me of my wife. Same dimensions, same figure, same hair, and brown eyes. It's just conversation. It is? Yeah. It was comments like this that made me wonder if there was some other thing going on with Heather. On the one hand, they could be perfectly innocent. On the other, they made my heart sink a little. I mean after all, an older man who spends a lot of his free time talking to kids he's never met on the phone and keeps it all a secret? Kirsten always wondered too. You know, the guys that would call him and make lewd comments or whatever, he would still stay on the line for that. And that makes me think, is that one of his interests too? Like that weird sexual underworld, is he a part of that and just being my therapist on the side? How does it work? Are most of his calls like dirty talk. Or is it all people like me who are just like, I've got to talk to somebody? So do you feel like creepiness comes with the territory with Heather, or creepiness begets the territory? In other words, the creepiness is just there and you have to deal with it, or the creepiness is sort of part of what attracted us to it. And it was a necessary part of Heather. Well, yeah. It's not like we were calling teen hot lines or anything. We wanted to talk to the guy who nobody was sure about, that the government hadn't inspected and given a patent to. I called Heather back to ask him, basically, if he was a perv. And it just sucked. I creeped him out. I creeped myself out. We both felt bad. And we got off the phone. And in the end, I still don't know the truth is. I believe my original feeling about him. He offered us something that's not generally available to teenagers. Either we had authority figures talking down to us or our peers judging us. There were no boundaries with Heather, and that was the scary but liberating thing about him. There's a reason he became the person everyone first called to screw with and then called back for catharsis. I mean, he could be anyone. Oh, I also wanted to ask you, Heather, if you could describe the room that you're standing in. It almost looks like a room in a cabin up north. I'm kind of laying down. And right in front of me is the coffee table. And the TV is on the other side of the room. What were you watching when we called? I'm watching Friends right now. Do you like that show? It's kind of good. I don't like Ross. He is the one that is supposed to have the most education. But he's the dumbest one of the group, in my opinion. You're sitting on the train. And you see an old man sitting across from you. Or you're in the doctor's office, or at the car wash, or wherever you are. Heather could be anywhere. He could have one of those strange phones where you can get the area code hooked up to whatever-- on a cell phone. And he's travelling the Earth trying to solve people's problems. Heather. Yeah, he could be anywhere. It's nice to know that he's still out there. That story by Jessica Riddle. Coming up, it take a nation of mommies to hold us back. 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, Time to Save the World, stories of people saving the world one person at a time, of people being hit with sudden moments of truth, thanks to complete strangers. We've arrived at act three of our program. Act Three, Fools Rush in Where Mommies Fear to Tread. The person who tells this next story of human kindness asked that we not use his name on the radio. He is just not sure what to think about the story still. I can say that he is an art history professor. He was once in the Marine Corps. But that was long, long ago. My mother and I were in sort of rush hour traffic. We were going downtown for lunch. And she's driving or you're driving? She's driving actually. And we're having a great time, joking, talking about old movies, as we do, or about the family or something. Just really sweet, really fun. And it was downtown traffic. And it was also a construction scene. So the cars were just creeping along. And all of a sudden, a guy in a pickup truck came around us. I suspect now that my mother may not have let him merge or something. But it was all in slow motion. It was one, two, three miles an hour. So in frustration then, he drove around us, and paused, and bellowed out of the driver's side window at my mother, and called her a really, really, ugly name. In fact, it was a word that I was hoping my mother didn't even know. The C word. The one syllable C word or three syllable C word? No, one syllable C word. And F-ing C word, in fact. So now we're going to pretend, did we hear this? In conversation, are we going to pause to talk about this? And so the conversation falls silent. I guess we say, well, yeah, Martin Balsam was really good in that movie. OK, now long pause. But I can feel my blood boiling at that point. I think I'm going to confront this guy, a guy screaming a few feet away from my mother's face. I can't let this go unchallenged. And so I start to get out of the car. And what are you thinking at this point? Are you somebody who gets in a lot of fights? Oh God, no. In fact, I had never been in a fight. I guess I'm hoping for an apology, maybe. So I get out of the car. And I walk up a few car lengths. And this guy is already out of his truck. He's already standing there. And to tell you the truth, that surprised me a little bit. That kind of gave me pause, because he's a big guy. He's easily maybe 75 pounds heavier than me. So I was just afraid. I was afraid. So he says, man, you better get back in your car. And I march up to him. And I say, what did you call my mother? You called my mother an F-ing C word? And this is the point-- he must not have seen the same movies that I have seen, because at this point, he actually shoves me backwards. So I figure, well, he put his hands on me. And I haul off. And since I'm off balance, I throw this huge left. And oh my God. It's like he didn't even know it was coming or something. I hit him so hard, unbelievably hard. And I'm thinking to myself, please fall down. Please faint. Please let this be over. But no, it isn't over, In fact, he staggers towards me. And I see that I've hurt him. But he's coming. Now it's going to turn into a wrestling match, which it does. And so he's got me in this bear hug. And now we're falling across the tops of cars, other cars in traffic. And in fact, we break an aerial off, break a couple aerials off of cars. And I'm doing everything I can to just keep out from under him, because he's an enormous guy. And it seems like it went on for eternity. Really Hollywood. It was really something. I noticed people are standing now outside of their cars. It is a big show. It's high school now, at this point. And are you thinking, at this point, what am I doing? Actually, I had just gotten my PhD the year before. And I'm hoping to God my professors aren't watching or, God forbid, anybody that knows me. And here I am in it. I'm wallowing around in it. In fact, I am trying to keep this guy off of me. And so we're wrestling around on the ground. There are people standing all over the place. And I feel a little tug on my shirt, on my shoulder, OK, break it up. It's all over in this little voice. And I think, oh thank Christ. It's the police. And I look, and oh my God, it was this guy's mother breaking up the fight. And she was a little, kind of leathery, sweet-- Granny Clampett, basically, is breaking up this fight. I remember she was so sweet. You know, honey, it's over. Get up, get up. Come on. It's all over now, she said. And so I get off. And then I kind of shake myself up. I kind of jump back. And God, afterwards my clothing was in tatters, just in tatters, and blood. And his mother helps him back to the truck. And they get in. And I get back in my mother's car. And it was like nothing had happened. The traffic just resumed. And we kind of drove away. We drove-- I guess we were going out to lunch at this point. Now we're just driving, in those first few blocks, just away. We're just trying to drive away. And my mother pulls the car over. And I am trembling. And we didn't know what to say to one another. And I said, well, sorry about all that, Ma. And there's a long pause. And she threw her arms around my neck. And she said, nobody has ever done that for me. And I said, really? Dad never did that for you? And she goes, well, honey, we never were in a situation like that. And I said, well, you're welcome. You're welcome. She actually passed away a few months ago. And I really miss her terribly. In the last few years, every once in a while she'll tell the story or somebody in the family wants to hear the story. And she was really proud. And she wasn't the kind of person that approves of that kind of thing. In fact, one time I heard her tell a girlfriend, she goes, you should have seen my son. He looked like he didn't have a chance, the way he was dressed-- and I guess I dress kind of like a preppy, pretty clean cut-- and boy, he let this guy have it. So she got a big kick out of the whole thing. It's so crazy to think about what experiences you have that will be the memories that stick with somebody as their most precious memories. For your mom, this is one of her most precious memories? Isn't that the truth? Isn't that the truth? And for me, I don't know quite how to think about it. I know that my wife doesn't let me tell the story at dinner parties and things. She's embarrassed by it. And I guess I'm embarrassed by it too. In fact, I struggle with whether or not I want my son to know this story. I never know if I should tell this story. I don't know if it's so flattering. I wonder if you're embarrassed because you're secretly proud. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. I guess I do feel that way. I am proud. And hell yeah. Oh yeah. Maybe so. You got him? Yeah, I got him now man. My little gift to Mom. Absolutely. [BEEP] That's right. It was the perfect fight. I felt blessed. Once in your life you have an opportunity like this. How often do you get something-- he was so clearly right wrong, black white, good bad. I mean, because you call somebody's mother a name and then push somebody around, boys, you are asking for it, or so it seemed to me. And I didn't get hurt too badly. Act Four, The Science of Good and Evil. And now a test that provides sudden truth from a stranger, based on a science whose goals could not be grander, to aid in the fight between good and evil. Given that, I have to say it is a surprisingly effective test. Invented by a guy named Robert Hartman, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his work back in the '70s. Susan Drury reports from Tennessee. Robert Hartman was born in Germany in 1910. By his early twenties, he was active in opposing Adolf Hitler. This is his son, Jan Hartman. He went as a young man to a demonstration in which Hitler was parading, with his brown shirts and what have you. And he was completely horrified. Actually, he would never go to large demos after that. I mean here were these thousands and thousands and thousands of people cheering Hitler, whom he knew was evil. So he decided somehow to answer the question, if evil can be organized so effectively, why can't good be organized in the same way, with the same efficiency? When Hartman was 23, the Nazis showed up at his door to take him away because he was a leader of an opposition party. He escaped through the back door. And with the help of a fake passport, he fled to America, where he became a philosopher and started working out an answer to the question that would consume him for the next four decades. How do we mobilize the good of the world? Hartman went about this using methods that scientists today would never use. He tried to mathematically quantify good and evil. If that seems strange, remember that, for Hartman, Freud, and Marx, and Einstein were still new figures on the scene, each one using scientific analysis to understand things science had never really considered before. So Hartman mapped out the kinds of small and large value judgments we make all the time. And he invented a test. From the very first minute that I saw the results, it was like, oh my God. This is scary. This knows things I wouldn't tell anybody. Harvey [? Shauf ?] is someone who administered all sorts of personality tests as part of his job, the Myers-Briggs, the DiSC, all the others. He first took this test 15 years ago. It was just something that was so unique, and so different, and so far beyond anything I had ever seen before that it was the tool I had always felt was missing, and the one I always felt I would like to find someday. Perhaps as many as 100 people in the US now administer the test. And they all seem to talk about it this way, like converts. It was incredible. I have no way to explain it to you, but my jaw just kept dropping, and dropping, and dropping. It's literally like someone lifted something off of you. You walk out feeling like, OK, thank God I know that now. It was more of a spiritual experience for me than anything I had ever experienced before. I mean it's just like the whole world opened up, and there was nothing but light. And at that point, my life changed forever. The test is called the Hartman Value Profile, and it is astonishingly simple. There are no actual questions. It's just two lists of 18 objects and phrases that you rank in order from most valuable to least valuable. Some of the items on the first list, a baby, a uniform, a madman, a mathematical genius, love of nature, a rubbish heap, with this ring I thee wed, blow up an airliner in flight. Some of the choices seem impossible. Which is worse, burning a heretic at the stake, or torturing a person in a concentration camp, or slavery? The second list of 18 items concerns work and happiness. There are sentences like, I curse the day I was born, and my work contributes nothing to the world. Again, you are supposed to rank them from most to least valuable. The notion of a test invented to distinguish good from evil seemed so incredible that when I heard it existed I had to take it. And so I called up a company. They send me a test, and tell me to do it quickly. Don't think too much, they say. Just do it. It takes me 10 minutes. And really, it feels like a very strange parlor game, like a horoscope or a test in a magazine, something slightly interesting but immediately forgotten, nothing profound. I send it back, and arrange a time to get my results. About a week later, I sit down with a guy named Wayne Carpenter. Wayne studied with Hartman in the '60s. He wears a cowboy hat over his long gray hair. He has a pile of papers with him, reports on me it turns out. But he doesn't look at them. The second he sits down, he just starts talking. In your profile, the first thing that I look at is the fact that you are a very, very keenly perceptive person. In other words, you are aware of everything going on around you. You have an outstanding capacity to understand people. 90% of the time, you size up what a crucial issue is. You may not express it, but you're right. There is just nothing like having a stranger tell you that it's a scientific fact that you are right 90% of the time. Wayne tells me lots of other good things about myself. Even the negative things he spins to me in a really nice way. For instance, apparently the test scientifically proves I'm a bossy know it all. But Wayne expresses that like this. When you see things that need to be done better, you like to give advice and tell people how to do it better. And you don't think about it as something that you are doing in order to create stress for them. But it can create stress. I already know most of these things about myself. But it was different coming from Wayne. The good things felt so official, like I could do anything, really. And the bad things seemed like such discreet little clumps of bad things in easy to understand categories. They're not soaking through your whole personality. It was all fine, except for one thing Wayne said to me about my need to tell people what to do. As your child grows, that's something to watch out for, because one of these days she'll bring homework to you. And it will be a B plus. And you will look at it and see immediately how to make it into an A. And your natural instinct to help her is to say, you know, if you had made that one difference. And you're going to do that. When she brings you that paper, and it's a B plus, the first response you're going to have-- you're going to do that, Susan. I'm telling you right now. You can't escape that, because that is you. This haunted me. I didn't care about other stuff. But what he's describing is the opposite of my idea of a good parent. And I want to manage my way out of it. And he's telling me that's impossible too. I can't fix it. That's who I am. I'm supposed to greet you all here at 1:15. Every fall, Hartman's followers hold a conference at the University of Tennessee to figure out how to spread his ideas more effectively throughout the world. When I hear the word conference, I imagine throngs of people gathered together poring over the latest scientific exhibits and hurrying to make it to the next panel discussion. But in reality, the conference is just one little classroom. There's a box of doughnuts on a folding table. And half the scheduled lectures, it turns out, have canceled. John, what are we supposed to do next here? On the day I'm there, the big discussion is about how Hartman's followers can convince the University of Tennessee to teach a class on his ideas. This was the last place Hartman taught. He was by all accounts a dynamic and beloved professor. And yet, 30 years after his death he's mostly forgotten even here. Tennessee today, the world tomorrow. If Hartman's own students and colleagues can't organize themselves enough to convince his own school to teach his work, how likely is it that his ideas will organize the good of the world? Back in the late '60s and early '70s, Hartman was actively trying to find practical uses for his test. He sent letters to all the US and European airlines. He suggested giving the Hartman Value Profile to airline passengers as a way to sort out potential hijackers before they boarded the planes. He was rejected by them all. In 1970, at the request of President Richard Nixon, Hartman and a colleague, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, submitted a proposal to test all American schoolchildren. Hutschnecker was Nixon's psychiatrist, and had been friends with Hartman for years. The proposal was to use Hartman's test to figure out which children had violent and criminal tendencies. Hartman figured about 1 million of them would be identified and placed into 50,000 therapy groups. Hutschnecker preferred the idea of camps. They saw the plan as a way to see trouble before it happened and try to prevent it. Again, here's Hartman's son, Jan. And when I heard this I kind of went ballistic. I got him on the phone. My dad lived in Mexico. I said, this is really immoral. And you have to stop Hutschnecker from doing this. You can't segregate potential criminals from society just on the sense of one test. I said, because that's just what the Nazis would have done. If somebody answers the questions in such a way that you say, my God, here's a raving sociopath, but all you have to prove it is a test score, then you have a very moral problem, don't you? What he didn't understand-- and I give him points for this, because it was a naivete, but it was also great idealism-- is that a tool is also a weapon. The media agreed. "Doctor Pushes Crime Tests for Tots," said the headline in the Washington Post. Time referred to it as an Orwellian proposal. The plan never went through. Hartman continued to believe that he could use the test to solve these big picture social problems, that the test could serve as a way to good, as a path away from evil. But it just didn't work out that way, because people were disturbed by the idea of doctors going around evaluating everyone. They were scared that some people would end up labeled good and others wouldn't make the cut. And what would happen to them? These days, there is still one arena where Hartman's test gets a lot of use, the workplace. We work with them at Procter & Gamble and at GTE for all the sales managers in all the companies they own, Arthur Anderson-- Consultants like Wayne Carpenter contract with companies to test their workers and help them solve problems based on the results of the Hartman Value Profile. It is the same test, the same logic. But they never talk about good and evil. They talk about performance, and work styles, and customer service. Wayne's company has tested about a half a million people. Wayne and Bob Terrell, the guy he runs his testing company with, show me and my producer, Starlee Kine, the letter they send out with the test results. It starts out-- Congratulations. You are now in possession of your value analysis from Axiometrics International. Why congratulations? That's just the marketing. If you think about it, the workplace is kind of a weird place for a test like this. Would you want your boss to know exactly the way your mind operates? And yet Wayne helped the Nashville Predators pro hockey team figure out who should be the captain. He helped banks in New York figure out how to bring in new employees from a group of young adults who hadn't made it through high school. He has worked with AT&T, and NASA, and the US Postal Service. So here it is. Here was this very high minded idea, this test born out of the idea of a science of morality, which 40 years later has become a placement tool in human resource departments. And Wayne, though he is devoted to spreading the word about Hartman, is fine with this. I thought, practically, what am I going to do? I can go out and preach, and people can listen. But if they only hear you talk about it, it's not the same. Is the goal still ultimately that more and more and more goodness is going to add up, and in the long term, big picture way wipe out the bigger evil? Is that still the goal? Oh, that is the goal. It always has been. That was the goal for Hartman. And that's the goal for me. He's trying to reach people one at a time, but even then it's not that easy. Wayne shows Starlee and me the profile of a successful businessman who recently took the test. The first thing I am going to make aware of is that he's more secure of himself than 90% of the people we profile. The second thing I'm going to do is make him aware that that security and that consciousness, in terms of how he translates that back out, can hurt people without his intending to do it. And he needs to be more conscious of that. He can hurt you and it wouldn't bother him. Who did you tell me, on television, this person is? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Who is it? Tony Soprano. But Tony Soprano is a sociopath. Well this is a sociopath. This person is a sociopath. OK. So what do you do with this if you have a sociopath? Knowing this person, I know there's very little I can do other than make them aware of it. And then they have to make the decision. But if you make them aware of it, then they have a chance. And without them being aware of it, they don't have that chance. He doesn't see it. So if he sees it on paper, and he starts to think about it, and he says, yes, that's me, and I don't like that-- But do you think he's going to change? The odds are probably against it. I doubt it. Hartman's son Jan says this is the big problem with his dad's ideas and with this test. Namely, once people understand what they are really like, does that make them change? And I can not tell you the number of nights we sat up arguing that point. Our basic argument was that if you can measure things in a way that will reveal to people who and what they are, that the rest will follow. Is it that he thought if people had a system and a way of seeing their own sort of moral limitations or possible failings, they would thus adjust and correct those things? That's the logic. Right, that's the logic. And I would argue that there's nothing more unpredictable in the world than people, and that logic and order don't really exist in human emotions. This is why it's so hard to organize the good in the world one person at a time, because people don't always want to be good, and because when they want it they can't always do it. Susie Drury lives on a farm in Bon Aqua, Tennessee, where she is carefully monitoring her behavior around her two year old daughter. Well, our program was produced today by Dave Kestenbaum and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, and Starlee Kine. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Jane Golombisky. 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 sometimes calls me up and asks-- Would to do me a favor? Would you sing me a song? 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. My [UNINTELLIGIBLE] sergeant put me on a deployment roster to go to the Middle East. And I was told to go to a pre-deployment brief. This guy's a Lance Corporal from the Marines' Eight Communication Battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. At his pre-deployment briefing to go overseas for whatever is going to happen next in Iraq, there were maybe 300 Marines. You know, folding chairs. There was a projection screen being used to show us the plan of attack. OK, this is where we're going to be landing. And then we're going to travel here. You'll be wearing this type of gear. They also taught us about Saddam Hussein's military. You know, how much he has. And after that, this other speaker came out speaking about the Arab culture. He was a sergeant and how the Marine Corps works per se, this guy is not specializing in Arab culture. You know, he was probably asked to do a course on Arab culture two weeks prior to the situation. He did some research, per se, and gave the class. In the class, the sergeant explained what Arabs eat. That it gets to 140 degrees in the desert. The different ethnic groups. Then he said to us, when you go over there, make sure you do not shake an Arab with your left hand. And we're all wondering, why? So he says and the reason is because over in Iraq, over in the Middle East, they wipe their asses with their left hand because they don't have any toilet paper. And so I'm standing there and I could see people's faces. And they were like in disgust. They're like, "Oh man. Wow. That's just nasty." This Marine told us that he thought the only reason the sergeant said that was to make the soldiers think that Arabs are disgusting, to make them hate. Who knows? Honestly, who knows? We checked into it and it's true. Lots of people in Iraq and Pakistan, and lots of other countries near there, do not use toilet paper. People wash their hands. But that sergeant really might have been trying to teach them how to be sensitive to local customs, just didn't do the very best job of it. Once there's a war going on, everyone is suspicious of the information they're getting. Nothing is trustworthy. And when a war is over, it's still hard to tell what the truth was. For instance, the number of Iraqi deaths in the Persian Gulf War back in 1991, do you know? No one knows. Just after the war, the US Defense Intelligence Agency made a very rough estimate of 100,000. The British government says 30,000. The US House Armed Services Committee estimated 9,000. The PBS show Frontline estimated maybe 27,000. Well today on our program, we bring you three stories, each one from a different war. Each one trying to get you the real true story behind that war. Act One of our show, Jarheads. In that act, a marine reminds us just how scary it was to fight against Saddam Hussein the last time around if you weren't just watching on TV. Act Two, what's the truth good for anyway. An act which asked the question, if Israelis looked back at their war of independence and decided that maybe they shared some blame for Palestinians having their country, would it change anything? Act Three, Jar Jar Heads. In that act, one brave and funny man doesn't simply try to rewrite the history of a war, he tries to rewrite the movie of the history of the war. Stay with us. Act One. I'm Anthony Swofford and I served in the US Marine Corps from December of 1988 through December of 1992. And when I left the Marine Corps I was a corporal. And Anthony Swofford is here because he agreed to read an excerpt from his memoir, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. And Anthony, before we start, I want to do a quick rundown of some of the words that are going to appear here and there during the readings so nobody gets lost. Give me just quick definitions to these. Ruck. Ruck is a pack, like a knapsack. Dope. Well, dope is any sort of information that helps you at all in the field, such as the distance you are from a target, or the wind speed. Or intelligence? Or any kind of intelligence, yes. Freqs. That's F-R-E-Q-S. Those are the radio frequencies that are being used on the battlefield. A grand. A grand is one kilometer. STA. That's S-T-A. It appears all through this story. STA is the acronym for the platoon I served in. It stands for Surveillance and Target Acquisition. I hope this next one isn't too naive. Click. This is one that I feel like I've seen in a million war movies and they always say, go three clicks over, or five clicks over. And I've always wondered, how far is a click? Yeah, a click is one kilometer. A thousand meters. Well, with that preparation, here then is Anthony Swofford, reading from his memoir of the Persian Gulf War. The oven heat of the Arabian Desert grips my throat. In the distance, the wind blows sand from the tops of dunes, beige waves that billow through the mirage. Just beyond the tarmac, artillery batteries point their guns east and north. Fighter jets patrol the sky. Our days consist of sand and water and sweat and piss. We look north toward what we're told is a menacing military, 400,000 or more of war torn and war savvy men. Some of the Iraqi soldiers who fought during the eight year war with Iran got their first taste of combat when we were 10 years old. While fighting Iran, the Iraqis became experts at fortifying their border with mines and obstacles, such as the 30 kilometer long lake they created to defend the city of Basra. We're forced to wonder what the Iraqis are preparing for us at the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. In 1983 and 1984, they use mustard and nerve gas against the Iranians. And since then, they've dropped nerve gas on the Iraqi Kurds. We believe they'll do the same to us. We wait for the Iraqi army. This is our labor, we wait. Knowing the reporters will arrive soon, we shave for the first time in a week. Our chief scout sniper gathers the platoon in a school circle under the plastic infrared cover. He has already recited a list of unacceptable topics. He's ordered us to act like top Marines, patriots, the best of the battalion. We're prohibited from divulging to the press data concerning the capabilities of our sniper rifles or optics and the length and intensity of our training. Basically, don't get specific, he says. Say you can shoot from far away. Say you're highly trained. That there are no better shooters in the world than marine snipers. Say you're excited to be here and you believe we'll annihilate the Iraqis. Take off your shirts and show your muscles. The reporters arrive at 09, 9 o'clock. The man is from the New York Times and the woman is from the Boston Globe. They shake our hands and urge us to speak freely. Yes ma'am, we believe in our mission, we say. We will quickly win this war and send the enemy crawling home. We can shoot out someone's eyeball from a click away. One reporter has brought a football. On seeing it, the press pool colonel instructs our staff sergeant that we should play football for the reporters, wearing our full MOPP gear with gas masks. The MOPP suit is supposed to protect us from skin contamination during a chemical attack. They weigh 10 pounds and after 6 weeks in our rucks, most of them aren't in their original packaging, but are bound together with duct tape and nylon ripcord. We're happy to use them for this game because now they'll really be useless. We'll burn them in the straddle trench and it will take supply months to issue replacements. Doc John Duncan, our navy corpsman, reports the temperatures has reached 112 degrees. We pull our masks on and tie the hoods. Five gallon water jugs mark the goals. My team makes 10 yards. [? Coumbes ?] and Johnny Rotten get into a pushing match, and a few of us pull them apart. The drama of the scene is catching. The reporters are taking notes. The gas mask and hood cause your hearing to lengthen and stretch, so that words enter your brain in slow motion. At some point, I hear the staff sergeant calling for halftime, telling the reporters that our gas masks are high tech pieces of equipment. That outfitted in the MOPP suits, we are an unstoppable fighting force. That the only chance the Iraqis have is to drop an a-bomb on us. When the show game is over, [? Keen ?] douses the suits with fuel and strikes a match. He says, may God please save us because these MOPP suits won't. One night on the headquarters roof, Johnny notices that we can see straight into the general's office. And that if we use binoculars, we can read his wall map. Every symbol that reflects troop strength and movement, both enemy and friendly. And so we construct our own model of what will occur at the border. After three nights of transcribing the general's maps, we're sure that we'll soon be dead. Johnny does the math and he has us out-manned at the infantry level three to one. The war begins. Within hours of the first US bombs being dropped on Iraqi forces in Kuwait and Iraq, the Iraqi air force threat is demolished. On the eighth of February, we move to the berm, the obstacle made of sand, an unstable material that will make futile all endeavour. That follows roughly the Kuwaiti-Saudi border. Shortly after arriving at the bivouac site, we receive incoming artillery rounds. Johnny is the first to yell, "Incoming." And we crouch in our half-dug hole. The rounds explode beautifully and the desert opens like a flower of sand. As the rounds hit, they make a sound of exhalation, as though air is being forced out of the earth. Sand rains into our hole. More rounds land nearby and someone yells, "Gas. Gas. Gas." We don and clear our gas masks. More rounds hit and these explosions too, look beautiful and beat the earth, seeming to force air out of it. And I cry inside my mask because I'm finally in combat. I piss my pants. My heart rate climbs. My breathing becomes shallow in the mask. I can't hear very well. Johnny and I look at each other and around our defensive position. More shells explode near us. If the Iraqis have competent forward observers, they will adjust their fire 100 feet north and land rounds directly on the commanding officer and executive officer of the Second Battalion Seventh and Marines. But this is unlikely. They aren't competent. The assault ends. We begin to look for an enemy observation post and the bastards who called in the rounds toward our command post. We scoured the biblical range 2,000 yards to our east, our bellies flat to the sand. Johnny is first to notice the enemy position. With his direction, I also make out the physical structure of the observation post dug into the side of the range like a wound into the ribs of a martyr. Those sons of bitches. Johnny dials the air freqs and I work the coordinates. We accomplish our map work like the experts we are, while all around us marines yell that they're OK, that they haven't been hit, and let's drop some [BLEEP] on those rag head mother [BLEEP]. Johnny asks and I tell him that I think the best bomb cocktail would be a combination of smoke for obscuration and marking, and anti-bunker for killing. He gives me the handset and says, [BLEEP] them up, Swoff. A captain from S3 appears and pulls rank, insisting that he direct the fire mission. Not me, not STA, even though Johnny has located the enemy position, and I have acquired the coordinates. The captain has even carried a field chair over. He explains that he has bad knees from college football and that if he lies prone in the sand it will take about three STA Marines to peel him from the deck. Johnny takes the handset from me and gives it to the captain. And we crawl backward a few feet and listen to the captain call in the planes. A minute later, I watched the devastation through my spotter scope. I saw thousands of bombs land on targets while I was in training, buildings constructed for the purpose of being bombed turning to dust, and the hulks of decommissioned vehicles becoming twisted piles of steel. But I've never witnessed the extermination of human life. Through my scope the explosions look about the same size as the artillery explosions that just hit the sand directly in front of me. The bombs make a quiet thud, like one of our small, folding shovels striking a skull. Another jet bombs the enemy position and we return to digging our holes. We have just experienced a formal exchange of fire. The reports will be forwarded to regimental and division S1. We've earned our combat action ribbons. At battalion, we learned that the final final deadlines for complete withdrawal from Kuwait are being issued to Saddam Hussein. And that the real battle, the mother of the mother's, is about to begin, within hours or the day. My battalion is one of four marine task forces from the First Marine Division crossing into Kuwait today. Our staff sergeant advises us to remove any foreign matter from our rucks. By foreign matter, he means letters from women other than our wives or girlfriends, and also pornography or other profane materials that wives and girlfriends and mothers might not like to receive after our deaths when our personal effects will be shipped to the states. Johnny tells us to dig shallow shelters. [? Keen ?] complains about the heat. Doc John quizzes us on inserting breathing tubes, treating sucking chest wounds, and administering IVs. The Boot says something about missing his Harley-Davidson. And only feet above our heads, the sky splits open as a round passes over. The sound is like a thousand bolts of lightning striking at once. [? Keen ?] yells, what the [BLEEP] was that? Stay down, Johnny yells. [? Swoffe, ?] get me visual. Rounds pass directly over our heads while I get my scope. As they pass over, it's as though all sound and time and space is sucked into the rounds. A five ton truck blows 100 yards behind us. Its water buffalo also blows into a large bloom of 500 gallons of water. Another five ton takes a hit. I gain visual. The tank shooting at us are M60A1s. I yell to Johnny, it's our own tanks. He gets belly down on the deck and looks through my scope and says, it's friendlies. The tank battalion is northeast of our position and even with their naked eyeballs, two grand out, they should have known we were friendly. Unlike the minor enemy assaults with artillery and rockets we've experienced, we know that our own guys will not stop until the entire convoy and all nearby personnel are annihilated because that is the way of the marine corps. We are fighting ourselves, but we can't shoot back. More rounds pass over. Johnny dials the battalion's executive officer and asks, who the [BLEEP] do your tanks think they're shooting at to their southwest? It's [BLEEP] friendlies. It's me. It's my team you're shooting at. And our battalion, and the god damn supply convoy, you lousy [BLEEP]. Johnny continues to scream and I hear in his voice astonishment and rage. Because of all the things that Johnny believes in, first he believes in the marine corps, and that the marine corps takes care of its own. As in doesn't kill its own. Word is that only two men died and six were injured at the hands of the trigger happy and blind tankers. I don't believe this because the damage is extreme. Three five tons and a humvee are burning. Lieutenants and sergeants are yelling up and down the ranks for us to start moving forward. The carnage is 100 yards behind me, but now my job is to forget it. There's still the god damn war here that we need to win. Johnny and I are attached to Fox company in order to take part in the Third Battalion and Seventh Marines assault on Ahmed Al Jaber Airfield. The air control tower's our main target of interest. I read it at 800 yards and Johnny agrees. Enemy soldiers are moving inside the air control tower. An argument is occurring between two commanders. They point at each other's faces and gesture toward the enemy troops-- us. And I'm sure one man wants to fight and die and the other man wants to not fight and not die. The men scuffle and their troops pull them apart. I request permission to take shots. The men in the tower are perfect targets. The windows are blown out of the tower and the men are standing. And I know that I can make a head shot. Johnny has already called the dope for the shot. He thinks I could take two people out in succession, the commander who wants to fight and one of his lieutenants. He thinks that the remaining men in the tower will surrender, plus however many soldiers are under that command. Perhaps the entire defensive posture at the airfield. The Fox company commander tells me over their freq, negative sierra tango one. Break. Negative on permission to shoot. Break. If their buddies next to them. Break. Start taking rounds in the head. Break. They won't surrender. Copy. I want to say, screw you, sir. Copy. But I reply, roger, roger. I can't help but assume that certain commanders at the company level don't want to use us because they know that two snipers with two of the finest rifles in the world and a few hundred rounds between them, will in a short time devastate the enemy, causing the entire airfield to surrender. The captains want war as badly as we do and they must know that the possibilities are dwindling. Also, the same as us, the captains want no war. But here it is. And when you're a captain with a company to command and two snipers want to take a dozen easy shots and try to call it a day, of course you tell them no. Because you are a captain and you have a company of infantry and what you need is some war ink spilled on your service record book. The combat engineers blow two breaches in the eastern fence line. And as the dark oil fire smoke gets darker, and the sky blackens like midnight even though it's only 1700, the infantry assault companies enter the airfield and we watch. We watched the grunts moving like mules. We watch the smoke. And we hear the resulting confusion over the freq. At the fence line nearest us, a platoon of Iraqis appears waving white towels and smiling. There's no one there to accept them and the men push themselves against the fence, as writers might at a soccer match. They then sit and stretch out in the sand, as though the war is over. No one has called Johnny and me for hours. The airfield assault continues and the fence line platoon of surrendering Iraqis remains. Some of the men smoking casually and eating canned rations. Because I'm angry and frustrated over being ignored, I tell Johnny I want to shoot one of the Iraqis and I spend half an hour hopping from head to head with my cross hairs yelling, bang, bang. You're a dead [BLEEP] Iraqi. We hear medevac requests over the freq and mortars are called in to support the grunts. And in a few hours, the assault is over and I've remained a spectator. After a few days, the war ends. The cleanup mission is a freelance operation. We gear up in our three humvees and head out each morning from the battalion bivouac. We run with glee through the enemy positions, noting the hundreds of different ways a man might die when 500 pound bombs are dropped on his badly fortified position. Some of the corpses in the bunkers are hunched over, hands covering their ears, as though they had been waiting in dread. Many seemed to have died not from shrapnel, but concussion. And dried, discolored blood gathers around their eyes and ears and noses and mouths. No obvious trauma to their bodies. A few weeks into the air campaign, the United States rolled out the daisy cutter bomb. The daisy cutter spread a mixture of ammonium nitrate and aluminum over the target area, and then ignited the cloud. If you were within two acres and exposed above ground, or even in a barricaded bunker, you were sure to die. The infantry positions looked like daisy cutter test areas. The mouths of the dead men remain open in agony. After our battalion gets its turn at a victory lap around Kuwait City, the captain from S3 suggests STA get together with him and the few enlisted marines from his shop and that we all fire the weapons that STA has gathered from the enemy positions. Our cache is 400 to 500 AKs and 3 dozen RPGs. The Iraqi soldiers took poor care of their rifles. We've pried some of the weapons from the hands of dead men, and the pitiful state of the weapons, the rust, the filthy barrels, and the sand filled trigger mechanisms, now leads us to curse the men and their sloppy soldiering. We stand in a firing line and shoot the AKs. I feel like a traitor holding the enemy's weapon. Now firing the enemy's weapon, the snap, snap, snap of the firing pin piercing the shell. The projectiles screaming down range. I don't care what I hit: desert, tanks, bunkers, troop carriers. And still in some of the carriers: corpses. Next to me, my platoon mates also fire from the hip with no precision, as though we're famous and immortal, and we burn through the magazines. It's a factory of firepower. The fierce scream of metal down range and discharged cartridges and sand flying everywhere. Now all of us shooting in the air, shooting straight up and dancing in circles, with the mad idea that the rounds will not descend. Screaming. Screaming at ourselves and one another and the dead Iraqis surrounding us. Screaming at ourselves, the corpses surrounding us, and the dead world. Anthony Swofford reading from his memoir about the 1991 Persian Gulf War. It's called Jarhead. It comes out in March. Coming up, John Hodgman solves a problem that's been bothering millions-- millions-- including maybe, I think, maybe just you. 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, The Real Story. In war of course, the first casualty is truth. We bring you four stories of what really happened in four different wars. We've arrived at act two of our program. Act two, What's the Truth Got to Do With It? This is one of those stories that people who closely follow this kind of thing have known for years. If you're a regular public radio listener you may have heard of this. But if you're like me, your sense of it has always been kind of vague. I turned a corner on this story a couple months ago when I met this Israeli named BZ Goldberg. And he started telling me about how, not too long back, he read one of these new histories about the state of Israel. There are these books written by Israelis that go back and take a look at what the Jews did in the early days of their country. It was like reading a suspense novel because I would read through it and on one page he would say something and I would say, no. No, that's not-- no, no, no. And I would go to the next page and say, no, that didn't-- no. No, that's not what I learned in grade school. One story that struck him hard reading these books, there was proof that back in the '40s, Israeli soldiers sometimes forced Arabs off their land and out of the country, keeping the land for Jews. That is pretty much exactly the opposite of the story that BZ heard back in school. I remember this teacher I had in junior high school who told us how the Israeli forces went from Arab village to Arab village trying to convince the local Arabs to stay. And the idea was they said, please, we want to be your neighbors. Don't leave. And we begged them. We asked them. We pleaded. And that was something I believed until I was in my 20s, or maybe 30s even. Just a few weeks after I met BZ, I traveled to Israel to do some stories for our radio show. And one of the things I looked into was these historians. I picked up their books. I talked to some people. I wanted to finally understand once and for all, what happened between the Israelis and the Arabs back when Israel became a state? Roughly 700,000 out of 800,000 Arabs left their homes, abandoned their country in less than a year. Why? It was like the back story to today's politics between Israelis and Palestinians that nobody ever really bothers to explain. We did not have history, we had indoctrination. We had mythology. Tom Segev is the man who wrote the first of these new histories, or as they're better known in Israel, revisionist histories. He says it wasn't possible to write a real history of Israel until the early 1980s when under Israeli law, the state archives released most of the government documents from Israel's early years. Among the findings there for historians, the diaries of David Ben-Gurion, the man who founded the modern state of Israel. The diary of Ben-Gurion is an incredible document. In that Ben-Gurion wrote every day. In fact, every hour. He wrote his diary during meetings, even with people. He wrote down everything he heard and everything he thought. It's an incredible diary. He did that since the age of 14 or 15, I think, to the very end of his life. And in little notebooks. And at the end of each notebook, he would prepare an index for that particular notebook. Some of the things that Segev and the other historians found was surprising. Not only because they had happened, but because somebody had actually put them down on paper. I remember that I was shocked and I also know that one of the chapters that actually shocked people was a detailed account of how Israelis looted Arab property. I mean, in some way, this makes it more concrete than just talking about 700,000 people left their houses. When you ask, so what happened to the carpets? What happened to the radio sets? What happened to the chairs and where did all this go? And I found documents about that as well. I mean, very, very critical reports written by government officials at the time. Some quick background might be useful before we go any further into this. All the events that led to the Arabs evacuating Israel happened in just a few months. At the beginning of the war, the Israelis call the War of Independence and the Arabs call the Disaster of the Catastrophe. Before the war, Jews had been steadily emigrating to the country for decades, living side by side with the Arabs. Though, sometimes not too peacefully. In 1947, the UN proposed a way that everybody could get along. Divide the territory into two separate countries, one Jewish, one Arab. The Jews said sure. They were lucky to get this much. The Arabs said never, thinking that it was on its face outrageous that these newcomers should get anything. And then the Arabs launched a war against the Jews. If you want the big picture on why most of the Arab population of the country left Israel during that war, the best book is probably by Benny Morris, a book with a very dry sounding title The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949. It is kind of an amazing book, starting with the maps right at the front, where Morris annotates what happened to the Arabs in 369 different villages that he's researched one by one. What happened he said is complicated. And he says it changes over time. Sometimes Arabs ran away on their own, sometimes Arabs were forcibly expelled. Sometimes Arabs were encouraged to run away by the Israelis. But at the beginning of the war-- Benny Morris is quite clear on this. At the beginning of the war, there was no grand Jewish plan to expel Arabs from their homes. There wasn't a general plan. There wasn't a master plan. And there wasn't even in the course of '48, a policy to expel Arabs. Though Arab propagandists and historians, or so-called historians, still tout this same Arab version. Official Zionist policy, and this was also the policy carried out in the field by the Jewish troops, was to leave the Arab population in place. And that was true until the Israelis started losing the war in March of 1948. Things were looking bad for them and they knew that they were going to get a lot worse. That Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq were all about to invade with their armies. So the Israelis went on the offense, attacking Arab villages, Arab towns, Arab neighborhoods. In one operation called Plan D, the idea was simply to clear away Arabs who were sniping at roads and at supply routes that the Jews were using in the growing war. But Jewish troops discovered, and records showed that they were truly surprised at this. That whenever they would move into an area, the Arabs would just flee en masse. And most of the populations in fact, fled as battle approached, and as the Jews began to attack. Most Arabs fled so there wasn't even a need to expel them in the sense of a unit moving into a village and ordering the population out. The population fled before the unit entered the village. I was talking to an Israeli who told me that he remembers being taught in school as a kid. The teacher said, the Israeli army went from village to village and begged the Arabs to stay. Please stay. Please be our neighbors. Did that happen in places? It did happen, but what happens in collective memory and in official memory, is that things are telescoped. In other words, what happened in one or two villages at certain points in time, and actually also in city of Haifa on the 22 of April, where Jewish officials asked neighboring Arabs to stay, it's telescoped and expanded to cover the whole range of the war and all various different places. But it only happened in specific places and specific times at the beginning of the war. By the end of April, basically, there was a consensus on the Jewish side, it's best that the Arabs leave. And nobody asked Arabs to stay after the end of April. Anywhere. In fact, by the end of April, once they saw how quickly the Arabs had fled, and how much easier things were for the Jews with them gone, the Jews started to realize that they could end up with something that they had never dared to dream of when the war began. A new state that was nearly entirely Jewish, with very few Arabs in it. And they started to lay the groundwork for that to happen. When Arabs started asking if they could return to their homes-- and they started asking just weeks after they left. The war was still going on. Arab farmers wanted to get to their fields and orchards. People wanted to get to their houses now that they knew that the shooting had stopped in some areas. The Zionist leaders told them no, you can't come back. And the thinking was really very simple. Militarily, it was understood that these Arabs would launch the war against Israel and we're supporting the Arab states in their invasion of Palestine, which was aimed basically at stopping the emergence of a Jewish state. These Arabs were a fifth column. If they were allowed back, they would be a fifth column, undermining, subverting, and perhaps, attacking the state from within. This was clear to everybody. Once the Arabs had fled, they said, well, that's it. They attacked us. They fled. This is justice. Had the Arabs not launched a war there would have been no refugee problem. We will not let them back. Letting them back in would be putting a time bomb in our midst. That's how they saw it. And all that made sense while Israel was still openly at war. It was at the end of the war that the Jews made what Benny Morris calls, "A morally questionable decision" to never let the Arabs come back. They leveled Arab towns, took Arab fields, took Arab houses because they wanted all that for the new Jewish state. This would allow settlements to expand. They would make more room for immigrants. And it would mean that Jews would be a solid majority in the Jewish state. One person who saw all this happen was Ahmun Hadari. There's a very nice village on the shore, an Arab village, a large one called Achziv. We found it empty. Everybody had run away. All the Palestinians had run away. At the age of 19 in 1948, Ahmun fought in Israel's War of Independence. And that same year, he was also one of the founders of a Jewish settlement called Gesher Haziv, up near the Lebanese border, by this abandoned town of Achziv. Achziv, he tells me, is mentioned in the Bible as one of the towns that the ancient Israelites were never able to capture from the local population. Now there's a Club Med there, by the way. Ahmun pulls out a snapshot of himself from 1948, lean and young, standing in the sun. Now, not where I'm standing, but a little in my background there, it was an Arab village. You don't see the village, but these were its fields. What we got when we settled there was a piece of very fertile ground that had already been worked for quite-- I don't know how many years. Probably hundreds. At the time, we did not feel that there was anything really drastically wrong with that. About a year after we settled, some old and decrepit and sick Palestinians-- they didn't call themselves Palestinians in those days-- had come back and were now living at the outskirts of town. And there was a call up by the local military commander, one of the members of the kibbutz, taking 12 or 15 young men with rifles down there to chase them away. They chased them away and the next night they were back again. So the night after that, we brought a truck. Or they brought a truck, I wasn't there. They put them on the truck and they took them all the way up to the Lebanese border. And told them, OK, find a way of infiltrating back into Lebanon. That was that. So how is it that living on that kibbutz with the village always standing there by the beach where you were going to swim, how was it that you didn't think about it all the time, oh, we took this from other people? Let me sound like a demagogue for just one minute. You're from Chicago? You know of Fort Dearborn? When you go to Fort Dearborn, do you see Indians being slaughtered by white people from Europe with muskets? It just doesn't enter into the equation. In every war, there are winners and losers. The winners, in order to feel like they're winners, try not to think too much about the losers. Lots of Israelis, especially the religious half of the population, still believe that God gave this land to the Jews just like it says in the Bible and the events 50 years ago really don't change anything for them. Polls show that 40% of Israeli Jews think they have a right, even to the occupied territories. Still, these revisionist histories have been around since the late '80s. There have been TV reports and specials. The findings have trickled into high school textbooks. How much has it penetrated into the way that Israelis think about their country? Do many Israelis ever think about it? Take one of the most disturbing and best known incidents that happened during the war in '48. At two towns, right near the airport when you fly into Israel, Lod and Ramle, the largest mass eviction of Arabs came from there. And we know about it partly because Yitzhak Rabin, the architect of the Oslo Peace Accords, one of Israel's prime ministers, wrote about it in his autobiography. Again, historian Tom Segev. He tells a story of how he really didn't know what to do when he headed the forces who occupied these two towns. He really didn't know what to do with the population, and so we went to David Ben-Gurion himself and asked him, what do we do with these people? And Ben-Gurion made some gesture with his hand. A gesture in midair, like somebody briskly sweeping away some crumbs. Which Rabin interpreted as meaning, get rid of them. Expel them. And this is exactly what happened. It looks like an old house, or just this stone, very long stone wall with arches inside and windows, but it's completely overgrown with weeds. While I was in Israel, I visited Lod and Ramle with Adam Davidson. If you heard our show from Israel, you probably recognize Adam, a regular contributor to our program. He's half Israeli and half American, fluent in Hebrew. We asked a taxi to drive us around. Arabs still live here, some of them descendants of the few hundred Arabs left behind in 1948. As we drive, Adam asks our cab driver if he's heard the story about the expulsion. The cab driver who's Jewish says that that story is impossible. He said that it's always been Jews here. It's always been Jew. And how is that possible that people would be kicked out? It doesn't make sense. But Rabin wrote it himself in his biography. He says it didn't happen. He doesn't believe it could happen because they were part of us. We lived here together. We were all unified. The cab driver goes on like this, incredulous. He thinks Adam and I are just terribly misinformed. We keep driving, looking for a shopping mall where we can interview people about the town's history. Our cab driver knows about one, but he cannot find it. And he keeps pulling over asking for directions from people on the street. Every time he does this, the same thing happens. First, he rolls down his window and he asks about the mall. Then, after he gets directions, he asks them, have you heard this story about 1948 and Rabin? A Jewish woman scolds us. Keep going, get out of here. A man shakes his head. He said, leave me alone in quiet. Leave me in quiet, my brother. When we get to the mall and out on the street afterwards, we talk with Arabs and Jews. Every Arab we meet in Lod and Ramle had heard the story of how Arabs were expelled in 1948. Nearly none of the Jews knew this story. This Jewish man used to teach high school history. He says he's taught a lot of course and given a lot of lectures about war and he's never heard this in his life. Maybe he has and he forgot, but he doesn't think he has. We kind of live this double life. On the one hand we know all this and at the other hand, we ignore it, or we don't want to know it. Here's BZ Goldberg, the Israeli who got me into all this in the first place. He says those stories that he heard back in school were really nice stories. Because I was, I guess, young when I heard this, there's still something in me that wants to believe that actually, that that really happened, that story that I heard. That we did beg them to stay. That's funny, like there's a part of you that kind of believes the storybook version. There's a part of me that desperately wants to believe the storybook version. We desperately want to believe that we're good. We want to do the right thing and we want to believe that we have been doing the right thing. There's a political side to this too. Officially, the Israeli government denies that it was responsible for Arabs leaving the country in 1948. Because if it admitted any responsibility, the Arabs who left, and their kids and grandkids, basically all the people who today we know as the Palestinians, they would try to use that to make Israel let them back in. Barely any Israelis want to see that. Even historian Benny Morris, who believes the Israelis do bear some responsibility for the existence of the refugees, who literally wrote the book on it, even he does not want to let the Palestinians back in. If they are allowed back into the country, if Israel admits, agrees to the right of return, which the Palestinians demand, this will mean that Israel will be inundated, flooded by Palestinian refugees, and instantly become a country with a Jewish minority. It will cease being a Jewish state. It means in fact, self destruction. It means suicide. So I think Israel must refuse to accept responsibility and the right of return. It seems that you're put into the position though, where as a historian, in a way, you're endorsing the government officially denying part of the truth of its own history? No, I don't do that. I've always professed and that's what drove me and still drives me in my historical writing that people should know the truth about their past. But it's not necessary to translate truth into policy. There's no one to one connection between truth and policy. When I first started talking to Israelis about this, I expected these histories might have led at least some of them to acknowledge that the Palestinians today have some kind of moral right to be in Israel. None of them saw it this way. Sure, they thought the Palestinians should be treated fairly. That the Palestinians should have their own state. Some thought that there could be reparations. Money. But it didn't lead anybody to question the Israeli's right to keep what they had taken. What else can we do? Benny Morris asked me. If you're suggesting Israelis get on a plane and move back to Poland, that's not really an option. Act Three. Well, there's a military cliche that says something like, generals always re-fight the last war over and over. This next story is an illustration of that principle, even though it is a very different kind of war than the ones you've heard about so far on today's show. Jon Hodgman tells the sorry tale. Here is something I'm not quick to admit even to close friends, never mind on the radio. Every day for the past several years, I have been working on a screenplay. This of course, is shameful on its face. But it gets worse, believe me. Working on my screenplay has been very hard because the story I'm telling is long and complex and important. It's also difficult because I'm not actually writing anything down. Until recently, I would only think about it, night after night, lying in bed, rewriting my screenplay in my head. And as this process tends to make me sleepy, I've actually not gotten very far. I began my screenplay on May 19, 1999, a date that may resonate with some of you who may already guess at the other main challenge of my project, the one that lends it the extra measure of sad delusion and ultimate futility that accompanies the writing of any screenplay. And that is that my screenplay has already been written by someone else and it is called Star Wars: Episode I- The Phantom Menace. You will recognize this music, of course. For many people, the opening fanfare embodies just about the sum total of what the Phantom Menace got right. Next, the familiar text crawls up and out into the galaxy. The taxation of outlying trade routes is in dispute we're told. And with this particularly rousing line of exposition, the bewilderment and shock and sadness begins. We know this now. But think back to the peculiar exciting year that was 1999. Slightly crazed by the end of the Millennium, we impeached a president for the first time in 131 years. We started paying English majors huge sums of money to create something called content. And in a still disturbing bout of mass hysteria, every American man grew at least one kind of goatee, and we waited for the Phantom Menace. This was when the internet was at its peak. Still, largely ruled by passion more than commerce. And in many ways, it had found its perfect expression in sites like theforce.net and Starkiller- The Jedi Bendu Script Site, anarchic collaborative communities of information obsessives building a model of what this new Star Wars movie would look like only from rumors, stolen photographs, and leaked script passages. And it somehow felt important that I spend at least an hour a day looking at them. And not just insane. Well, this wasn't always a good thing. When I first downloaded an unofficial audio clip of Jar Jar Binks's quasi-Caribbean Stepin Fetchit whining, I spent a long moment staring doubtfully out the window before quietly deleting the file. But still I had hope. Jump to early May 1999. I saw the Phantom Menace first at a private press screening thanks to a journalist friend of mine who either sympathized with my obsession, or feared what would happen if he did not indulge it. It was probably the first time in history one could go to a new movie, as I did, knowing every scene, every line front to back. As the lights went down, there was a feeling of joy and imminence in the room. The nation was prosperous and relatively peaceful. I was sitting next to the movie star, Jon Favreau, and Star Wars was coming to fulfill a promise it had made 22 years ago to a generation now coming into its own. When the lights came up though, something had changed. Something had broken and I couldn't put my finger on what it was. The ideas were good, I kept saying as we left the theater and drank, for hours, afterward. There was so much promise there. How could it have all gone so wrong so quickly? I started revising that night. First of all, I thought, Anakin Skywalker would have to at least be a teenager. What made George Lucas think we would be OK with the idea of an elderly man taking a nine year old boy away from his mother, Jedi master or no. And that's just creepy. And one of the great pleasures of any Star Wars movie was always the one planet, one climate concept. You had your desert planet, your ice planet, your swamp planet, your cloud planet. Yes, the Phantom Menace had a city planet, but that had already been done with the death star, don't you think? So what is it? What comes after cloud planet? Occasionally, I would sneak away from my desk and call my friends. I found a solution to the Jar Jar problem, I would say. But mainly, I would lie awake at night, alone, and ponder the big questions. What does Darth Sidious want with Naboo in the first place? What were those glowing purple balls of energy the Gungans were always tossing around? And of course, Obi-Wan Kenobi knows R2-D2 from the Phantom Menace, why doesn't he recognize him in Star Wars? At this point, you will want to know, what is the solution to the Jar Jar problem? I understand, everyone hates Jar Jar. In fact, everything in my screenplay flows from this very simple fix. And that is, replace him with Sebulba. OK, Sebulba. You remember the villain in the pod race, the cranky, Joe Camel looking thing in the World War I goggles who walked around on his hands and almost beat Anakin? Switch that guy, Sebulba, with Jar Jar, and what you get is an angrier, more interesting character, who accidentally gets his life saved by Obi-Wan Kenobi during the invasion of Naboo. Then this hybrid character, let's call him Jarbulba, he now has to follow Obi-Wan around until he has a chance to save Obi-Wan's life. It could take years, Jarbulba would explain, to their mutual dismay. But for now, they're stuck with each other. Obi-Wan, the snobby, young Jedi from the big city, and Jarbulba, the bitter malcontent with the heart of gold. Like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones. This is a good change for three reasons. One, Jarbulba becomes the cynical Han Solo figure the film so desperately needs. Two, he actually has a reason to go on the rest of the adventure. And three, creatures walking on their hands are cool. But this is only the beginning. In the actual Phantom Menace, the Gungans, Jar Jar's people, have no real purpose in the story. In my screenplay, they do. In my screenplay, it turns out that they're preternaturally sensitive to the Force. And Darth Sidious, the bad guy, needs them like bloodhounds to track down this powerful new concentration in the Force he's been sensing somewhere on the edge of the galaxy. But Jarbulba is a Gungan and he leads our heroes to this concentration first, which turns out to be a teenager on Tatooine, Anakin Skywalker, who uses the Force to win the pod race and is then accused of cheating. Thus having to flee with our heroes who need his skills as a pilot. And so, as act one concludes, Obi-Wan is captain of a crew he can't stand, bound by fate to a strange hand-walking freak, and forced to watch as the dashing and not nine year old, Anakin, captures the heart of the queen that Obi-Wan secretly pines for himself. I will stop talking now. This is the moment in discussing my screenplay that I begin to feel more and more like someone standing on a cold corner mumbling to himself. And also, this is as far as I've gotten. It's been 31 months. Some 960 days of work and I've only made it to the end of act one. Long after Episode II has come and gone, I'm still trying to get Episode I down. Even though I know I never will. Because even in the midst of my mania, I know I'm trying to repair something more than a script. The Phantom Menace was the beginning of the end. Think about it. It came out in May 1999. Was it a coincidence that the economy then collapsed? That all the promise and light of that time went with it? That my mother became suddenly sick and soon died? That our country was attacked? That we went to war? Well, probably it was a coincidence. But there's a reason I would work on my screenplay while falling asleep. At night, dozing in the hospital while my mother was dying, or when I was awake in bed in October 2001, listening for planes over New York City, when all daylight and distractions were exhausted. Instead of feeling angry or panicked or sad, I could ask myself, what if? What if Jar Jar and Sebulba switched places? What if Naboo were a sunken planet, where all that was left of a once great world, a shining civilization, were the tips of mountains, the tallest spires of the cities just poking up above the water's dark surface? Is that what comes after a cloud planet? It's an odd compulsion to tell a story correctly. We feel it every time we tell a joke or interrupt our spouse in the middle of the one about the time we drunkenly broke into the London Zoo. Wait, go back, you say. Wait, go back and start over. And maybe this is not really borne of a desire to get the beginning right, but to avoid ever having to come to the end. I know it's futile to go on with my screenplay. And to tell the truth, it isn't offering me the same kind of comfort that it used to. The story will end the way it ends. All I really needed was to get this far. As Obi-Wan and Jarbulba, Anakin and the queen fly off in the desert planet, the point where the adventure is just starting, with everything still promised and unknown. Because beginnings are really the only happy endings. John Hodgman in New York City. Well, our program was produced today by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, Dave Kestenbaum, and Starlee Kine. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Jane Golombisky, and Mr. Jorge Just in a special cameo. BZ Goldberg who you heard in our Israel story is one of the creators of a great film about Israeli and Palestinian kids. If you want to know more about that visit promisesproject.org. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago or visit our web site, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who says it is not easy wearing a Darth Vader costume everywhere. I piss my pants. My heart rate climbs. My breathing becomes shallow in the mask. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Things are just starting to look up for Jorge, when the thing with the TV happened. He had just moved to a new town, started his life over, found some work, got a place. Years of searching around in vagueness were ending. It's going well. Like the way that I'm procrastinating now is by-- like doing work. You know? Coming into my home, I feel good. I'm paying bills relatively on time. He'd moved to New York City, which was scary. And walked into an apartment that real New Yorkers told him was a find-- a little studio in the East Village. One room. Good location. Cheap. And then one night he's sitting at his table, watching The Bachelorette on TV. And it's the episode where the bachelorette has whittled it down to four guys that she's going to pick one from, eventually. And she's in New York City visiting one of the potentials. And you know, she goes out to dinner with his family. And they eat, and you know, they've got the shifty-eyed sister. And you know, like everybody's family acts the exact same way. You know? Right. And then they get in the limousine, and they decide to go back to his apartment. Now I'm on the edge of my seat. Because I moved to New York-- it's an enormous city. And I would be so excited if I could recognize the street. I would be so excited. It would just make me so happy. And so I'm totally-- I'm totally excited. So they get out of the limo, and he hugs her in the street. And they pan and they show a building. They show an awning. And it's my awning. It's your building? It's my building. It's the awning to my building. It says the address. It says the street. It's-- you know-- it's possibly the only place in New York I actually know. (both laughing) And then he opens the door, and she comes in, and it's my lobby. You know? There's my lobby. There is the row of mailboxes, you know? And I'm just like-- I'm out of my chair. And I'm-- I can't talk. I'm like-- you know-- like pointing at the TV. If it were me, I would think like, are they here right now? Like in the building? You're too smart. I couldn't think. I was just like, aaah. [Ira laughs] You know? You know what I mean? I was just like-- I was just flabbergasted. It just couldn't be happening, you know? He watches them take the elevator up to the fourth floor. Jorge goes on the fifth. They walk down the hallway door. And then Jorge realizes something else. You know, he doesn't just live in the city as me. He doesn't live on the same street as me. He doesn't just live in the same building as me. He basically lives in my apartment. He lives in the exact same apartment. This exact same layout. So wait a second. So the camera goes inside this apartment, and you see your apartment, basically. A much better version of my apartment. His is much better. The walls are wider. The place is cleaner. The furniture is nicer. He has a half wall. He's got a half wall. A half wall with brick, glass, blocks? It's like drywall, you know? But it seems like it has some sort of counter top kind of thing on it. And at that moment Jorge gets this flash. He is not really doing all that well. His apartment is a kind of dump, compared to this guy who's on TV. Plus he's watching Trista Rehn, the bachelorette, on TV, looking uncomfortable in his apartment on national TV. In fact, she bails on the guy. She leaves the apartment, and they cut to like that head-on interview. You know? And she's looking into the camera. And she says, I've dated guys with really bad apartments before. I can't judge him on that. I have to-- I have to find out why he feels like he can live in an apartment like this. She ditched him because of the apartment? Yeah. Yeah. Wait. He lost out on the bachelorette because of the apartment? Oh yeah. And it was your apartment? But better. Over the next few days it all sort of goes to hell for Jorge. He's depressed. His new life does not seem so shiny. His New York friends console him. Look, they say, the bachelorette had never seen a New York apartment before. She does not know how people here live. This means nothing. Which helps him for a while, until one day Jorge picks up the New York Post, and right there is an article about his neighbor, Todtman-- the guy from The Bachelorette-- getting busted for cocaine. Third paragraph. "Todtman's fate on The Bachelorette was sealed the moment Rehn set foot in his squalid Avenue A studio apartment." Do you understand the weight of that? Squalid. "Squalid Avenue A studio apartment." So this isn't just like people from outside New York. This is the New York Post. Nobody knows New York apartments like the New York Post. These guys have been in the most squalid New York City apartments. It's squalid, you know? It's squalid. Squalid. Squalid. You know? There's not that many definitions for squalid. There's not many ways to look at the word squalid and think, mmm, maybe they mean kind of hip. You know? Somehow, without ever meaning to, Jorge had the experience that a person would have if he actually went onto one of the reality shows, and then got booted off the show. National television came into his apartment, and then kicked him off the island, by proxy. He was like collateral damage to a reality show. You know, I never-- I didn't want to be-- I didn't want America to judge me and tell me my apartment sucked, you know? I didn't want that. But that moment when they came into my building, and they opened that door, and it was my apartment, I thought I was-- you know-- I thought that I was hot. I thought that it was-- you know. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it's like-- byoo byoo boo. [Ira laughs] You know? What was it? Byoo, byoo, byoo, byoo, byoo. You lose, you lose, you lose, you lose. You know? Jorge says that if he hadn't just moved to New York City, if he hadn't just started this whole life, it would not have been the kick in the stomach that it was, which brings us to today's radio program. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, starting from scratch. Stories of people in that period of their lives when everything is up for grabs. They're starting over. Everything is tenuous. Act One, Puppy Love, the Business Model. Act Two. Making Money the Old-Fashioned Way. In that act, the story of a man-- a limo driver, in fact-- who begins each day from scratch with just a few bucks, and builds it to hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands by the end of the day. Act Three. The First Starting From Scratch. In that act, Jonathan Goldstein revisits a possibly familiar tale of a man, a woman, a garden, and a snake. Stay with us. Act One. Puppy Love, the Business Model. OK. You know There are mom and pop grocery stores, mom and pop newspapers. But could you throw everything away, change your life, start your life over, and create a mom and pop cable network? Molly FitzSimons' own father tried. And she has the answer. Some people's fathers quit their jobs and become teachers. Some maybe retire early and start a new hobby, like model building. My father, after turning over the reins of the business he'd owned and operated for 25 years, started a cable channel. From scratch. It was February 1995, and he was looking for something new to do, but he didn't know what. Then came the O.J. trial. He had just had back surgery, and the day they sent him home for bedrest happened to be the day that the trial began. During the long breaks in the action he would flip through the channels. There was so much downtime in the trial I had a chance to see everything that was on television all day long for weeks. You mean you just surfed around while-- The slow points of the trial were most of the day. And I spent the time surfing around daytime television and seeing what it was. What it was was mostly soap operas, talk shows, reruns, game shows. Things that my father had no interest in. My father is a problem solver, and this was a problem. So I thought, something else is necessary. There's a need for a parking place on television. If you don't want to watch something that is there you could have the TV set on, and it'd be playing something that didn't bother you, and would hold the place until your favorite show or what you chose to watch. For my father, like for a lot of people, simply turning off the television isn't an option. So he's stuck flipping through a bunch of shows that he hates waiting for the O.J. trial to come back on, when a little light bulb goes off in his head. I recalled my wife and I walking to lunch on a Friday in downtown Cleveland, walking into a building where the Animal Protective League had puppies up for adoption. And the crowd of people standing around these puppies included men in three-piece suits, and women in fancy outfits, and shoppers, moms with kids in strollers, the UPS man. And they stood together smiling and chuckling, and even sometimes addressing one another in the middle of a big city building, all because there were puppies. The puppies made them feel better. And so my thought jumped to if television needs some other kind of programming, what would be wrong with one channel, out of the hundreds that there are, that showed nothing but puppies. All day, all night, every day. The initial idea was all puppies all the time. You would turn to the Puppy Channel and you would see-- 24 hours a day, seven days a week-- footage of puppies fooling around like puppies do, acting the natural comedians and cuties that they are. With no people, no talk, accompanied only by relaxing instrumental music-- would be the Puppy Channel concept. What are you looking for here? I'm looking for Ted Turner's letter, where he very nicely refused me in writing this time. My father's home office in Clearwater, Florida, is all decked out with family photos, artifacts from his years in the ad business. And an entire wall of file cabinets, which has the complete Puppy Channel archive. What's that? This is a demo that is on the way to being the pilot show. He shows me a banker's box filled with videotapes, and pulls out the one-hour pilot he made early on in the Puppy Channel development. It's professionally packaged. There's a closeup of a puppy on the cover with the word "Woof." And two exclamation points. OK. So it's a really-- it's a cute cover. Let's put it in. When's the last time you watched this? I think it's been years since I watched this. [singing on video] Puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies. Puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies. You may recognize this voice. It's my dad. He also wrote the lyrics. Puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies. Puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies. Puppies! [puppies bark in the background] The scene fades up to a family of old English sheepdog puppies playing and barking in a wood-paneled suburban den somewhere, with mellow guitar music in the background. After a couple of minutes the scene changes to a corgi puppy running in circles on a snow-covered lawn. Soon border collies are fighting over a sock on somebody's linoleum kitchen floor. It's exactly what you'd expect from my dad's description of the Puppy Channel. And what's so surprising is that it really is nothing more than that. Throughout the hour-long pilot, puppies waddle around and sniff things. Puppies wrestle and nuzzle each other adorably. It's a soft focus world of indescribable cuteness. Occasionally, my dad's singing interrupts the relaxing instrumental soundtrack. Wait. This is your voice, right? [singing] Puppies are everywhere. Puppies go anywhere. Watch the Puppy Channel now for puppies on TV. That's like the, um, theme song? That's the third Puppy Channel theme. Aww. Look at that one, with the big ears flopping up in the air. At some point while we're watching, my dad's wife, Carol-- who's been listening quietly to our conversation from the other side of the room-- comes over and starts cooing at the television. Carol went with my father on most of the Puppy Channel shoots, and actually had the idea for what became the big climactic final scene of the pilot. Here's a scene of all 10 of the dogs on a sofa, and how they get off. Some of them are vigorous in getting off. Some of them are a little reluctant. This was your idea, Carol? I thought it would be cute. It's not just cute. It's also suspenseful. Most of the puppies immediately jump or tumble off the couch onto the carpeted floor. But a couple of them stay up there looking sort of confused. It's a pretty long sequence. I glance around the room during it, and realize that all of us are smiling. And we're watching with rapt attention to see if the two cowardly puppies will ever find their way down off the couch. One of the two finally does, leaving only one puppy left. And to give you an idea of the drama of the moment, let me put it this way. We all find ourselves talking to the TV. Come on. Come on. You can do it. You can do it. Come on. No. Wrong way. Finally, after a good three or four minutes, the last puppy sort of half jumps, half falls off the couch. And all of us cheer. The moment. Yes. Success. Nice move into slow-mo there. The whole time my dad was doing the Puppy Channel, I could never decide if I thought the idea was genius or totally insane. And the thing that made it seem super smart was the same thing that made it seem kind of crazy-- namely, puppies. Suddenly my businessman dad was talking so much and so fervently about puppies it was kind of weird. And my question was always how would the Puppy Channel possibly make any money. When I asked my father this question, he was so convincing that I started to wonder why it's not on television right now. Here's how it would work. There'd be fees from cable operators, and there'd be product placements and sponsorships. You'd see a bunch of puppies tearing into a bag of puppy chow, for example. Or a scroll across the bottom of the screen saying, this hour of the Puppy Channel brought to you by Milk Bone. In focus groups it did well-- 37% preferred it to TBS. 41% to CNBC. And remember, my dad didn't need a huge audience to succeed. At the time we created the Puppy Channel, television channels with the tiniest little sliver of audience were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Court Television sold one third of its stock for $100 million, which presumably means the thing was worth $300 million. And their primetime ratings was 1/10 of 1% of the TV audience at that time. Based on our research, that even though the Puppy Channel would appeal to a very small segment of people, that segment would be big enough to make it a success. But even a small cable channel was a huge venture compared to anything my father had done before. By his reckoning, he needed to raise $17 million to get on the air. Or he needed a big cable company to buy his idea. And so he and Carol started hustling. And after 25 years of being at the center of their own small familiar world, they suddenly found themselves in middle age, on the fringes of a much larger and stranger one. There were cable conventions. We had a little tiny booth way in the corner. And we had a million people coming around wanting to get our video. And what was your role there? Um, dog. [both laughing] What? I dressed as a dog. And I painted my nose black. Yeah. And couldn't get the black out of the pores of my nose for days. Whose idea was it for you to wear a dog suit? I think it was-- I think it was your father's. Of course it was your father's. Would I have voluntarily done that? These are the things you do for love. [laughing] Fortune magazine published a photo of Carol in her dog suit. The media loved the Puppy Channel. There was an article about it on the cover of the Hollywood Reporter. There were favorable blurbs in Entertainment Weekly and USA Today. Everybody loved it. Everybody except the ones who, at this stage, mattered most. People like Ted Turner, Barry Diller, and Rupert Murdoch all got the Puppy Channel pitch. But my father couldn't make the sale. One of the TV professionals that we talked to was talking about the amount of space on a satellite-- they call it bandwidth today-- that it takes to have a commercial TV network shown. He said something like, you'd ask us to give up six megaschlocks of gooberschnapp to put just puppies on there? And the answer is yes. But if you are the guy who owns the six megagoops of schlockendock, you're maybe not gonna give it up for puppies. But why? He doesn't like puppies? Or-- No. It's a foreign concept to want to go way far off the beaten path. The Puppy Channel is way off the beaten path. It has no people. It has no talk. Usually when you describe this, you do mention that there would be no talk, and that seems to be a big part of what you liked about the idea. Why do you think that is? Why were you so interested in a channel where nobody talked? Having a human being in the picture talking about what the puppies were doing, or talking about something, struck me as against the concept originally of just having a quiet place on television that was all relaxing, all comfort, all easy and pleasure-giving in a very, very low-key way. One person my father talked to characterized the Puppy Channel as the antidote to television. And in the end, I think that's probably why it never worked out. My dad hadn't just imagined a new cable network. He'd imagined a new way to think about what television can be. What you'd get from watching the Puppy Channel would be very different than what you get watching the Food Network or QVC. Or Law and Order, for that matter. In his business plan, along with all the spreadsheets and financial outlines, under the section titled "Vision," it says only "to make television more helpful." And under "Mission," "to help people relax and feel better." My father conceived of the Puppy Channel as a refuge from regular TV. But implicit in this notion is the idea that regular TV is something you need a refuge from. And that's a tough sell to the people who make it. After five years of hard work, my father decided to pull the plug. I'm just going to put it out there and say I think the world wasn't ready for the Puppy Channel. If there were 1,000 television channels, the Puppy Channel might be in there. If there were 600 television channels regularly being sent out by the satellites, the Puppy Channel might be there. There's a number where the puppy generally fits in. We just don't know what that number is. When we find out what that number is I'll be there with my dad. And we'll be singing this song. Take us out, Dad. [singing] I love the little puppies, pretty little puppies. I love the little puppies on the Puppy Channel, every little pup on TV. Molly FitzSimons and her dad. Since we first broadcast this story back in 2003 we have obviously seen the incredible demand for cute puppy videos on YouTube. There's the Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet. There is Dog TV, a channel intended to be watched by dogs. Molly's dad, Dan FitzSimons, died in 2016, but obviously was far ahead of his time. Molly says that he delighted in the fact that his idea, a cozy corner of the world for watching puppies, caught in the act of being cute, flourished in all these other forms. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. You gotta have something if you wanna be with me. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. You gotta have something if you're gonna be with me. Act two. Making money the old-fashioned way. Well, now we bring you the story of someone who starts from scratch every single day with next to nothing, and tries to build it up to something. Mary Beth Kirchner tells the story. Every day Joe plays this game. He starts with enough small bills to make change-- lots of fives and ones-- then the clock starts. It's 1:30 in the morning. I go out with almost nothing in my pocket in the morning. And sometimes I end up with thousands. Sometimes I end up broke at the end of the day. So how much do you have in your pocket today? I got $32 in my pocket today. By six o'clock I should have at least a couple hundred bucks. And you know, I take it from there. By 6:00 AM, he means. Joe, who doesn't want me to use his last name, drives a super stretch limousine in Las Vegas. Joe says he prefers starting in the middle of the night. Doesn't like crowds or traffic. Here's how his game works. By driving his limo to and from the airport mostly, Joe slowly earns enough-- a few hundred dollars-- to play blackjack in the casino. And then pretty much the sky's the limit. Sometimes I end up with 10 grand, you know? One time I started out with like 32 bucks or $33-- Like today. Like today. And I wound up with $84,000 at the Gold Coast. $84,000? $84,000. How do you turn 32-- I try and build it up to like $1,000, then I play with the $1,000. I build it up to three, four, and then you get on a run. Joe is a bit of a legend in Las Vegas gambling circles. I'd heard about him from a pawnbroker south of the strip who said Joe was a regular customer who came every month for about a year. Among the stories he told me, which led me to Joe, that he'd never worked a day in his life. That he lived only on a trust fund until he was 50, controlled by his father who despised his love of gambling. On his 50th birthday, the legend went, Joe inherited six million. He instantly spent the first million on a house. The remaining five he gambled away. It took him five hours. Joe says not true, but based on the truth. He did inherit millions of dollars from his family, and did lose a big piece of it gambling. But over years. Not hours. People tell me, oh, look at the kind of life you lead. I mean, one day I could have a million dollars. The next day I'd be broke. But I love it. I love the action. I love the adrenaline. I get an adrenaline rush from it. One day you have a million dollars and the next day you're broke? Is that an exaggeration, or really-- No. It's not an exaggeration. I mean, I had days where I went in and I won-- like at the horseshoe I won $680,000. I started the day out with like 50 bucks in my pocket. And I went out and I bought two homes with some of the money. Then I ended up losing the other money. Then I needed money so I borrowed on the houses. And then I lost the houses. I couldn't pay. I go up and down. It's like a roller coaster. But I really enjoy doing it. You know? I think without it I'll just wilt away and die. See, this is one of the hotels. The Barbary Coast won't let me in. If I go in there and sit down for two minutes they'll tell me to get up and leave. Joe has a long history of winning big at the casinos. So much so, and this is clearly true, about a dozen of them in Las Vegas have kicked him out. He says most of them think he cheats. Nobody could be that lucky, they say. Among the places where he's still allowed to play, none wanted their names mentioned, or would allow me to record in their casinos today. So we were limited to taping outdoors, where most of Joe's game happens anyway. Sometimes you'll stand here for like half hour and nobody will come out. But as soon as they come out to take a cab I approach them. First stop. His favorite nameless hotel and casino, where the doorman lets him approach potential customers from the circular driveway out front. Joe tips the doorman for each ride he gets, so he gives Joe first dibs on every person who walks out the door. You guys need a cab? Yes. How about this? 15 bucks. 15 bucks? With the approval of the doorman, lots of people say yes. Isn't this a lot nicer than a cab? A lot nicer. See. It's 2:00 AM, with our first $15 coming in. Joe says he started waking up at these hours when he worked in New York operating vending machines and coffee carts, gambling in Atlantic City on weekends. There, too, he says most of the casinos kicked him out. By the time he came to Vegas 14 years ago, he says he was ready to retire, but he gambled full-time for the first eight years he was here. Well, he's not a dishonest man by no means. But, you know, he is an opportunist. He's the type of guy if there's an opportunity for him to, you know, work the odds or make a dollar he'll make ten. He's one of them guys. George-- please don't mention my full name, either, or where I work-- is a casino manager in one of the few places where Joe now plays. We met in an empty hotel ballroom, far from the casino floor. They think he counts cards. He doesn't. He's very good at knowing when the deck goes cold-- when there's not a chance of winning. If I would own a casino and have 1,000 Joes walking around in my casino I'd be out of business in short order. Well, maybe not. Joe walks away with his winnings, but then he always comes back for more play. And that combination, George says, does to Joe what it does to everyone. I see the numbers. There's not a player in this place, like in any casino I've ever been in, that has won more than they lost. Never? I'd say never, when you see the cumulative numbers. And that's one reason why Joe is driving a limo. If these guys are going to a strip club that would be great. That's $100. 5:00 AM, and we've got $180. Where are you guys going to? Joe has his eye on a group of guys who've clearly been out on the town for most of the night. Whoo! Joe's hoping these four are looking to go to a strip club, because he gets a kickback of $20 a person. Are you guys having fun? We planned it. Turn the radio up. You want the radio on? Radio is optional. It's more money. I got anything you want, as long as you got money. Joe tells me he also takes guys to the brothels a half hour drive from Las Vegas, and collects even more. [men singing] We take people out there and we usually get 30. Now for the holidays they're doing 40% of what the person spends. If a person spends $1,000 we get $400 kickback for bringing them out there. Now, what do you mean, "for the holidays?" Till December. They're doing like a special. Instead of 30% they're giving us another 10%. Because I have pictures of everything in my trunk. I have a menu also. They have a menu of all the stuff you could do. Yeah, I love Vegas! As we drive, the stories keep coming. There was the day Joe won big at the race track and flew to London on the Concorde just for dinner. Or the two-day stretch he was playing $20,000 a hand at the Hilton, and walked away with over a million dollars. These kinds of stories can't be confirmed, but I wanted to believe them. So he offered to show me what's in his trunk. See this? This is about a half a million dollars in markers right here. Joe hands me a three-inch stack of receipts from casinos all over town totaling about a half million dollars. Evidence, he says, he wants me to see that these can't all be lies. And what are those 20,000? Yeah. They loaned me $20,000 to sit and play with. Oh. You know? If you lose you've got 30 days to pay it back. These are $20,000, $20,000. Yeah, they're all like-- $25,000. Yeah. And what's this? This is my uncle in Forbes magazine. He made like close to a billion dollars. He's your uncle? Yeah. That's my uncle. Billionaire? Yeah. Later when I look into it that story checks out, as does the one about his aunt, who Joe says sits on the board of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He says she's the one who bails him out when he gets over his head in debt. Joe admits he's the black sheep in the family. How much did they give you? $41. It's 7:30 AM and we're up to $350 from the run to the strip club, and five trips to the airport. And we just keep going around and around. There's a brief lull. Joe says it's time to go into the casino. I'm gonna go play a little blackjack. The only thing is I don't know if they're gonna let you-- Of course they're not. They won't. The casino won't let me record his play, of course, but I watch. I'm going to play with $100 now. I'm making $50 or $60 in like 15 minutes, or less. Joe sits in front of a woman dealer with an empty table. And he's got that look, almost like a drinker who bellies up to a bar every night. Like he belongs there. He signals the woman for cards and chips in quick short-cut hand signals. Each hand takes less than a minute. He plays a few, and easily wins his $60 in 10 minutes or less. Before I know it we're out again. 8 AM with $410. He says it's getting to be peak time for airport runs. See now it gets busy, so I don't have a chance to get to really go in and gamble because I'm, you know-- As long as I keep the cash coming in. If it's slow I supplement it with gambling. If it's not I just, you know. But you wouldn't rather be gambling? I'd rather be working. Really? Yeah. What happened to your feeling about the gambling? I just do it to, you know-- because I'm so hyper I have to have something to do. I used to sit-- like I was at the Flamingo one time, and I had about $40,000 in chips in front of me. And I was playing like $2,000 a hand. And I told the doorman if you get a good ride, like to a golf course, come and get me. So it was like a $75-- Anyway, he came up to the table, and he told me I got a ride for $75. And people in the pit, they all think I'm nuts. I just stopped. I left, took my money, and I ran down to take a guy for $75. And here I am playing two grand a head. And I try and separate the two. One has nothing to do with the other, you know? I don't understand that. Nobody does. But that's how I am. You know? But do you understand that? Just gambling to me is gambling. Work is work. You know? 10:00 AM, and we've got $650. We've had three more airport runs, and the last customer just gave him a $25 tip. Only in America. But Joe says today his game is subdued compared to the past. At age 54 he's had some heart trouble, and that's changed the stakes. A year ago his daughter was home from college, and noticed he didn't look well and called for an ambulance. Joe was having a heart attack. It was pretty scary just to see him in-- I think he might have been in a casino but I'm not there. I guess that's enough to really get your heart rate up. Yeah. If you ask me, I think he probably was, but he never told me for sure. Joe's daughter knew what she was doing. She's studying to be a doctor in medical school in the Middle East. I talked with her via her cell phone while she was working at a hospital in some remote spot in Israel. She asked that I not use her name. Not even her first name. What did you tell your friends your dad did? Now or when I was growing up? Because now even I don't-- only a few people in my class really know, of my good friends even. What did you tell them then? Then I would say, well, he's not really doing anything now, but he has real estate in New York. And sometimes I just make things up. I'd say he's a chef. But it was always funny, because it was a running joke between me and my dad that when I was growing up I couldn't tell people, because nobody else had a dad like that. And so I felt like they would either not believe me, or I would sound ridiculous. And they just wouldn't understand. But he had never had a problem with me saying to anyone what he does is that he gambles. When Joe moved to Las Vegas, his daughter was just entering high school. He raised her practically as a single parent, starting from the time she was born, when his ex-wife had a breakdown. It wasn't until they moved to Las Vegas that she says she really understood just how much her father gambled. I guess what always blew me away in the beginning is we would walk in and everybody would know him. And they would know me too, because he would talk about me. And I would say to him, how do these people know you? I was amazed by that. And they would joke with him, and they'd say, are you back again? And they'd say, well, what do you need today? Because he would go in sometimes and he'd say I need a pool today. How much money does it take to build a pool? $20,000? I don't remember how-- How long did that take? Literally 10 minutes, maybe. One, two, three. And that was it. But as much as she knows her dad's wins, she remembers the times when they were broke. Really broke. We would have to search for quarters on the floor. And my uncle-- this was really funny-- to buy a hamburger, or something like that. Search for quarters on the floor in your uncle's-- Yeah. He would search. We would pick them up. And I would go and get a hamburger. But that was in the very beginning. I mean, even when things are really bad he can always find a way out of it. And even I would be amazed. Because I would say to him, there's no way-- that how are you gonna do that? And he'd say, don't worry. We'll find a way. And there was always a way. And he can just laugh about it. Which airline are you going to? Southwest. Southwest? It's noon, and Joe has $1,100. The limo business has been steady for hours. It's a good time for business, but Joe wants to take a break to call his daughter. I talk to her like five times a day. It's late night in Israel. He just wants to hear about her day. Hi, honey. It's me. I just called to say hi. So what's happened since your daughter is gone? Well, that's when I started to work. I never worked while she was here. This like filled up my void, maybe, in a way. [INAUDIBLE] just think about it. I miss her so much. When I see her it's like-- it's the greatest feeling in the world. And we're at the airport now. This is zero level. I'm going to go upstairs and see how busy it is-- if people are looking for rooms. It's 1:30 PM and we're up to $1,300. We've just dropped off yet another ride at the airport. And for a little variety, Joe says he's going to show me how he also sells hotel rooms. These are hotel rooms the casinos give him for free because he gambles so much. So I got to make it seem like I'm just walking casual. [whistling] Joe's carefully checking out a middle-aged couple in shorts and tennis shoes. Just as he's about to approach them-- [phone ringing]-- we're interrupted. Hi. This is Joe. Oh. How you doing, Dave? What's up? A lucrative job has come up. He says some high roller wants to charter his limo for three hours. For three hours? Did you tell him it's $75 an hour, though? Joe says these guys are seldom big tippers, but it's worth the gamble. This customer-- a handsome, mid-thirties Middle Easterner-- says no recording, please. So Joe tells me to take a break, and he'll catch up with me when he's done. Since my family lost their homes when the Jews took over Israel-- It's 5:00 PM, and I have no idea how much money Joe has. When we reconnect he looks exhausted, but hyped up. Since I left him he's finished with the charter, been to the casino to gamble, where he won $500. But there's more. He's anxious to tell me about how he's ended the day. So tell me this again. So this guy at the end of the day-- you thought this was gonna be the end of the day. I just asked him-- I asked him-- I said to him, where are you from? So he says, Lebanon. And I said, oh, I speak Arabic. I said, I was born in Baghdad. I was really born in Baghdad, Iraq. What Joe didn't tell the guy is that he's Jewish. I said, are you Muslim? He says, yes. Yes. I said, oh, those Jews-- I said, what they're doing is terrible to the Palestinians. And then he just-- his adrenaline just started going. He wanted to go out with me tonight. He wanted to hire the car for five hours tonight. And then I said, no. I said, I'm too tired. So he says, well, I'll call you tomorrow. I said, fine. He's like buddy-buddy. But he gave me 500 bucks. I said, all right. That's what I call a perfect day. You go out with like 32 bucks, you go home with two grand. As we take off, Joe's still hanging on to today's winnings in a wad of bills, folded up like it's a double cheeseburger in one of his hands on the steering wheel. $232 he gave me as a tip, which is not bad. But think of it. If Joe just worked five days a week, making $2,000 a day, and never lost it back, that'd be a half million dollars a year. It's a wonderful country. [laughing] Mary Beth Kirchner lives in Washington, DC. Coming up, when the creator of the universe starts from scratch. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. 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-- Starting from Scratch. Stories of people starting over, with all the vulnerability and rawness that comes with starting from nothing. We've arrived at Act Three. The first starting from scratch. Well, before there was money, or gambling, or TV, or puppies, or even the idea of before, there was this story about when everything started from scratch. Here's Jonathan Goldstein. In the beginning, when Adam was first created, he spent whole days rubbing his face in the grass. He picked his ear until it bled. Tried to fit his fist in his mouth. And yanked out tufts of his own hair. At one point, he tried to pinch his own eyes out in order to examine them. And God had to step in. Looking down at Adam, God must have felt a bit weird about the whole thing. It must have been something like eating at a cafeteria table all by yourself, when a stranger suddenly sits down opposite you. But it's a stranger who you have created. And he is eating a macaroni salad that you've also created. And you have been sitting at the table all by yourself for over 100 billion years. And yet still, you have nothing to talk about. It was pitiful the way Adam looked up into the sky and squinted. Before he created Adam, God must have been lonely. Now he was still lonely. And so was Adam. Then came Eve. Since the Garden of Eden was the very first village, and since every village needs a mayor as well as a village idiot, it broke down in this way. Eve. Mayor. Adam. Village idiot. And that is the way it was from the very beginning. Sometimes when Adam would start to speak Eve would get all hopeful that he was about to impart something important and smart. But he would only say stuff like, little things are really great, because you can put them in your hand as well as in your mouth. Eve would ponder how one minute she was not there or anywhere, and now she was. Adam would ponder nothing. In her dreams Eve danced in the tops of trees. Her beautiful thoughts flew out of her ears and lit up the sky like fireflies. And there were all kinds of people to talk to and hug. And then she would hear snoring. She would wake up and there would be Adam, his yokel face pressed right against hers. His dog food breath blowing right up her nostrils. Eve stared up at the sky. Adam draped his arm across her chest, and brought his knee up onto her stomach. God, watching in heaven, feared for Adam's broken heart as though the whole universe depended on it. Adam was close to the animals and spent all day talking to them. Except for God, Eve had no one. She would complain to the Lord any chance she got. Adam is a nimrod, she would say. And the Lord would remain silent. God was the best and all that, and she loved the hell out of him. But when it came to trash talk, he was of no use. Adam was constantly trying to impress her. Look what I have made, he said one bright morning, his hands cupped together. Eve looked into his hands. She pulled away and shrieked. Adam was holding giraffe feces. I've sculpted it, said Adam. It is for the Lord. He opened his hands wide to reveal to her a tiny little giraffe with a crooked neck. On some days Adam galloped about exploring. His hair was wiry, and when it got sweaty it hung down in his eyes. Adam was cute this way. On one such day he saw a snake. Adam made the snake's acquaintance by accidentally stepping on his back. Wow, that's smart, said the snake through gritted teeth. Their eyes locked. And in that very moment the snake concluded that, indeed, Adam was a lummox. And that as king of the Earth, his reign would very soon end. There was a new sheriff in town, and it was he. It was no longer the story of Adam, but the story of the snake. He could tell all of this just by simply looking into his idiot eyes. I've seen you around with another one like you, he said to Adam. But instead of the dead legless snake between the legs she has chaos there. That's Eve, said Adam, all animated. I named her that myself. God made her from out of my rib. He showed the snake the scar on his side. The snake looked at him in silence. The idea of Adam-- Adam the shlemiel, Adam the fool-- being God's favorite was enough to give the snake a migraine. You weren't at all like I imagined, the snake said. I thought you'd be closer to the ground. More pliant. Greener. I tried to explain to God that to make you balanced up on your hind legs was architecturally unsound. I don't know why I bother. Adam sat and listened wide-eyed. Eve hadn't the patience to sit and chat like this. So when the snake suggested they get into the habit of meeting every once in a while to talk Adam was very excited to do so. As they lazed on their backs staring up at the sky the snake would brag about how he was older than the whole world, and that he used to pal around with God in the dark back before creation. He said that in the darkness, it was a truer, freer air time. That in the darkness was the good old days. He told Adam that back in the very beginning he had all kinds of thoughts on how to make the Garden of Eden a better place, but that God was just too stubborn to listen to reason. Make the earth out of sugar, I told him. Instead of stingers, give bees lips they can kiss you with. Adam didn't always agree with the snake. In fact, a lot of what the snake said went straight over his head. But there was still something about him that made him get into a very particular mood. He made the world feel bigger. Sometimes when Adam was with Eve, sitting there in icy silence, he would think to himself, I sure could go for a good dose of snake. You would think that after all the time they spent together the snake would finally find it within himself to start liking Adam just a little bit. But instead, he only grew to hate him more. He took to comforting himself with thoughts of Adam's wife, Eve. From what he heard from Adam, she was hot and smart. Often he would imagine running into her, and the instant synergy they would have. Adam neglected to tell me how leggy you are, he would say, wrapping himself around her calf. The snake had no idea what he looked like. He was hairless, bucktoothed, four inches tall, and he spoke with a lisp. Adam had the IQ of a coconut husk, but he was still human. The snake, in his arrogance, was unable to grasp this, and so he daydreamed. Sometimes I think you were watching me, the snake imagine saying to Eve, because I felt like there were ribbons wrapped around me. Ribbons made of raw pork intestines. I would turn around to catch you sneaking a peek at me from behind a tree, but all I'd see were the hedgehogs which mocked me. Come my dear. Let us eat from the tree of knowledge. On Eve's very first day Adam explained to her the rules of the garden just the way God had explained them to him. He had lifted his head up and had made his back stiff. He had spoken the way a radio broadcaster from the 1940s would. Another kind of woman-- someone softer than Eve-- might have found this charming. He explained that except for the tree of knowledge every tree in the garden was theirs to eat from. I am a fan of the pear, Adam said. It is not unlike an apple whose head craves God. Tell me more about this tree of knowledge, said Eve. She enjoyed the sound of it-- the tree of knowledge. It sounded very poetic. There's not much to tell, said Adam. If we eat from it we will die. From then on Eve talked about the tree of knowledge all the time. It was tree of knowledge this, and tree of knowledge that. It's like it wasn't a tree at all, but a movie star. Sometimes she would just stand by the tree and stare at it. It was on such an occasion that she met the snake. When Eve first caught sight of him she brought her hand to her mouth and gasped. She had seen some repulsive animals in her day. A booby that percolated her vomit to just beneath her tonsils. A dingo that instilled in her a sublime sense of nature's cruelty. And a deathwatch beetle that filled her with existential dread. But still, there was something about the snake that made her realize in a flash that the world was anywhere from 60% to 80% oilier than she would have ever imagined. Hi, said the snake. In the mood for some fruit of knowledge? It's fruity. We were told not to eat from that tree or else we would die, said Eve. Die? What an ignorant thing to say, said the snake, all chewing on a blade of grass on the side of his mouth. If there is an escape hatch from paradise then it isn't really paradise, is it? The snake made interesting points. That appealed to Eve. He could see he was making an impression. All I'm saying is to give it a try. Many things will be made immediately clear to you once you partake. I could talk about it all day and you still won't get it. You have a right to at least try it, right? I'm not saying go out and eat an entire fruit. Have a nibble. A nibble isn't really eating, is it? Eve found arguing semantics exhilarating. She looked at the tree. The way the sun shined through its leaves was beautiful. Everything seemed to point to nibble the fruit. Then the snake said, think about it. Does God want companions who can think for themselves, or does he want a bunch of lackeys and yes men? Wouldn't God want a few surprises? It would seem to me that God's telling you not to eat the fruit was just a test to see if you could think for yourselves, to see if you could exist as equals to God. The day you taste the fruit is the day God will no longer be lonely. At least give it a lick. Eve looked at the fruit, then she looked at the snake. Then, slowly, she parted her lips and pushed out her tongue-- all wet, and warm, and uncertain. She ran its tip along the smooth flesh of the fruit. The snake smiled. Has anyone died? he asked. Now take a tiny little nibble. Just a speck. Just to see. The fruit was squishy and tart. She smushed it around in her mouth. She squinted her eyes. It was a bit like trying on new glasses. It was a bit like an amylnitrate popper. It was a bit like a big wet kiss on the lips, right at first when you weren't sure if you wanted to be kissed or not. She felt 1,000 little feet kicking at her uterus. The idea of her own nudity, as well as Adam's, had always felt more like a Nordic coed health spa thing. Now, with the fruit of knowledge, it felt more like a Rio de Janeiro carnival thing. Her breasts felt like water balloons filled with blueberry jam and birds. Her nipples were like lit matchsticks. Her thighs, the way they squished against each other, were like scissors cutting through velour. With her lips still glistening in tree of knowledge fruit juice, she ran off to find Adam. The snake watched her as he chewed on his slimy blade of grass. And as she receded into the distance, he thought something along the lines of, now that's what I'm talking about. Kiss me Adam, said Eve. Taste my lips. Adam, like any lummox truly worth his salt, could smell the minutest trace of knowledge coming his way. And thus, he knew how to avoid it like the plague. But yet, there was also this. Eve had never sought him out in the middle of the day before just to kiss him. It felt like a very lucky thing. When he took her in his arms he told her that he loved her with his whole entire heart. He closed his eyes tightly and brought his lips to hers. Then he squinted. Then it started to rain, and Eve began to cry. During the darkest days ahead, with the fratricides and whatnot, Adam would often think back to his brief time in Eden. As he became an old man, he would talk about the garden more and more. A couple of times he had even tried to find his way back there, but he very soon became lost. He didn't try too hard anyway. He didn't want to bother God any more than he already had. When Adam met someone that he really liked, he would say, I so wish you could have been there. It didn't seem fair to him that he was the one that got to be in Eden. This sunset isn't bad, he'd say. But the sunsets in Eden, they burned your nose hairs. They made your ears bleed. He couldn't even explain it right. When you ate the fruit in Eden it was like eating God, he would say. And God was delicious. When you wanted him you just grabbed him. Now when he ate fruit he can only taste what was not there. But it wasn't all bad. After Eden Eve became much gentler with Adam. After getting them both cast out she decided to try as hard as she could to give Adam her love. She knew it was the very least she could do. She sometimes even wondered if that was why God had sent the snake to her in the first place. Adam would tell his grandkids, his great-grandkids, and his great-great-grandkids about how he and Nana Eve had spent their early days in a beautiful garden naked and frolicking. And the kids would say, eww. The children would swarm into the house like a carpet of ants. The youngest ones would head straight for Adam, lifting his shirt to examine his belly for the umpteenth time. They smoothed their hands across his flesh and marveled. Where is grandpa's belly button? they all asked. He stared at the children. They were all his children. And as they slid their little hands across his blank stomach, he wondered what it was like to be a kid. Jonathan Goldstein. This story appears in his book where he rewrites bible stories, called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible. Jonathan is also the writer and host of the really wonderful podcast Heavyweight. Our program was produced today by Wendy Dorr and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Diane Cook, David Kestenbaum, and Starlee Kine. Production help for today's show from Todd Bachmann, Jane Marie, Aaron Scott, and Alvin Melathe. Mixing help today from Catherine Raimondo. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Special thanks today to Mr. George [? Lara. ?] Thanks also to Kevin Scully, Dave [INAUDIBLE], and Tony Mancini. Some of the funding for Mary Beth Kirchner's story about the gambler came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's radio fund. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to any of our over 600 shows for absolutely free. Or if you want to download those shows you can get our app. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who got all angry this week when I told him that we were going to be putting a story about puppies onto the Public Radio satellite. You'd ask us to give up six megaschlucks of gooberschnapp to put just puppies on there? Well, yeah. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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So Neil Chesanow, do you have a copy of your book, Please Read This for Me, there with you? Yes, I do, right in my greasy little claw. Perfect. Can I ask you to open up just to the opening page of the preface to read from the preface? "When you have something very important but really tough to tell the man in your life, wouldn't it be great if you could just reach for a book that starts the conversation for you? Imagine being able to turn to the appropriate page, give an open book to the man you love, and ask, 'Please read this for me.' 'What is it?' 'Just read it, OK? Page 73. It's only a few lines.' Once the man you love has the book in his hands, a glance will do the job. Each page is an emotional telegram." Neil Chesanow's book is now long out of print. But back in the 1980s, when it was published, it represented, I think, a kind of utopian endgame for what self-help books could accomplish. Instead of explaining in a general way how you should handle this situation or that situation in your life, the book, Please Read This to Me, cut to the chase, went to the next logical step. It actually gave you a script. You're in this situation? Say this. Here are the actual words you can use to kick off the conversation you need to have. I tried to come up with a book that would not just tell you how to communicate, but actually spark conversation. Let me just read some of these titles to give people a sense of what some of these are like. Page 111, "It's time to admit you don't have a drinking problem. You're an alcoholic." Page 82, "You act like Cary Grant in public and Archie Bunker at home." Page 134, "I think about marriage all the time." Page 148, "Maybe I'm not ready to have a baby." Page 136, "You'd probably prefer if I were an orphan." Let me ask you to read the one on page 135. OK. This one is entitled, "It could be that I'm falling out of love." A difficult subject. "Once I thought I loved you. Now I'm not so sure. Yes, we've changed over time, but that's only part of it. I feel confused. I don't know what I feel. One minute I say to myself, stick it out. Make it work. Don't be a quitter. And I feel guilty. It's not in my power to change you. That much I've learned. So I'm giving some serious thought to the only alternative left that I can think of-- a trial separation. If you have another suggestion, I'd like to hear it." Over and over in this book, Chesanow and his co-author, Gareth Esersky, take some of the most painful situations that people can have with each other and give surprisingly graceful one-minute speeches that a person could say or write or show to somebody else. There are a dozen about problems that people might have together in bed. 10 are about dealing with each other as friends. 10 are about the fights that couples have over money. One of the entries even ends with the sentence, "Let's become husband and wife." All of these are written for women because, Chesanow says, men don't buy these books. We specifically interviewed women to come up with the most difficult kinds of subjects to discuss. Let me ask you to read another one. I'd be happy to. Let me ask you to read on page 105. This one is titled, "Let's Get Religion." "There's something missing in our lives. We're so focused on relating to each other that we've overlooked an important aspect of relating to our world. I'm talking about religion, spirituality, God. A belief in God and a spiritual life can add--" When you read one of these after another, the book as a whole seems to have this almost touching faith in the idea that getting the words right might actually solve something or help something. But of course, if you want religion in your life and your partner doesn't, or if you think you've fallen out of love, or if you don't want a baby and your spouse does, I've got to say, your main problem is not what words to use. Your main problem is the situation itself. Neil Chesanow says that plenty of times he heard from women who used the words in the book and it didn't fix the problem. So there may not be magic words. There aren't always magic words, but sometimes that in itself becomes something vital for a woman to understand. Now she can tell herself, well, I really have given it my best shot. This message in Please Read This for Me really sums up my feelings. He's still not willing to respond. I think we're reaching one of those landmark moments where we have to decide whether we want to go on or not. Which brings us to today's radio program. Today, during this week in which talking is failing on an international level, from Washington and Moscow to Paris and Baghdad, we bring you stories that ask the question, what is talking good for, anyway? When does it work? When doesn't it work? From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in four acts. Act One, How to Write a Note. In that act, a guy who thinks that words and reason might help his friend from trying to hurt himself. Act Two, The Battle of Words Versus Fear. In that act, one man decides to conquer his fears by listing them, all of them, one after another, all 183 of them. Act Three, When a City Opens Its Big Mouth. The story of just how easy-- how astonishingly easy-- it is to get people of all ages and races and economic levels to open up and chat. You just need three little words. Act Four, Wedding Bells and Telephone Bells. In that act, Jonathan Goldstein and Liz Gilbert bring us stories of words failing-- in one case, in the worst wedding toast that any of us has ever heard of occurring at a real wedding. Stay with us. Act One, How to Write a Note. This first story on our show today is unusual. It wasn't originally made to be broadcast on any radio show. It was a tape made by somebody who had never put anything together for radio. He made it to give to a friend. Here's what happened. Back in July of 1999, Jake Warga heard that somebody who he was close to in college, his friend Brian, tried to kill himself. Jake went out to visit Brian and he took with him this little MiniDisc recorder that he had just bought for himself that had this little clip-on microphone. During his visit with Brian, they recorded this long conversation they had. And then when Jake got home, he decided to edit this down and give it to Brian as a present. He had no idea how to actually edit sound or do anything like that, so at some point, he jumped onto the internet and found a website-- a website, actually, that we've mentioned on our show in the past, called transom.org that teaches beginners how to edit and mix audio with links to free editing software. And Jake put together this story you're about to hear. And he sent it to Brian. His hope was that if Brian heard this tape, heard himself talking, heard his own words, it might convince him that he shouldn't try to kill himself again. That didn't work. Here's the tape that Jake put together. Last year, my friend Brian tried to commit suicide. He had checked himself into a new hotel that runs alongside the interstate, which happens to pass through the small college town in which he lives. And without ceremony or note-writing, he took a combination of drugs he thought sufficient enough to quietly end his life. As people often do, Brian and I started getting lazy about communicating after I left college and moved out of that same college town. Emails became rare, and phone calls rarer. After the longest period yet of not hearing from Brian, I got a call from an old mutual friend of ours asking if I had seen or heard from him. I said I had not. We made calls and eventually found him safe in the hospital. A few weeks later, I arranged a visit to see how my old school-- and Brian-- had changed in the years I had been away. And when I came to visit, we sat for three hours on a park bench late one summer night. He was still in the process of piecing together exactly what had happened. This is Brian. Let's talk about you. There's not much to talk about. You were going to go to the hospital today, right? Oh, yeah. I did. Yeah. The woman in the records department made a photocopy of my medical records from when I got admitted, and there wasn't anything too surprising or anything in there. But it was still interesting to read. But they said I was discovered at approximately 6:00 PM. I guess this was the next day. 6:00 PM? Yeah. I don't know why-- They waited so long? Yeah. Because I should have checked out around noon, I guess. But they said I was unconscious and unresponsive. I was reading the paramedics report. I was pale, cold, and clammy, and I was breathing only six respirations per minute, which is very slow. And they said they found pill bottles and a bottle of alcohol in the room. And they cleared my airway and started administering oxygen. Then they gave me a 2 milliliters IV of something called Narcan, which is an antidote for opiates like morphine. Do you think it would have worked? I think it would have. And I mean, maybe I didn't take enough because morphine is very serious. It's very hard core. It's very easy to OD on it. (JOKINGLY) It's hard core, man. And I guess it was really late that night or even early the next morning when I guess they were about to transfer me, and I woke up. And the attendant who wrote this report said that I said I was disappointed to be alive and that I had passed out before I could take the morphine. And that part I do remember really vaguely. I remember waking up and feeling the nasal cannula in my nose giving me oxygen and seeing that IV bottle hovering over me. And the guy asked me, kind of sarcastically it sounded, so are you glad to be alive? And I'm pretty sure I remember saying no. Brian doesn't have that many friends. He's good-looking and funny, yet something inside prevents him from being confident in social skills. For example, it took a long time in our friendship before he told me, and I felt confident in asking, about his biological mother. He told me she died when he was young, that she had committed suicide. His father remarried soon after and raised Brian and his brother, who is now a doctor. Although, there seemed to be some incongruities with the reports. I guess those paramedics and hospital staff can really hastily fill stuff out. They can really take a lot of license. My own mom's coroner's report was really-- it had some gross inconsistencies in it, or errors. My brother says coroners often just make stuff up if they can't find certain causes, like cause of death, I guess. Were you hoping to find similarities between your mom's report and your report? Oh, no. I hadn't really thought of that. I brought her up just because they made some errors on hers, just like they had with mine. But with me, I don't think it was anything really major. About a week prior to this interview, Brian was arrested in San Francisco for possession of narcotics. Brian does not use drugs or alcohol. He had gone to the same bad part of town to buy the same drugs with the intent of trying again. I asked him about this trip to San Francisco. What were you doing there? Same thing. Same cocktail? Mhm. Pretty much. But it didn't work before. I'm too much of a wimp to try other things, like other things that might be more violent but less immediate. I don't like violence in practice. I've read that suicide is a selfish act, yet I have never really thought of Brian as selfish. But I can understand why the relatives of suicide victims might go through that angry phase, that phase when they place the blame on the person who killed themselves to help with any feelings of guilt they might have. I asked Brian if he thought what he did was selfish. I say it's selfish in the same sense that going to a therapist is selfish. You have a problem and you're doing something about it. You're doing something about it in the way you feel like coping with it. I don't think, in the end, people should live for other people. They should really live for themselves, just like you shouldn't go to school for a decade to become a doctor or a lawyer or whatever just because your parents want you to be that because you want to do what your parents want you to do. You should live your life as you want, as you see fit. And it doesn't necessarily mean you haven't considered other people's reactions. It just means that maybe you have and you've decided that, unfortunately, you still want to go forward with it. I don't want to spend the rest of my life alive and miserable just because someone else doesn't want me to die. I don't see much sense to that. In an effort to catch up on letter-writing, Brian would occasionally write long emails filled with wit, humor, and sometimes desperation. He's an excellent writer. I asked him why he didn't write a suicide note. I'll admit that was rather selfish. I know that people were wondering what the heck is up. I could have sat down for probably what would have been several hours to type something up. At that point in time, I was just very fed up and impatient and just I wanted it all to end. I just didn't want to screw around with anything else. I could've also cleaned my room first, too. As we were talking, an ambulance passed by in no particular hurry. There's what I probably rode in. It cost over $800 to be transported from-- A few blocks? Yeah. According to their time table, it took them eight minutes to get from there to there. I guess that's pretty far. Yeah, that's an appreciable distance, I guess. It's worth eight minutes. 2 milligrams, 2 tiny milligrams of Narcan opiate antidote is $6. As I write this, I wonder if I'm making Brian's note for him. Am I documenting this story for him, or for whom he might leave behind? This was not the first time he tried committing suicide, and, in light of his recent arrest, not his last. Do you think you found the only way to cope? The only viable way, so to speak. I don't get the impression most people are that happy, anyway. They just grind their way through life. They'll have kids, and that'll give them an artificial reason to live for a while. And then the kids grow up and forget about them. I know the mind is a really powerful thing. People can do just about anything they really put their minds to, but it also takes a tremendous amount of self-motivation. As my therapist says, it has to come from within, and it doesn't feel like there's much within. What's your relationship with death? I was brought up in a Protestant family as a Lutheran, and I haven't renounced that faith. I just feel I've stumbled in a big way, and I haven't gotten up or haven't been able to get up. And I'm hoping that I'll just go to heaven after I die. But of course, there is a lingering fear of hell because it's not a-- it's highly stigmatized, suicide. But I don't think I believe in sins that are, what do you call them? Cardinal. Yeah. I think it's just another kind of sin. My cousin, Amy, who's an atheist, told me that her dad, who's a Lutheran minister, told her that, if you kill yourself, you go to hell because you're not alive to repent and ask forgiveness for that sin. So therefore, since you have not repented for that sin, you'll go to hell. And I think that's ridiculous. Just think of all the sins you haven't repented for in your life, even if you tried to. I know you haven't tried to, but-- so I do have a fear of dying, but it doesn't always outweigh my other fears or my other-- Fear of living? Yeah. After sitting at a park bench for so long, and after Brian confessed to having talked more than he ever has, we were more than overdue for a stretch. And after a while of walking around aimlessly, we picked up our old habit of trainspotting and penny-smashing. Jeez. Quick. I would have loved to-- You're taking it slow. I probably shouldn't run with this thing. I don't know if I can record while being jostled. It'll catch up. We are now running to try to catch the train. We're running past lions. We're now up on the tracks. Here come the lights. At this point, Brian and I are running alongside the train as it's beginning to stop at the nearby station. Well, train's here. No pennies. Oh, brother. I have a penny or two. Give it up. You give it up, homeboy. I don't know. Anything else? Do you ever cry? No. I hardly remember the last time. It's probably been almost 10 years. I came close, though, in December of '92 when I came home after visiting my grandma over Christmastime. My grandma had shown us a bunch of pictures of my biological mom and told us some stories about her. These were photos I don't think I'd ever seen and stories I don't think I'd ever heard. I came home and I was taking a shower late that night, and while I was in the shower, I wept just a little bit. But it wasn't really full-fledged. I kind of feel like I'm emotionally constipated. I guess that's a major part of my problem. People need to express their anger and whatever else they're feeling. I've actually tried to. I've tried because I knew I wanted the release because I knew it would feel good. But I just couldn't do it. Very frustrating. We're in the last nine minutes of this cassette. (FAKE WHINY) Oh, there's nine more minutes. (FAKE WHINY) I kind of want it over now. I can't think of anything else to say. I'm not the kind of guy who can just rattle off his famous last words or big words of advice. Don't have kids unless you had a good relationship with your own parents, I guess, because you can seriously screw them up by saying negative things to them or even neglecting them. Apparently, that's a highly debated cause of sudden infant death syndrome-- not giving your baby enough physical attention. One of my psychiatrists said I'm failing to thrive. That's a phrase commonly used for infants who mysteriously die. I'm thinking-- I just kind of amuse myself with the thought that my case is a belated case of sudden infant death syndrome. I don't think my dad failed as a parent, as he worries that he has. I think he did a great job. It's just, along the way, I contracted a disease and it doesn't have a very optimistic or bright prognosis. And not even the best parent can prevent that. At the end of editing this story, Brian is still alive, living in the same small town. I don't know if he's getting better or not. Jake Warga. He sent this tape to his friend Brian in 1999 and waited for a reaction. Brian emailed him. He wrote, "How did you learn about the music that you included in the interviews?" He liked some of the pieces, but said they, quote, "Might be a tad overdramatic." And he wanted to know if Jake's computer had a filter that can make him sound less stupid. Brian also asked Jake if he had any plans to publish this story. He told Jake that he thought Jake would have an easier time publishing it if he were dead. Nearly two years later, in the spring of 2001, Brian did try to kill himself again, and this time he didn't survive. Jake added this epilogue to the story. On May 9 of this year, Brian's body was found in his room. He had injected himself with a lethal dose of morphine. He was 31 years old. I had sent this tape to Brian sometime after our interview in hopes that, by hearing himself, like looking long and hard into a mirror, he would realize what he was saying, that he would snap out of it. Though he appreciated my efforts, I did not change him. And I came closer to realizing I never could. Brian left packets for a few people, myself included. In them were copies of letters he wrote years before, explaining some of what he felt at the time, and tapes of the interview we did that night. He actually had to make cassette copies for his brother and cousin from the MiniDiscs that I sent him. I've had to ask myself now that Brian's dead, why do I want to share this tape? One reason is I want to take something from death, to rob it, for a little while, of the mute it imposes. I also hope that it might help someone who feels like Brian. Or, for friends and family left confused, some sense of closure they may not have had if death were allowed its silence. So Brian, I'm relieved your pains are over. And now it's time for ours to begin. You will be missed. Jake Warga. He teaches storytelling at Stanford University. Thanks to Jay Allison and transom.org and KUOW in Seattle, where Jake's story has appeared. If you or somebody you know might need help, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-TALK. That's 1-800-273-8255. Coming up, three magic words that make tough New Yorkers pour out their hearts to strangers. And I'm not talking about "hand it over" or "yes, you've won" or "I love you." Also, your fears listed in a minute from 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 some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Say Anything, stories about what talking can accomplish and what it cannot accomplish. This show was first broadcast back in 2003. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Battle of Words Versus Fear. Michael Bernard Loggins is in his 50s. He's developmentally disabled. He lives in San Francisco. And he says that there's certain things that he's afraid of, things that just put him on edge. And one day, he felt like he needed to write them down, just to get them out of his system. And so he started writing, numbering each fear. And it quickly got to 10, and then to 20, then to 30 and 40 and 50, till he had 138 of them on paper. The arts program for adults where he did this, a place called Creativity Explored, published this writing as a little handwritten, xeroxed zine called, "Fears of Your Life." A few years later, Michael found that there were more fears to tame by turning them into words, and he put out a part two, a sequel titled, "Fears of Your Life, a Whole Brand New One." This one listed 45 fears. Michael gave us permission to excerpt the two books, which we do now. Actor Tom Wright is our reader. Fear of hospitals and needles. Fear of school and dentists. Fear of noises and bumps in the middle of the night. Fear of doors when they slams. Fear of toys that come on by itself without anyone touching it. Fear of being caught with another woman after cheating on your wife. Fear of being in wrong places at the wrong time. Fear of dropping your soda as it hit the ground and fizz on you. Fear of tall giraffe. Fear of some birds. Fear of being different. I fear that those TV people would take off my favorite cartoon, The Rugrats, off the air and wouldn't be able to watch them anymore for a long, long, long time. Please let well enough alone. Please don't take my Rugrats cartoon off the air because I love that cartoon. Let there be a possibility that life with the Rugrats stays put, means leave my Rugrats cartoon on TV, Michael said. Fear if you put things that doesn't belongs in your ears and you bust the drums that's are in your ears, it liable to run you deaf, where you can't hear anything at all. You wouldn't be able to hear cars when they're coming at you. That can be a frightening and very horrible situation to happen to you if you had an occurrence in real life, especially if you comes involved in it. Can you get hit by cars if you can't hear them? Michael is afraid and frightening and fearful when Andrea Scheer goes away for a very, very, very long, long, long, long vacational trips in order to go traveling all over the world, almost like different places and different cities and countries to visit people in her own image and own language. He afraid Andrea Scheer would come back to San Francisco, California, with all different accents and won't be able to speak Michael's English, or not be able to understand his words that he's telling her, like Merry Christmas. I'm afraid and fearful that pigeons don't know right from wrong to not go out into the street. They don't have the kind of memory as we humans does to know what to do and what shall not do. They must don't know the danger of their lives are being jeopardized. And they must don't know what can definitely happen to them to humans' knowledges and sense. They land just anywhere they can find a land on surface. Fear of sharks. Fear of giant man. Fear of gorilla. Fear of Godzilla. Fear of tall woman. Fear of killer whales. Fear of dinosaurs bird. Fear of invisible man. Fear of Blob. Fear that, if I go into the library and I happens to get like seven or eight books and I happens to find a place in the library that I would get a lot of comfortable and begin reading in those seven or eight books, but one book at a time, and I start to read and somehow, my voice and mind start to get from low to high and, thinking that there weren't anyone elses reading theirs, and I look over and the people in the library, and I get fearful and I'll say, "Oops, sorry." If your friends are people that you are with and you hear them making decision about what they decided that they are going to steal expensive and very valuable merchandise out of the department stores and don't care less, you say, I am out of here. Bye bye. I'm not getting caught in your crazy schemes. I'm not your stealer partner. I'm just your friend. It's going to trouble, and it's on your head, not mine. I'm not going to participate in stealing with you, so leave me out of your crazy schemes, especially if it involve Oreo cookies and other stuff, hot stuff. Fear of me getting in trouble just as well. It's very scary and fearfully to be sleeping in your bed in the middle of the night whenever there's a telephone right beside the bed on you left near the door you once enter and exit out. You are sleeping. The telephone rang and scared the living life out of you in the middle of the night. Who is this calling at this hour of the night? Fear of a blasted music on the radio, where you are not aware that the volume is turned up. Fear of rolling downhill backward. Fear of foghorn. Fear of getting hugged by somebody you don't like. There's Los Angeles fears. Fear of getting hit over the head when you carry lots of dough with you, or bucks. Fear is like this. Someone like a woman that you grab a hold of her hand in going down the escalator, when of a sudden, you happens to be holding a stranger hand, not realizing that she isn't your mother is scary. Fear that if you put too much of toilet paper in the toilet bowl, it will run over and get all over the floor and on you and on someone else, too. It would leak from upstairs to the next floor below. I am afraid someday I liable to get lost inside Children's Hospital if I'm not all so familiar with that place yet. It's going to take some time to get used to it. Fearfully of that great big, humongous Children's Hospital there ever would be to Michael's knowledge. Good that Michael's sister is driving him up there on Tuesday, January 15, 2002. Even though she's with him, she can easily get lost, too. Bad situation to tangled up in, especially if you that person has an appointment at 10:45 AM in the morning. Michael Bernard Loggins does. Michael fear that if his teacher Francis doesn't put away Michael's Top Ramen noodles up in the desk drawer that Douglas will see it and he'll liable to want to take it, and he'll happen to eat up Michael Bernard Loggins' noodles himself. And Michael Bernard Loggins would be out of luck, but he would have to go home tonight and bring back to school another pack of noodles to eat himself so that wouldn't ever, ever happened with that Douglas eat up noodle story. It would be very fearful if I reached up on top shelf trying to reach for a nice thicker-covered dictionary book and not ask for help from someone and the books come off the shelf and make lots of noises and the people gets angry at me and don't understand that I had want help, but I were afraid to ask for it. And they'd be a jerk or a creep, as Hope tells me. And people say that I'll have to pay for the shelf, and I get in lots of trouble behind it, says Michael. Fear of being with a friend that you have recently met start to take you places with him and you doesn't know him all that well. You didn't know that he were going to bring you fear and lots of trouble your way. Someone you doesn't know all that well starts to carry you in the store to buy you and him something to eat and drink, and all of the sudden, something very fishy starts to happen. Like for instance, your friend that you are with could be up to trouble and whoever with him could be heading in for trouble, as well, especially if a friend of yours could be bringing you trouble by stealing a big package of Oreo cookie. People are fearful of me, which I wonder, is they think I'm all that terrible? Or I'm thinking that they think I'm not human at all, because when they sit next to me, then they get back up and move away from me. I may be a stranger, but that doesn't make me a created monster or something like that. People aren't humans. They act like ignorance dogs with their tail in back of their legs or in between their middle bodies their legs. They don't think whose feeling they hurt at all. They just do it, no consideration for whatsoever. People don't think about how they hurt my feelings or don't give a hoot. They don't give a crap. Fear of you never knowing you were going to lose your mother is very sad and scary experience you have to face and learn from. And you wonder why she has to die. I love her. And I had loved her once while she were alive, especially if she was the mother that raised you and the others through birth. And you only wish that you could have done all you can to help save her life. There going to be a worse times and hard times for Michael Bernard Loggins and his sisters and brothers, too, especially when Mother's Day comes. Afraid this is the last thing that ever occur to me. Excerpts from Michael Bernard Loggins' two xeroxed zines, "Fears of Your Life," Parts One and Two, read first by Tom Wright, an actor in Los Angeles. Michael writes and makes art in San Francisco. To get your own copy of these amazing books or to find out more about the arts program where they were made, visit the website of Creativity Explored, creativityexplored.org. Act Three, When the City Opens Its Big Mouth. For months, Liz Berry and Bill Wetzel have been going out in the streets, seven days a week, 12 or 13 hours a day, in any kind of weather, with a handmade sign that says, "Talk to me." Hello. What's this? Just being friendly. Huh? In a way, it's a relief to see just how wary people are of being scammed. Nearly every person who approaches them asks the same question in one form or another. Are you taking money? Are you with some organization? Are you doing this for TV or something? In other words, as one Chinese woman put it-- Who are you and what for? I'm Bill, and that's Liz, and it's just the two of us. Here they are, people who decided that it might be nice if strangers would just interact a little more. And they were going to take their matters into their own hands to see that it happen, even though it pays no money, even though it means camping on people's couches, even though they end up acting like cheerful customer service representatives to a largely indifferent world, one exhausting hour after another. We just put up this sign and anything people want to talk about, we'll go with it. Sign? Liz is 25. Bill is 23. But they each use the kind of vernacular that you'd expect from an 80-year-old woman. They call men fellas. And instead of using the word ass or bum to describe the part of the body that you sit on, they favor the word patootie. They smile easily. They look young and vulnerable and almost overwhelmingly earnest. That kind of thing either works for you, or it doesn't. And for them, apparently it does. People talk to them. The sign does its job. Two plainclothes cops approach, and the one in the wraparound sunglasses talks first. This girl I've been going out with for two years just got engaged to some dude after dating him for four weeks. Did you think she was just spending your time? Did you think she was stringing you along? Do you think she didn't love you? Yeah, sure, for like the last six months. Yeah. Nice, right? Did you know? No. I had no idea. Nope. In the course of this one day in New York City, Liz and Bill chat with a teenager from LaGuardia High School who was all excited about the fake country she and her friends had made up. There was a drunk guy carrying bags full of brand new computer equipment. He talked about how much money he's making. A woman who just quit the AmeriCorps program hours before because it seemed too dangerous, and they wouldn't even give her a phone. There was a guy in Harlem who fixed up two of the patients in the optometrist's office where he works. A woman who was mad at the teacher who hit her son in school. A well-dressed man who explained the intricacies of estate tax assessment. And there was this guy, who walked up to Liz and Bill right after being let go from his job. They brought me into an office and they just said, "As you know, things have been very slow, and I really don't know how to tell you this. I mean, you've been great. It's not a firing. It's purely economic-based." But I feel like-- have you ever been laid off or fired? Yes. You know that blank feeling you get right here? It's just like, oh, my god. Do you have any kind of savings? Are you in a rent-stabilized place? Yeah. No, I'm in a rent-stabilized place. As conversationalists, Bill and Liz are perfectly fine, no better or worse than you and me. Mostly what they do is keep the ball rolling. Watching all this for several hours, it makes you start to see everyone on the street differently. Everyone starts to seem like he or she could suddenly burst into a story. A whole city seems filled with people who need to get something off their chests. At this point, it's also, I want just some more stability in my life. And my birthday's next week. I'm going to be 39 years old. At the end of day, a man talks to them for three hours. Three hours. Mostly about a girlfriend that he lost who he can't get over, but also about the war and the time, years ago, that he tried to kill himself. By the end, it was 1:00 in the morning and he offered Liz and Bill $100, which they turned down. Liz was still full of energy and completely cheery. It seemed like she could go for another three hours. But it was late and the streets were clearing, and it was time to go home. Act Four, Wedding Bells and Telephone Bells. We end our program today with two brief case studies of situations where the words for something don't even matter, where it's not about the words at all. We begin with this one from Elizabeth Gilbert. My friend Kevin once attended a wedding where he heard the world's most inappropriate wedding toast. The toast began inauspiciously enough. The best man stood up during the meal, clinked his knife against the crystal, and the other guests all quieted down. "I was thinking on the airplane ride here about what I was going to say today about Danny and Joyce," the best man began. "And all I could think at first was what a happy day today is." Good enough start. But then this speech took an interesting turn. "And I realized that what I really wanted to talk about this afternoon is jury duty." "Now, I don't know how many of you have ever served on a jury," he went on. "But it's a fascinating process. I was just on a jury last year for the first time in my life, and I learned a lot about myself and about the legal system. It was a pretty serious case, too. It was actually a murder trial. It was very tragic. It was this old man who got killed. Very sad. He was getting money out of an ATM in the middle of the day and some gang kids came up and robbed him and shot him right in the face." By now, many of the wedding guests were lowering their champagne glasses gently back down to the table. "It was a cut-and-dry case, really," he went on. "There were plenty of witnesses, and the forensic evidence pointed straight to one kid as the shooter. The kid was definitely guilty. But here's the thing. It was actually a capital offense. And my jury had to decide whether or not to give this kid the death penalty." "Now, I don't know if any of you have ever had to decide whether somebody should live or die, but it's emotionally intense. We all knew the kid was guilty, but the death penalty is nothing to take lightly. In the end, though, we decided yes, this kid needs to die. And we sent him to his death." The tent was silent. The bride, ashen. The best man took a moment to compose himself and concluded, "That was probably the worst day of my life. And I got to thinking about it on the plane because that day was nothing like today, which is a happy day. A really happy day. So here's to Danny and Joyce." Thus concluded the toast. I've pondered the meaning of this story for years, and ultimately, I've decided that I get it. I've heard it said before that the human psyche cannot always tell the difference between good events and bad events. All we can feel is the tremor of the earth. Which is what happened to our best man, I believe. He was so overcome by happiness for his friend and he was so out of touch with his emotions that he couldn't express that happiness appropriately. All he could do was remember the last time he had felt so moved by something, and so he tried to express that. Sure, there's nothing parallel about an old man getting shot in the face and a dear friend getting married-- unless, of course, you measure human emotion by the weight, in which case, the two events carry exactly the same impact. Which is to say that I think I finally understand what the best man was trying to convey that afternoon. And I raise my glass to the poor guy for his valiant and hopeless attempt to celebrate. Liz Gilbert is the author of many books, including most recently, Big Magic. Her story first appeared on a website that doesn't exist anymore but was called otherpeoplesstories.com. Well, now we move onto our next example of wordless communication. Our very last example today from Jonathan Goldstein. Hettie lives in the same building she grew up in, and I live with her. We're in an apartment two floors up from her dad. He's 78 years old and doesn't want to bother climbing up the stairs every time he wants her, so he ends up usually just calling her on the phone. He calls anywhere from 20 to 30 times a day. The one thing he never wants is conversation. Sometimes he calls to ask Hettie what time it is because he's too tired to get up and look for himself. Sometimes he calls to see what she's having for dinner. But most of the time, he calls and doesn't say a thing. Hettie picks up the phone and only hears classical music playing and she knows it's her dad with his kitchen radio on. Sometimes I'll walk into the living room and Hettie will be watching TV with the telephone cupped to her ear, not saying a word, and I know she's on the phone with her dad, and that, three floors down, he's sitting, watching TV just as silently. When our line is in use, the voice mail picks up. Hettie's father will leave a dozen messages in a row. The way we know it's him is that there are no words, just the click of the phone. After about 10 minutes, the fact that he can't get through starts to drive him crazy, so he walks down to the buzzers by the building's main door and buzzes our apartment. The way he sees it, why should he have to walk up two flights of stairs when he could just walk down one? The buzzer is like an amplified dentist drill. And sometimes, when you're quiet or deep in thought, the suddenness of it is like being goosed by something cold and metallic. It is the kind of sound that rats in lab experiments come to associate with a terrible, perhaps fatal, error. When we hear the buzzer, we get off the internet or the telephone so that he could call. Even now it could buzz, you think to yourself. Or even now. One day, I didn't get off the internet quick enough, so he went back down to the buzzer, and this time, he just leaned on it. I got off the line and Hettie phoned him. He wasn't answering. She yelled down the stairs, but still he would not stop. He was making a point. I am not exaggerating when I say that he kept the buzzer going for several minutes straight. And after a while, you could hear layered fluctuations and subtle pitch blends. He was like Yoko Ono on that thing. Hettie got on a chair and hit the box above the door with a hammer. The buzzing stopped. A few minutes later, her father called. "What was so important?" Hettie asked. Her father was quiet. Finally, he asked her if she knew what night the Oscars were on. Hettie told him that he had gone too far. It made Hettie's father sad that our doorbell was gone. He suggested that he and Hettie get walkie-talkies. I imagined them both sitting in their separate kitchens, each eating a sandwich, and in between long silences, one of them uttering the occasional 10-4. Hettie refused the offer. "Fine," he said. "From now on, I'll just go down into the basement and turn off the building's power two times really fast. I noticed where they keep the main switch the other day. That'll be the signal for you to free up the line." Hettie told him that that would be the signal for her to move out. Now her father just comes up and knocks. He knocks in a particular way that I think is supposed to be a secret code. Often, after Hettie has answered the door, he just stands there in the doorway, looking at her uncertainly, sort of put upon that now that he's got her attention. He actually has to come up with something to say. Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the podcast Heavyweight from Gimlet Media. Well, this rerun episode of our program was produced by Starlee Kine and me, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, and David Kestenbaum. Matt Tierney is our technical director. Production help from Diane Wu. 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, who begs you, who implores you. Please don't take my Rugrats cartoon off the air because I love that cartoon. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Anthony Swofford was an infantryman in the Marines back during the 1991 Gulf War. And we asked him to watch the television coverage for us once this war got under way and tell us his impressions. Oh I'm thinking it's strange to be in my living room this time. And this morning there was the first scenes of the oil well fires burning as some Marines are up near them. And that brought the whole scene pretty close to me. For a civilian watching this coverage today, I have to say, I feel like, oh, I'm right there. It feels so real. For you watching this coverage, does it all seemed fantastically fake? Yeah, it does. It feels made up and scripted. Now you brought along a recording of some of the things you taped off TV. Let's just play one of those. There's this one great scene of the wild man on CNN who-- he's moving with the seventh cavalry, and he's talking about "great waves of steel crushing the Iraqis." You don't sleep. You really don't sleep out here. Of course you're on an adrenaline high. But racing across the desert, you know that you're traveling toward the jaws of what could be a major military battle. He's dramatically narrating what currently from the video is a totally un-dramatic and incredibly common event, which is vehicles moving across the desert. But he's projecting this romantic vision of what the battle will be. Then the army is going to kill them. Their goal is to find the enemy, grab him by the nose they say. And this is according to one senior officer, after grabbing him by the nose, we don't let the Iraqis go anywhere. The seventh cavalry's mission is to find the Iraqis and to persuade them to give up. And if they don't give up, then they will be pounded, according to the officers we're travelling with. Just because the tanks are barreling across the desert on their way to Baghdad, that doesn't mean that they're going to roll over and grab the enemy by the nose. This would be an example of one of those moments that you find to be completely fake. Yeah completely fake. By the way this is This American Life from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. This guy Anthony Swofford has been on our program before, reading from his memoir about fighting in the Persian gulf war, which is called Jarhead. He says he finds it hard to watch the coverage of this war now. He thinks it's fine for camera crews to go out with the soldiers and all, but he says that to him, it just seems voyeuristic in this way that just gives him the creeps. In battle, he says, you're completely naked in this way. It's so extreme. And he says the cameras can't really capture what it's like to be there anyway. The missing element thus far is fear and the unknown. Everything seems certain when there's a camera filming this. You've written about how you and the other Marines during the Persian Gulf War who you were with were told to say pretty much next to nothing to reporters. Keep everything positive. You were given little scripts to say. When you watch the interviews that are now being broadcast on TV, do you feel like you're seeing soldiers spinning the way that you were trained to? Oh I'm certain of it. What's coming out of their mouths is scripted. And it's what they're asked to say. And it's also part of what they're asked to believe, and they believe some of it. But-- Can you think of any particular moment where you've seen somebody talking and you thought, yeah, that's right. That's just the line we give them. Yeah, well this morning there was an embed sitting with a Marine. And they were a forward force that had had nine gas calls over the evening. And having nine false gas calls is incredibly frustrating, and it pisses you off. And you're cussing. You're saying who's that idiot who called gas again? I'm tired of putting this thing on. Calling gas meaning somebody said gas is incoming and so put on your gas gear. Yeah, gas is incoming. So the reporter asked the young marine that. "How are you feeling? We've put our gas masks on nine times now? How does this make you feel? And the young guy said, "It's just what we do. We put our gas masks on." That's all he's going to give. He's not going to say, "Oh this sucks man. I'm tired of putting this thing on." Well today on our radio program, as bombs go off and soldiers are on the move, we have stories about this war that's just starting. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in six acts. David Sedaris files for us from Paris. Sarah Vowell tells the story of the first time that the United States went overseas and attacked a country that had not attacked us first, a country where 100 years later, things are still pretty dreadful. In preparation for today's show, we gave out audio recorders to a few soldiers who are part of the invasion force going into Iraq. We probably will not get the recordings back and on the air for you for a few months. But we do have one first person account of what's happening, an email from one soldier. Plus other stores trying to make sense of what is happening right now. Stay with us. Act One, Bombs Over Baghdad. When it comes to the massive bombing of Baghdad that has started, all of us following the news heard from the US military. We've heard from reporters in Baghdad. But a while back I spoke with an Iraqi named Issam Shukri, who lived in Baghdad during the first Persian Gulf War. And he talked about what it was like to despise Saddam Hussein, but also not be so crazy about getting bombed by the United States. He remembers clearly how he learned that war had started back then. Me and my wife used to work in two different rooms in the same building. And she always listened to a 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. And she said, "Issam, it seems there is 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 announcement in music to times of trouble. I heard about the invasion by dashing out to the street. And I said, what happened? And people in a lower voice, "Well Saddam invaded Kuwait. And he's calling people to go and fight over there at the front." And I sort of stroked my head, and I said, not again. Had you served in the Iran Iraq war? Yes, I served for three years actually. In 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. Could 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 individualistic as well as a collective miserable experience 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 your-- That is the government of Iraq, right. I couldn't picture myself putting on the same uniform and fighting for 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, inside the city of Baghdad. Oh, so you were very lucky? I was actually. But some of my classmates were sent to 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. 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 dividing my family home into two little homes. One is for my sister, and one is for my family. And as a show of 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. I've brought a lot of paint to paint my living room. So anyway, we slept on that night, and the night of the 17 of January, in my living room. And we kissed each other, and we fell asleep. And exactly at 2:00 AM, we all woke up and the ground was shaking violently. And it was like a deep, deep 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 at that minute, we were certain that this is the war, and we're back again. We are 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 B52 over his head. I put my hand on his heart, and I felt his heart bumping like crazy. And ironically, again I went to the washroom like five, six times in five minutes. You know when you have this stress? I needed to go to the washroom. 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 when it happens suddenly, if you're asleep or if you're embarking on your work or whatever. But when you're expecting it minute by minute, and second by second sometimes, it becomes like torture. So we were literally tortured. And we started to wonder with the streets. I looked around in my neighborhood-- and by the way our neighborhood looks pretty much like any American or Canadian neighborhood: row houses or individual homes with front yards and very nicely done. And people that have the same qualities of life. The difference is that they live in constant fear. And you were with your three year old boy. Right, and well actually, I was very worried about this guy because he was very young. And 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 in their hands. And then they came and punished him." And then I stopped for one second. But then he said, "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-- after days and days of bombing, I first told him that, "Well there are some judges who are going to catch this man. And he's an outlaw, and they're going to put him in jail." I tried to make things like a story to his age. And then after that, I started to feel frustrated myself because I saw people slaughtered in front of my eyes. And Saddam comes out on the screen laughing with his ugly, ugly face. So I started to tell him, "Well those judges are sometimes more severe, and sometimes they hit hard. 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 neither in Iraq nor in Afghanistan, nor anywhere in the world. Was there a part of you which hoped that the Americans would succeed and liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein. To tell you the truth, I hoped for that. 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's always history that tells you lessons. And there is the fresh memory when Saddam bombed chemically, used the chemical weapons against Halabcha, 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's very rich in oil, everybody-- So we didn't really trust the West. It's a feeling that those people do not care about other nations. 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, but some of these buildings were inhabited by civilians. So I do not hate. 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, a lot of force, inhuman force to punish very poor people. And were you also angry at Saddam for putting you all in this position? Oh, in that respect, we hated Saddam. I would definitely use that word. Issam Shukri is watching the war from his home in Toronto, where he lives and works as an architect. He has two sisters, four aunts and uncles and many nieces and nephews in Baghdad. He last talked with them all a few days ago. He hasn't been able to reach them since because the phones have been bad. He doesn't know how they're doing. Act Two. Over the last few weeks, our program has been in contact with a number of American soldiers in this war. One of the ones who expressed an interest in giving an account of what is happening to him is first lieutenant Tice Ridley. He's been in the army for seven years. He's 30 years old. He's the one we're able to put on the air this week because he's the one who's continued to have access to email. He's someone whose job is to deal with the press. He's a public relations officer at the Coalition Press Information Center in Kuwait City. What you're about to hear are taken from the emails that he has sent to friends and family, and emails he has sent to our program. We asked him to stay away from the official army stories that he deals with in his job and just talk about what it's like to be there. His emails are read for us by actor Tom Wright. February 27, 2003. Dear friends and family. Last night we arrived in Kuwait City, which is nine hours ahead of you guys so I'm actually living in the future. If you want to know what happens, just let me know. When we got off the plane, it still looked a lot like Texas, but there was no mistaking where we were. There were soldiers with weapons everywhere. The buses we rode from the airport in had curtains covering all the windows to prevent sniper fire. And we were escorted by soldiers with fully loaded, crew-served weapons, really big guns mounted on their vehicles. Sniper fire is common here. On our first night, my vehicle broke down during a convoy, and the security force with those big guns was unable to turn around to assist my driver, a 19 year old private, and me. We'd been briefed on what to do, but the plan failed because security was unable to stop or turn around right away. We were sitting there alone, in a foreign land with street signs in Arabic, not knowing whom to trust. What do you do? After assessing the situation, it was my decision to keep moving no matter how slow. I didn't want us to appear to be an easy sniper target. After about 15 minutes, but what seemed like an eternity, the security force was able to turn around and catch up with us, prepare the vehicle and guide us back into the convoy. After we'd been returned to our comfort zone with the rest of our convoy, I asked my driver if he had been scared. And initially, he said no. He then asked me if I had been afraid. I replied, "Yeah, I was scared as hell." I told him that scared is good, as long as you don't let panic set in, because fear will keep you alert and alive. I saw that in some movie somewhere, but I think it's true. The private then told me that he had been afraid but didn't want me to know. I would go to war with a solider like that any day. Oh wait, we're already here. Friday, March 7, 2003. Around 5:00, Murphy showed his ugly little head and the phone started ringing. A soldier was injured pretty badly in an accident, and I got the message. It's not the first time I've gotten a message of this nature, but it was the first time I looked at the name. That made a world of difference. It was no one I knew, but looking at a name and a hometown personalized it. That is something I have to learn to deal with. Monday, March 17, 2003. I met Ted Koppel the other day. Nice guy, little worn-looking though. I told him to have his people call my people and maybe, just maybe, we could do lunch after the war. Yesterday I was interviewed by Jay Levine of Channel 2, Chicago. That was cool. I've received email from some of you saying that you saw the interview. He asked me how I felt about the protesters and political debate. What I really wanted to say was, "Those [BLEEP] need to go to Saddam Hussein's house and try their protesting in front of one of his billion dollar palaces. Or maybe they can go sing Kumbaya with the bastard. And just maybe he'll stop mass murdering, invading his neighbors and gassing people. As far as the political debate goes, I think those countries that keep saying more time don't have soldiers sitting in the desert longing to be with their families. Not that we're war mongers, but most of us didn't give up our lives so that we could come to the desert to play dominoes. Hell, I don't even know how to play freaking dominoes. However, while wearing the uniform, I represent the United States Army, so I had to keep it professional and say, "I really don't think about it much." With that in mind, I must say farewell my friends. Please think about these things as you form your opinions on this possible war. We see a lot of protest on the news here, but if you see someone protesting, ask them if they know the history. And if so, why aren't they protesting Saddam Hussein? Love you all, Tice. PS, if you haven't done already, I would fill up my gas tank today if I were you. Tuesday, March 18, 2003. A little over 24 hours ago, President George W. Bush gave a powerful speech, and we all wondered if the wait was over. 48 hours was his answer, and I actually breathed a sigh of relief. This is my first war, and in my inexperience, I thought that as soon as the President left the podium, planes would start flying overhead and the war would have begun. He gave them 48 hours. Thursday, March 20, 2003. It is now 2:55 on the morning of March 20. The 48 hour deadline is up in one hour and five minutes, and all's quiet. One of the first things I was told as I started my shift was that Iraq had placed artillery pieces along the border with Kuwait within striking distance of us. This was a definite concern of ours, and you could see by the mood that it was at the back of everyone's mind. The initial fear is of a direct hit, but even if we didn't get hit directly, the chemical vapors might drift our way. Tracy and I read from the Bible together every night. We also take turns reading the 91st Psalm to each other. That's a long story. But a unit from World War Two read that psalm every day together, and while all the other units around them were being wiped out, none of them got a scratch. At approximately 22:00, Tracy came down for our nightly reading of the 91st Psalm. As I reentered the office, there was a flurry of phone calls. We found out that the artillery pieces that were within range of us had been destroyed by coalition air forces. The Air Force officer that happened to be in the section at the time yelled, "The Air Force is always saving you guy's asses." The information was soon confirmed, and we breathed a sigh of relief. Also, we heard that 17 Iraqi soldiers had turned themselves in. We were trying to get confirmation. My first thought was, 17 down and only 400,000 to go. Tom Wright, reading the letters of first lieutenant Tice Ridley in Kuwait City. Coming up, David Sedaris reports from France, Sarah Vowell, and some lessons of war from thousands of years ago. How people thought about war back then, how we might think about it now. 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. Today's program, The Balloon Goes Up, stories about this new war with Iraq. Much of Europe and the Arab world still oppose this war. Protests continue. Is the world just going to hate the United States now in some way we've never seen before in our lifetimes? Well, writer David Sedaris lives in one of the countries that oppose military action most fiercely, France. He says the answer to that question is complicated. For the past several weeks, I've been been getting these late night calls. The phone rings, and when I answer the person on the other end will say, "Thank God, are you all right?" I wonder how they knew I had the radio perched on the lip of the bathtub, and then I'll realize that they're talking about the French American thing, which is a lot nastier in the United States than it is here. The assumption is that, mirroring the cafeteria in the US House of Representatives, France has banished the word "American," retitling videos to read "Liberty Gigolo" or "Freedom Graffiti." But that's not the case. Neither are radio stations hiring bulldozers to flatten hamburgers and low-fat muffins and pictures of the American president. The French people I know are saddened by the name calling, but not enough to touch a muffin or a hamburger, much less a picture of George Bush. On September 11, 2001, Jacques Chirac announced that we are all Americans. A year and a half later, things have changed. Chirac threatened to use his UN veto, and the Bush administration announced that it could no longer take this country seriously. But how seriously did the current administration ever take France? While the Clinton ambassador was engaged and well regarded, Bush appointed a former fast food processor who does not even speak the language. Bush doesn't come to France to talk with Chirac. He goes to England to talk about Chirac. And every time he opens his mouth, he makes it just that much harder to hold your head up. While in the United States, the President might make his own kind of sense, to most of the outside world he sounds like a bully and a braggart. Here is a man who actually failed to win a popularity contest against Saddam Hussein. And that's Europe's fault? I'm told that France is dangerous now, that Americans are being spat upon. But neither me nor my friends have experienced any hostility whatsoever. Talk to a French person about the war, and they'll say that while they dislike the current administration, they understand there's a difference between the American people and the American President. Six Feet Under they love, Tony Blair they grudgingly respect, but George Bush, that's another matter. If I did not share their view, I suppose there might be some discussion, but I can't imagine that it would result in saliva. I have an American friend who speaks French perfectly and leads tours of Paris. As late as February, her spring schedule was packed. Then one by one, all of her upcoming parties phoned to cancel saying it just didn't seem safe. The only exception was a man from Wyoming, who said he would come as long as my friend could arrange for an armed bodyguard who would accompany him and his family everywhere they went. My friend explained that guns were not really allowed in the Louvre. And after expressing shock, the man canceled. I know Americans who have taken to identifying themselves as Canadians, but I'm always afraid that if I try it myself, the other person will have family there and ask me what part of Canada I'm from. There is nothing more pathetic than being ashamed of where you come from. I know this. Still, I look at the American President raising his fist on the front page of Le Monde, and I find myself wondering, is Sacajawea a province? What about Mandingo? David Sedaris is the author of several books, including one about his life in France titled Me Talk Pretty One Day. Act Four, Fighting The Previous War. Sarah Vowell has this story about the first time the United States attacked a country that had not attacked us. The first time we invaded a country for the purposes of regime change, which was widely seen as an idealistic act freeing an oppressed people. Here she is. The congressman from New York said that the United States was right to invade another country in order to "correct the intolerable evils and set up in their place the institutions of enlightened government." The President, who believed we were entrusted with this war by the providence of God, said "It is not a trust we sought. It is a trust from which we will not flinch." An American citizen living in Europe among Europeans opposed to America going to war wrote home that, "it is a worthy thing to fight for one's freedom. It is another sight finer to fight for another man's." The President was William McKinley, the American citizen, Mark Twain, and the congressman was speaking at the turn of the 20th century and not the 21st. These were the country's good intentions in our first attempt at regime change, the Spanish American War. As the United States embarks on Operation Iraqi Freedom, it's worth looking back on the role we played in creating that bastion of 20th century democracy known as Cuba. American do-gooders fought to liberate the oppressed people of Cuba from the tyranny of Spain. And what can we learn? For starters, the war itself is a snap. It's when the guns get put away and the ink pens come out that the real headaches begin. The Cuban people suffered at the hands of the Spanish in the 1890s, especially those who were rounded up into concentration camps. American newspapers sensationalized Spanish atrocities, stirring up an idealistic fad for Cuba libre on the part of the American people. The clincher, the hard proof of Spanish evil-doing, was one of those acts that in retrospect might not have happened at all. Historians still disagree. On February 15, 1898, the American battleship, The Maine, exploded in Havana harbor, killing 254 men. Remember the Maine? War boosters accused the Spanish of bombing the ship and shrieked for a declaration of war. In fact, the evidence was inconclusive then and remains so today. Some historians believe it may have been a freak accident, a coal fire that ignited explosives on board the ship. Just like today, President McKinley had to squeak around that pesky provision in the Constitution that says Congress shall declare war. Congress didn't actually approve the war until it was already under way, but still, it's nice to be asked. Then, as now, optional wars are fought because there are people in the government who really, really want to fight them. The Paul Wolfowitz of the McKinley administration was the assistant secretary of the Navy, one Theodore Roosevelt. He was part of a group of young wonks from various branches of the government who had been arguing that it was in the American interest to wrench Cuba from the clutches of Spain. They feared what would happen if the iffy Cuban rebels governed themselves. They wanted American companies to get a piece of the Cuban sugar business. And they thought Cuba would be a handy base of operations from which to get cracking on a canal they hoped to one day build in Central America. Roosevelt wanted all those things, but more than anything, he wanted to fight. He wanted to wear an outfit, I mean uniform. He wanted to use one of his favorite words, adventure. And he wanted these things so badly that once the US declared war on Spain, he resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy, ordered himself a custom-tailored uniform from Brooks Brothers and volunteered to fight as a comparatively lowly lieutenant colonel with the first US volunteer cavalry. He helped assemble this ragtag regiment of cowboys, Indians, Ivy League graduates, one genuine Dodge City Marshal and a Jew nicknamed Porkchop. They came to be known as The Rough Riders. Roosevelt described them as "men in whose veins the blood stirred with the same impulse which once sent the Vikings oversea." And how did our Vikings fare? The war was over in four short months. America's first time out in interventionist warfare with the aim of regime change was seen as such a success it became known as The Splendid Little War. Success, hell, if Teddy Roosevelt is to be believed, it was downright fun. In his memoir of his Rough Riders days, he can't stop using the word "delighted." All fine until the war ended. The very fact that we call it the Spanish American War hints that Cuban sovereignty was a fairly low priority for the McKinley administration. As the Cuban revolutionary hero Jose Marti worried, "Once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive them out?" After the United States signed a treaty with Spain in 1898, we occupied Cuba for the next five years. In 1902, Cuba became nominally independent thanks to an American act of Congress. It was called the Platt amendment, but a better name for it might have been "Buenos Dias Fidel." It kept Cuba under US protection and gave us the right to intervene in Cuban affairs, which we did for the next half century, re-occupying the country every few years and propping up a series of dictators, crooks and boobs. The last one, a sergeant named Batista, was one of the monsters created in part by American military aid. When the revolution came in 1959, all American businesses in Cuba were nationalized without compensation. "Yankee," said Castro, "go home. And oh, by the way, how do you like them missiles?" Which is to say our clunky post-war policy after the Spanish American War actually led the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation in 1962. And a hundred five years later, Cuba still isn't free. But back at the beginning of the Spanish American War, like at the beginning of this war, Americans understood that their country's role in the world was changing for good. Immediately after, we fought a not-so-splendid war to take over the Philippines that dragged on for years. Theodore Roosevelt became a national hero thanks to his Rough Rider exploits and was President by 1901. He built the Panama Canal, brokered a peace treaty between Russia and Japan, secured Moroccan independence and sent the great white fleet of the US Navy on tour around the globe to show the world that the US was now a power to contend with. Before long, we were in World War I and the whole country was humming the tune "Over There." Finally, there's one more side effect of America's first attempt at regime change. The Platt amendment, signed by President McKinley in 1901, required the Cubans to lease land to the US Navy. That base at Guantanamo Bay is currently the home of several hundred Taliban and other prisoners of the War On Terror. I like to believe that if Saddam Hussein is captured, he'll be put in a brig on the USS Theodore Roosevelt and taken to await trial in a cell at Guantanamo Bay. Sarah Vowell is author of The Partly Cloudy Patriot and a regular contributor to our program. Act Five, What Peacetime Forgets About Wartime. In a weekly paper here in Chicago a few years back, The Chicago Reader, a writer named Lee Sandlin wrote a story about what it is that makes wartime different. About the particular psychology of being at war, the things that a country goes through in war that it does not experience any other time. It was a massive historical article. Here's an excerpt, which we ran a few years back but seemed appropriate this weekend. It's read for us by Matt Malloy. Back when the forest still stretched in an unbroken expanse from Scandinavia to the Urals, the Vikings who inhabited its northernmost reaches wrote down their own stories about war. Their legends may have been garish fantasies, cursed rings and enchanted gold and dragon slayers, but when they wrote about battle, they were unsparingly exact. Their sagas still offer the subtlest and most rigorous accounts of the unique psychology of combat. They knew that the experience of being on a battlefield is fundamentally different from everything else in life. It simply can't be described with ordinary words so they devised a specialized vocabulary to handle it. Some of their terms will do perfectly well for a world war fought 1,000 years later. The Vikings knew, for instance, that prolonged exposure to combat can goad some men into a state of uncontrolled, psychic fury. They might be the most placid men in the world in peacetime, but on the battlefield they begin to act with the most inexplicable and gratuitous cruelty. They become convinced that they're invincible, above all rules and restraints, literally transformed into supermen and werewolves. The Vikings called such men berserkers. World War II was filled with instances of ordinary soldiers giving in to berserker behavior. In battle after battle, soldiers on all sides were observed killing wantonly and indiscriminately, defying all orders to stop in a kind of collective blood rage. They were found in every army, even among those that emphasized discipline and humane conduct. American Marines in the Pacific became notorious for their berserker mentality, particularly their profound lack of interest in taking prisoners. In his memoir, a Marine named Eugene Sledge describes once seeing another Marine in a classic berserker state urinating into the open mouth of a dead Japanese soldier. Another Viking term was fay. People now understand it to mean effeminate. Previously it meant odd, and before that, uncanny, fairy-like. That was back when fairyland was the most sinister place people could imagine. The old Norse word meant doomed. It was used to refer to an eerie mood that would come over people in battle, a kind of transcendent despair. The state was described vividly by an American reporter, Tom Lee, in the midst of the desperate battle of Peleliu in the South Pacific. "He felt something inside of himself, some instinctive psychic urge to keep himself alive, finally collapse at the sight of one more dead soldier in the ruins of a tropical jungle." Lee wrote, "He seemed so quiet and empty and past all the small things a man could love or hate. I suddenly knew I no longer had to defend my beating heart against the stillness of death. There was no defense." "There was no defense." That's fay. People go through battle willing the bullet to miss, the shelling to stop, the heart to go on beating. And then they feel something in their soul surrender. And they give in to everything they'd been most afraid of. It's like a glimpse of eternity. Whether the battle is lost or won, it will never end. It has wholly taken over the soul. Sometimes, men say afterward that the most terrifying moment of any battle is seeing a fay look on the faces of the soldiers standing next to them. Fayness might also explain the deepest mystery of the war, why the surrender everybody expected never came. The Germans and Japanese refused to surrender even though they knew the war was lost. Not until the last days of the war did either government even consider a negotiated settlement, not until they had absolutely nothing left to negotiate with. But then that's the point, a rational calculation of the odds is a calculation via the logic of peace. War has a different logic. A kind of vast fayness can infect a military bureaucracy when it's losing a war, a collective slippage of the sense of objective truth in the face of approaching disaster. In the later years of World War II, the bureaucracies of the Axis behind the lines gradually retreated into a dreamy, paper war where they were on the brink of a triumphant reversal of fortune. Not everybody succumbed to these fantasies, but those who understood how hopeless the situation really was also knew that defeat would mean accountability. And they had a reasonably good idea of what would happen to them if they were ever forced to answer for what they'd done. This is the dreadful logic that comes to control a lot of wars. The American Civil War is another example. The losers prolong their agony as much as possible because they're convinced the alternative is worse. Meanwhile, the winners, who might earlier have accepted a compromise peace, become so maddened by the refusal of their enemies to stop fighting that they see no reason to settle for anything less than absolute victory. In this sense, the later course of World War II was typical. It kept on escalating no matter what the strategic situation was. And it grew progressively more violent and uncontrollable long after the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The difference was that no other war had ever had such deep reserves of violence to draw upon The Vikings would have understood all this. They didn't have a word for the prolongation of war long past any rational goal. They just knew that that's what always happened. It's the subject of their longest and greatest saga, the Brennu-Njals saga, or the saga of Njal burned alive. The saga describes a trivial feud in back-country Iceland that keeps escalating for reasons nobody can understand or resolve until it engulfs the whole of northern Europe. Provocation after fresh provocation, peace conference after failed peace conference, it has its own momentum, like a hurricane of carnage. For the Vikings, this was the essence of war. It's a mystery that comes out of nowhere and grows for reasons nobody can control until it shakes the whole world apart. This was the course of World War II from the fall of 1944 on. After the Allies at last acknowledged that despite the decisive victories of the previous summer, the Axis was never going to surrender. That was when the Allies changed their strategy. They set out to make an Axis surrender irrelevant. From that winter into the next spring, the civilians of Germany and Japan were helpless before a new Allied campaign of systematic aerial bombardment. The air forces and air defense systems of the Axis were in ruins by then. Allied planes flew where they pleased, day or night, 500 at a time, then 1,000 at a time, indiscriminately dumping avalanches of bombs on every city and town in Axis territory that had a military installation or a railroad yard or a factory. There was no precedent, even in this war, for the destruction on so ferocious a scale. It was the largest berserker rage in history. The Allies routinely dropped incendiary bombs in such great numbers that they created firestorms in cities throughout the Axis countries. These weren't simply large fires. A true firestorm is a freak event, where a large central core of flame heats up explosively to more than 1,500 degrees and everything within it goes up by spontaneous combustion. Buildings erupt, the water boils out of rivers and canals, the asphalt on the pavement ignites. Immense intake vortices spring up around the core and begin sucking in oxygen from the surrounding atmosphere at hurricane speeds. The Allied raids reduced cities in minutes to miles of smoldering debris. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, about 20% of them children. Tens of thousands suffocated because in the area around a fire storm, there's no oxygen left to breathe. Out of idle curiosity, I've have been asking friends, people my age and younger, what they know about war. War stories they've heard from their families, facts they've learned in school, stray images that may have stuck with them from old TV documentaries. I wasn't interested in the fine points of strategy, but the key events, the biggest moments, the things people at the time had thought would live on as long as there was anybody around to remember the past. To give everybody a big enough target, I asked about World War II. I figured people had to know the basics. World War II isn't exactly easy to miss. It was the largest war ever fought, the largest single event in history. So what did the people I asked know about the war? Nobody could tell me the first thing about it. Once they got past who won, they almost drew a blank. All they knew were those big, totemic names, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Auschwitz , Hiroshima. The rest was gone. Kasserine, Leyte Gulf, Corregidor, Falaise, the Ardennes didn't provoke a glimmer of recognition. They might as well have been off-ramps on some exotic interstate. What had happened, for instance, at one of the war's biggest battles, the Battle of Midway? "It was in the Pacific. There was something about aircraft carriers. Wasn't there a movie about it?" A couple of people were even surprised to hear that Midway Airport in Chicago was named after the battle, though they'd walked past the ugly commemorative sculpture in the concourse so many times. All in all, this was a dispiriting exercise. The astonishing events of that morning at Midway, the quote "fatal five minutes on which the war and the fate of the world had hung," had been reduced to a plaque nobody reads at an airport with a vaguely puzzling name midway between Chicago and nowhere at all. Is it that the war was 50 years ago and nobody cares anymore about what happened in the past? Maybe so, but I think what my little survey really demonstrates is how vast the gap is between the experience of war and the experience of peace. And there's another and simpler reason the war has been forgotten. People wanted to forget it. It had gone on for so many years, had destroyed so much, had killed so many. Most US casualties were in the final year of fighting. When it came to an end, people were glad to be rid of everything about it. That was what surprised commentators about the public reaction in America and Europe when the news broke that Germany and then Japan had at last surrendered. In the wild celebrations that followed, nobody crowed, "Our enemies are destroyed." Nobody even yelled, "We've won." What they all said instead was, "The war is over." That was the message that flashed around the world in the summer of 1945. "The war is over. The war is over." Matt Malloy, reading an article by Lee Sandlin that appeared in The Chicago Reader. Act Six. Now this story from a preventive act of war committed 3,200 years ago in modern day Turkey, not far from Iraq. Or anyway that's how the story goes. After the Trojan War, this bloody, ten year war that left Troy devastated, the Greeks, who won that war, felt that they could not leave Troy unless they killed all the children of the King. They assumed that one of his kids might some day grow up to lead the Trojans in a war of revenge against them. One little grandson was still left, maybe three or four years old. And one of the Greeks, Ulysses, goes to the boy's mom to talk her into handing him over so that neither country will have to face another war. Needless to say, she's not too keen on that idea. Mary Zimmerman is a Chicago director. She won the MacArthur Genius Grant. She won last year's Tony for Best Director. And she's now directing the play The Trojan Women, written 2,000 years ago, telling this story. She says that from the play's opening, it's hard not to think about very recent events. It starts out with language that recalls our own ground zero really, really closely. And so we have this profound identification with the victims in the play to begin with. But then, when the aggressors come on, their language sounds so much like the language of our own administration that this strange flip happens. But at the beginning, Hecuba is lying in this pile of rubble and she says-- and this is the really killer part to me-- "Never did we imagine the ground we stood on would give away, shudder, gape open and swallow all we had and were. We supposed that gods had built the city. We believed ourselves to be safe. Nothing is safe for sure but ruin itself. In billows of black smoke, the sky is obliterated. Daylight itself is in mourning. The air is thick with ashes and a foul smell like that of cooking meat, except we know it's human flesh, and gag and try to hold our breath." And then Ulysses comes on from the other side. And he's there on a mission to basically kill a little boy who the Greeks don't want to grow up and become a leader who will start a war against them. So he's on this sort of preventive war mission. And when he shows up, he's using language like, "You have to give him over to us. He threatens the peace. His life is a danger. We cannot allow it to continue to undermine the entire region's collective security." Yes, it very clearly is a preemptive strike. I have to say reading the text of this, what's most striking is how sad Ulysses is to have to do it. He's the one who has to go out and get the kid from the kid's mother. He is sad. He knows it's a disgusting job he has. But he knows he has to do it, and he's done it before. He knows it's his lot. The war machine is rolling over him as it's rolling over everyone else and forcing him into being this kind of person. It's interesting. As the whole discussion goes on when finally she gives the boy over to him, and then says goodbye to him, she pretty much admits that he's right. Yeah, she does. That if he left her [INAUDIBLE] --complex about the play and what the Greeks understood about war is that it doesn't end. And I feel that although Andromache really does hope that the little boy could grow up-- And lead them to victory. And lead them to victory. She also makes the argument, admittedly to try and save his life, look, his spirit is broken. "In a lifetime," she says, "could he rebuild, rearm? He's seen his father dragged through the dust. What kind of spirit do you think this little boy has?" So this goes on, this discussion. The play proceeds. And then when the Greeks finally kill the little boy-- one of the things that's interesting reading it is that they are just as wrecked about it as the Trojans. They're completely wrecked by it. So let me ask you to read the speech. A messenger comes in, reports on what has happened. "Through the crowd Ulysses makes his way, leading by the hand the boy who follows in confidence. The crowd is hushed, solemn, and here and there one can see tears that fall from brimming eyes. Ulysses recites the prayers Calcus instructed, summoning gods to witness what is being done. But the boy, knowing what then must come, of his own free will departs from the script to take command himself and steps abruptly out and over and into thin air to fall and plunge in an instant down through the delicate surface of the Earth to rejoin Priam in the gloomy kingdom below." The messenger goes on, "After the boy had fallen, the throng of Greeks still weeping for what had been done in their name, turned to Achilles' tomb by Roecian waters, with what thoughts who can say? The future threat, if ever there was a threat, had disappeared. Would another death propitiate the whims or offend the gods as it would seem to offend any sane person watching? Greeks and Trojans weep together, appalled as the blood soaks into the thirsty earth that drinks the copious gore until it is gone. Thus was the rite performed. Mary Zimmerman. Her production of The Trojan Woman opens at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago in April. Our program was produced today by Wendy Dorr and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook and Starlee Kine. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Katy Adone. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who wondered-- Is Sacajawea a province? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories from This American Life. What about Mandingo? PRI, Public Radio International.
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If you think your life is confusing, consider for a moment what happened to Congressman Ernest Istook last year. He's a Republican from Oklahoma. He believes that the Federal budget needs to be balanced. He believes it so fiercely that last year he formally proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would require a balanced Federal budget. And then, just a few weeks later, he voted, along with the majority of the House of Representatives, for a Federal budget that would create the largest deficit in American history: $347 billion. Even without the money that we were spending on the war in Iraq, it would have been the largest in history. I talked to him about it at the time. Certainly a majority of the American people and a majority of the people in Congress, on principle, say that they support a balanced budget amendment. That's great. But it's just like the Scarlet O'Hara syndrome, I'll worry about that tomorrow. Well, tomorrow never comes. Right. But if you and so many other people in Congress believe that we should not have a deficit, why not just vote against this budget with this deficit? Yeah. I voted for the budget not because I support the level of spending in the budget, but because I understand in the process that we go through in Washington DC, if we did not adopt this budget resolution, we would end up with higher spending levels. Those are the political dynamics that are afoot. And this doesn't really seem like an answer to the question. It is all that he would say. We went around and around on it, me asking why not just vote for less money, him saying this was the lowest amount Congress could agree on. For our program this week, all of us who work on the radio show wanted to do a program that would give a sense of what the hell is going on in the economy, because everything that we read about it or hear about it seems so contradictory. You've got deficit hawks, like Congressman Istook, supporting a tax cut from President Bush that could boost the deficit by a third. You've got the economy growing steadily for over two years now. In fact, last summer, it was growing really fast, 8.2% growth, which should have created jobs, but somehow it didn't and nobody exactly understands why. Then, two months ago, the economy finally started creating jobs. And again, nobody really understands why it happened then. And then there's this. At the same time the job picture's been so bleak over the last few years because of low interest rates and cheap mortgages, lots of middle-class people had money in their pockets. And so, even during the recession, people bought homes and cars in record numbers which is not what a recession used to mean. Welcome to WBEZ Chicago. It's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our radio program, a show that we call My Two Cents in which we try to get a grip on what is happening in this weird, contradictory economy with stories from three different people in three different places in the economy. Act One of our show, Dave Knows, the story of a man who might have a better grip on what is going on in the economy of middle-class America, what is going on in your personal finances, than all of the experts you ever read about in the paper or see on TV. And chances are, you have never heard his name. Act Two, Stock Making Sense, in that act somebody who lost money in the stock market during the collapse of the internet economy heads off on a quest. Perhaps an even more futile quest than his original stock purchase. And he puts together a report, a stockumentary if you will. Act Three, A View From The Mop. A janitor has written a book about what it is like to work for over a decade for under $6 an hour at the same job. Stay with us. Act One: Dave Knows. We wanted to begin today with this story about what is happening with middle-class Americans and their place in the economy. There are lots of different ways that you can measure how they're doing. You could examine unemployment statistics or consumer spending. You could take a poll. Or you could have a, more or less, random group of adults with all sorts of jobs call into a radio show to talk about their money situation. It turns out that somebody already does this, and he does it really, really well. His name is Dave Ramsey. His show is on over 160 stations, mostly in the south and west. The show comes out of Nashville. From Tennessee, Susan Drury put together this report. To me, a daily show about personal finance is, by definition, boring. And this program is not boring, it pulls you in. Here's Lynne, a typical caller. She and her husband sold their carpet store business and they don't agree on how to handle the money from the sale. He is disabled, and he kind of likes to gamble a little bit. And he says it's all his to do what he wants to. I said, no, I'm not working. We need to take it and budget it out for us to live on because we have two little children. What should I do? Let's just stop this right here. On any other financial show you wouldn't even hear this question because it's not about money. Her real problem is her husband. Let's hear some more. When you got married, the preacher said, and now you are one. It's our money. It's our kids. It's our stuff. It's our bills. It's our stuff. We work together, so no, it's not his, it's ours. And if he's a real man, what he'll do is sit down and the two of you, together, decide what this is going to be used for, for the good of the family. And this seems like just answer she wants to hear. But then the conversation takes a turn as it often does on this show. Dave knows that the money is never just about the money. So why is the husband holding on to the money? Well, that can't just be about the money either. Dave runs another theory by her. Maybe she's part of the problem. You may be kind of a tightwad and you've got the thing turned down too tight. I am. That's definitely. And his reaction to that is rebellion. You need to loosen up a little and he needs to come to the table and be a grown-up. Is there disability income coming in? Yes. Uh-huh. Now there is. OK. Are we sharing that? Well, it comes to me, and so I just budget it for each week. OK. What you need to do, though, is it doesn't need to be I budget anymore. It needs to be we're budgeting because part of the rebellion from him is coming from the fact he doesn't feel like he's getting control. The only control he has is over that carpet store money, and he's grasping at trying to have some sense of dignity and control. I understand. This call takes just 10 minutes out of the three-hour Dave Ramsey Show. It's on Monday through Friday. It has 1.8 million listeners each week. He gets a lot of calls you'd expect to hear on a personal finance show: questions about 401-Ks, bankruptcies and mortgage rates. But then there is the classic call, the one he gets all the time. I need your advice on a credit situation that my wife and I have gotten ourselves into. This is Scott. He and his wife have student loans and debts from a failed business. And when they lost their jobs last year, they started living off their credit cards. Scott just got another job, but he owes almost as much in debt as he'll make in a year. OK. So you're at 55K and you owe 45K? Oh, yeah. All right. First, get $1,000 cash for miniature emergencies. Cut up your credit cards, and never again are you going to do this. It has to be a healthy level of anger, and I am getting out of this mess, and I'm never going to live like this again. And we're going to build up some savings. And it's going to take you about three years of sacrifice and living on a budget. And no vacation, and no new anything, and very little eating out, and rice and beans, and beans and rice. And on 55K, you can be debt-free in about three years. This is what Dave tells everybody every time, the same thing over and over. Live on a budget. Cut up the cards. Work extra. Pay it off and save. Rice and beans, beans and rice, this is his sermon. In the world of The Dave Ramsey Show there's one specter that haunts the US economy, and that is debt, personal debt. It's at record levels these days, $8 trillion nationwide. And for the first time ever, if you added up everyone's debt in this country, it would be greater than our annual disposable income. And Dave's got a story that makes people trust him on this subject, a story he tells often on the radio, and which he told me when we sat down for an interview. The way we ended up teaching this stuff was that we went broke. Sharon and I started with nothing in our 20s, early 20s, and started buying and selling real estate. And by the time we were 26 years old, we had a little over $4 million worth, a little over $1 million net worth. I was making, the best year I ever had in the real estate business, I made $250 thousand taxable cash income that year. That's a lot of money for a kid from Antioch, Tennessee. He bought a Jaguar. They went to Hawaii a couple of times. They bought a house, and then a bigger house. He was taking out a lot of short-term real estate loans. He would use the loans to buy property, fix it up, and re-sell it all within 90 days. Then the bank got sold, and they called all his loans in it once, and he couldn't pay back the money. And we fought for two and a half years. We fought against the process of going broke by selling things and working hard, and it didn't work. And we were sued, and sued, and sued, and sued. And we were foreclosed on repeatedly. And finally, at the bottom of that, with a brand new baby and a toddler, we were bankrupt. And so there I sat, with all these letters and licenses after my name that said I knew something about money, broke. It doesn't work. And I started trying to figure out how money really works, not what someone's theory was. This story of how he went broke and how it changed him has all the ingredients that make a great morality tale. And that is how he sees it: the sin of overspending, the dark night of the soul, and the redemption in wealth and success. Dave's not the first person to say you shouldn't spend more than you make, but he is on a mission to change you and how you deal with money. And he is very, very specific about exactly what you should do in exactly what order. Then he's there every day to answer questions, to goad you, to push you, to harass you into following his rules. Now, here's your host, best-selling author and financial counselor, Dave Ramsey. Welcome to new millennium where debt is dumb, cash is king, and the paid-off home mortgage has taken the place of the BMW as the status symbol of choice. Every Friday on the show, they do this thing called Debt-Free Friday. People who have followed Dave's rules call in to give their testimony of how they got into debt, how much debt they were in, how they got out, and what it feels like to be free of it. This is everyone's favorite part of the show. Becky, what's up with you? Hi, Dave. I just wanted to let you know that, after four long years, I'm finally down to the first mortgage, and I just got that refinanced on a 15-year. Good for you. Four years, you've been working on this. Yeah. A single working mom, and I work three jobs, seven days a week. Whoa! In four years, Becky paid off $21,000 in debt. She's got a daughter in college and makes $34,000 from her three jobs, combined. She tells Dave she took extra jobs that let her stay at home at night with her family. How'd you find this job? One of my friends suggested. We were trying to think of things for me to do a few years ago that never closed, and she said something about a nursing home. And I called. I made a list of the ones close to my house, and the second one I called, which is five minutes away, had an opening. So you guys had a brainstorming session. I mean, we got together and said how could I work? You know, you're just awesome. Thank you. It's a great place to go when you're broke, to work, and you figured that out. I'm proud of you. That's awesome. And I just want to give anybody out there that thinks they can't do it, if I can do it, anybody can do it. I'll tell you. No, I'll tell you anybody can't. They've got to have the work ethic and they've got to have the character that you've got. And if they have that, they can do it. Becky, I'm proud of you. Yell at the top your lungs with all your friends. OK. Are you all ready? Yes. OK. I'm debt-free! Debt-free! It's a party, baby! Hey! To Dave, it's all about individual initiative, and Becky has it. And if you don't have it, he's pretty rough. Here's Tina. I have a car payment, and I am upside down. I've heard a couple of your shows before. I want to get out of this debt, so what can I do? How much do you owe on the car? 10,000 and something. And what do you think it's worth? 5,000 and something. Oh, my goodness. What a mess. She makes $800 to $900 a month, and she's paying a $368 car payment. Dave is trying to figure out how she came to owe twice as much as the car is now worth. It turns out she was in a car accident. You wrecked it. Has it been fixed? No. Oh, crap. And you didn't have insurance? I did. They sent me the money, but I spent it. OK. Ah. Yeah. I'm afraid what you're looking at is, probably, a really good part-time job, about six or eight months of 80-hour weeks. 80-hour weeks? Yeah. That's too much work. I can't help you, Tina. OK. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for the call. Bye-bye. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host. See, the bottom line is, you've got the obligation. You've got a mess, and you can't work your way out of it. You're not willing to work? I don't know anything to call that but lazy. That's all you can call that, and I can't help you. Dave says the financial problems we have are because we are too much like Tina and not enough like Becky. His view of the bigger economic picture is that we are all screwing up, each of us individually guilty in the same way. And this, he says, has nothing to do with the stock market, or the tech bubble, or even rising unemployment. How have the calls that you get changed since the boom ended? They haven't because the boom hasn't ended for the consumer. It was never there. Because the consumer in the '90s, the only thing that has changed for Joe and Susie is their 401K balance is lower. But they weren't using it, anyway, to live on. So day to day has not changed a bit. They're still borrowing up to their eyeballs in credit card debt. They're still buying cars they can't afford. And they're still living without a plan and no savings. And so the boom, when it was here, didn't affect them positively, except it gave them a false sense of confidence to go even crazier. And credit card debt got worse in the '90s. Now that doesn't make any sense. I mean, if there was this boom, why don't we have money to buy stuff? Dave's message is that you are not at the mercy of the economy. It might feel like you are, but you're not. He believes this, and he gets other people to believe it. And I have to say, people, all sorts of people, like his answer. They flock to him to hear what he has to say. He tells them that there is a very simple but very difficult solution to their money problems, and it's a solution that has no room for excuses and nothing outside your control. And maybe that's what people want. It's a Saturday morning and I'm at a Pentecostal church north of Nashville. I'm an hour early and the parking lot is nearly full by the time I get here. The lobby and the halls are filled with Dave Ramsey merchandise and the 2,500 people who are here to see Dave's five-hour, live event. He has a warm-up act, a comedian, and then he comes on. Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome Dave Ramsey. Yeah! Thank you. Thanks. Well, thank you for being here today. We are going to have some fun today. I found out something about money. Money's fun if you've got some. Dave Ramsey is a brand. Not only does he do the radio show, but he writes books, holds these live events, and does curricula, and classes, and counseling sessions. It takes only four people to run the radio show, but he's got 75 more employees doing all the other stuff. We don't get it locally. Jane Henkle drove five hours from her home in Indiana to see Dave live. She and her husband have been following Dave's plan for five months. Oh, it's changed our life. I've been married 28 years and, until we met with Dave, my husband and I had never done a budget together. We had never. He did the finances, or I did the finances at different parts. We'd never done it together. We fell into the credit card trap. They started with $30,000 in credit card debt, and they've got about $20,000 left to pay off. It was a lot different before they started Dave's plan. A lot of stress. A lot of stress. Like, I would hide from him the credit card bills when they would come in. We're weren't totally honest with each other in our spending. We didn't have a budget to see where everything went at the end of the month, or even the end of the week. We were like, whoa! What's going on here? Oh, I'm going to the grocery store. Sorry, no money left. You know? And it's changed things around completely. This sense of excitement is all over this place. Like a roomful of people who are all losing lots of weight doing the exact same thing and succeeding in a world where everybody else is getting fatter. You hardly ever hear people talk about money in this way with this sense of control. And these are not rich people. I'm Bobbi Hargrove. I'm Phillip Hargrove. I've been listening, probably, about five years now. I drive a truck, so I'm up this way a lot. So I get to hear him on-- I wondered what the people on the radio was saying, that they was getting out of debt and all this. And I was like how's this work? So I love it, you know? I was going to say you're just glowing. My kids, they come in, I've got the tape on the TV or I've got a CD in and everything. I live and breath this stuff, you know? It's changing everything that I've ever been taught, you know? In a way, it's sort of a simple thing to have a plan on how to spend and save your money. But here we are in the richest country in the world, an economic superpower, and few of us have ever really learned how to do that. When I tell my friends here in Tennessee that I'm doing a story on Dave Ramsey, one person after another tells me how he changed their lives. I hear this from a teacher, a professional musician, a reporter, a lawyer, and some farmers. Kim Turner and her husband have done Dave's plan for several years. You know, listening to that keeps you on the straight and narrow so that you don't stray, kind of like you go to church. Even though you already know what he's going to say, but it's just, I guess, you need to hear that every day. A lot of people I met made this connection between going to church and listening to Dave's show, and it's not accidental. Dave's a Christian, and he doesn't shy away from quoting Scripture or talking about God on the show. As he tells callers, the Bible doesn't contain any positive references to debt. His 13-week course, Financial Peace University, is held in hundreds of churches, and he works with ministers to publicize his live events. For lots of folks, the religious angle on money is the way in. Sometimes people call in to thank Dave for his show. They call it his ministry. And he's OK with that term, although he says he doesn't want to be pigeonholed as the Christian financial guy. Talk radio is one of the last intimate mediums where people can have their emotions touched along with their information. And so, in that sense, it does become a very large accountability group. And you can name it Promise Keepers, you could name it AA, you could name it therapy, it just depends on your belief system on how you would approach it and what vernacular you might put with it. Certainly, from a Christian viewpoint, what we do is minister. From a therapy viewpoint, what we do is do therapy. 888-825-5225. We're going to start this segment off with Kerry in Kankakee, Illinois, WKAN 1320. Hi, Kerry. How are you? Hi. How are you? Good. How can I help? Kerry lives with two teenage sons from an earlier marriage and with a boyfriend. OK. And we both work. OK? He makes almost $1,000 a week, where I make $300 a week. I'm a factory worker. OK. The thing is, he's like very, to a point, controlling. We share expenses. I have to give up half of my paycheck to pay for the bills, to help pay for the bills. When I'm done doing that, then I have hardly any money left to do for my kids, or for myself, or to try and put money back. OK. He says that I can't leave because I would never be able to make it on my own. I will admit, I'm not very good at handling money. I don't know how. Well, let me ask you something. If you were sitting down with a cup of coffee-- how old are you? I'm 41. OK. If you were to sit down over a cup of coffee with a 27-year-old, single, young lady that was living with a guy, and she told you what you just told me, what would you tell her? To get out. You can make it on your own. Mm-hmm. Good advice. OK, but how do I start on my income? Well, I'm not positive. You don't make a lot of money, I agree with that. But let me tell you what, you're in a really unhealthy relationship. You're dealing with a guy who-- he's not hitting you, is he? No. You sure? Yeah. I'm not sure I believe you. Yeah. It's fine. I'm sorry? It's OK. I need to-- You've got to get out of there, girl. You've got to get out of there now. OK? He says, you know, that it's me. It's because-- No. It's not you, darling. This guy's sick. You've got to get away from him. And you think I can survive on-- Well, I can tell you this. If nothing else, you can start by going to a domestic violence shelter right now and checking in with your kids. And they will help you put together a budget, and get back on your feet, and get other employment. And you may have to take a part-time job. You may have to move into subsidized housing of some kind. I don't know exactly what the short-term, the next six months, is going to look like, but I can tell you this Kerry, you were not designed by God for this man. Dave gives her the phone number for a women's shelter. And then, after Kerry's call, one person after another called in to tell Kerry to leave. Women who had quit abusive relationships years earlier, men and women who had grown up in violent homes, women who had felt they had been controlled by a lack of money or a fear of not being able to make it on their own, most of the calls didn't mention money at all. Susan Drury lives in Tennessee. To find out where to hear the talented Dave Ramsey on the radio every single day, go to daveramsey.com. Coming up, mild-mannered radio reporter seeks vigilante justice from the entire internet-level economy, sort of. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. With This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, a show we call My Two Cents in which we visit three people in three different places in the economy to try to understand this weird non-recovery recovery we're supposed to be in right now. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two: Stock Making Sense. Right now, half of all American households own stock either through retirement plans, or through mutual funds, or that they bought themselves. But during the internet bubble, all sorts of people got into the stock market that probably never should have. Like, for instance, one of the producers of this is very radio program, Mr Alex Blumberg. If I were rich, your life would be different. I know this for sure. I know this because the source of my wealth would have an invention that changed the way you shop. This invention that would have made my fortune would also have revolutionized the distribution of carbonated beverages and would have been displayed in every supermarket, convenience store, and Walmart in America. Instead, what happened is this. I bought stock in a company on a tip in 1997. By 1998, the stock was worthless. I've spent the intervening years trying to forget that it ever happened. It was the only investment I ever made. I was the only person I know to go zero for the '90s, to have a perfect losing record for the greatest peacetime economic boom in history. Now I find myself wondering, probably with everyone else who lost money in the stock market collapse, what happened? Was it mass-delusion destined to crumble from the beginning? Or could things have turned out differently? What was going on inside all those factories and online boutiques we bought pieces of at the end of the last century? All right. Well, I'm putting on a head lamp because I have to go look for stuff that might be in the basement. What's in the basement? Monsters. Financial monsters. It was my best friend, Shane, who gave me the stock tip in 1997. And all the records are his basement where, symbolically enough, there are no lights. Shane had never invested in anything either. He knew nothing about stocks, but he saw other people making money and he wanted in on the action. He called a good friend who he thought knew about this stuff, got a tip, and promptly called me. A Dirt Devil, a couple of bikes. I remember the phone call, but I was always fuzzy on what the company actually did. It was some kind of in-store, self-service beverage dispenser. Customers put an empty bottle under a nozzle, chose a flavor, and seconds later they had a full two-liter of off-brand juice or soda for a fraction of what it would cost in the soft drink aisle. Plus, it was organic or healthy or something. Frankly, I wan't paying all that much attention. They were going to be in stores all over the place. Shane said he was putting in 5,000. My total income that year, according to my '97 taxes, was $17,529, but I'd just gotten a big freelance check. I said put me down for 1,000. Finally, I thought, some of the boom will spill over onto me. Taxes, '94, '99. That's going to be in there. Beneath some old dog beds, Shane finds a promising looking shoe box. Oh, yeah. Well, this is the mother lode. That'd survive an audit. OK. This is the end of your statement. And this is on 7, 29, '97, we bought 1,400 shares of Fountain Fresh International, symbol FTFR, at $4.12-1/2 cents. To help us sort through what happened to Fountain Fresh International, we've brought along our most financially astute friend, Mike Quattrocki, who does something involving lots of money and words like hedge funds, derivatives, and options, with the Chicago Board of Trade. Standing with his drink in stocking feet on Shane's unheated cellar floor, he's surrounded by old bicycles, rusty toolboxes, garbage bags filled with magazines, and Shane's financial records. He gets right to mockery. Was this a high-technology play? No, no, no, no. No, no, no. No. It was not a technology play? Well, the beverage center was high-tech, but it was not internet. So, at the birth of the internet, you were buying beverage stocks? Yeah. I'd like to point out here that I've never even made enough money to lose as much as Mike did in the stock market. Plenty of his tech stocks went to zero too. He's mocking us not because we lost money, but because we lost it in a slightly different way than he and all his friends did. What's in there? We bring the box back upstairs and begin to reconstruct what happened to the stock. With hindsight, there's a few things in the purchase certificate itself that don't bode well. Like the name of the brokerage house, Olde Discount: O- L- D- E. Mike has never heard of it. Shane chose it on the advice of the same friend who gave him the tip. I said, "Well, how do you buy a stock?" And he goes, "Well, you have to open a brokerage account, and you probably want to go to one of these discount places where the fees aren't high." So you got this tip. And then the next thing you had to figure out was, I know the stock I want to buy, how do I actually buy it? Exactly. And I look in the phone book, and there's a discount one, called Olde, and it's downtown. That sounds really suspicious. Why didn't you just go to Fidelity? Why didn't you just-- what? Because it was low fees. Schwab or anything with a little name recognition. I know. I mean, Olde? I mean, did you actually write the check out to Olde when you bought the stock? I don't know. No. It was like a national chain. It was like the poor man's Schwab. It's easy that it doesn't exist. I'm betting money it's gone. We look. Olde's not in the phone book, but we do find something about it on the internet. --go down. That's the regulation press release in '98. What happened there? Oh. Today fined Olde Discount-- 1.35 million and censured it in connection with the firm's sales practices. Sales practices. What? Founder, Ernest Olde, also fined 500,000 and suspended. It turns out that Olde Discount Corporation had been engaging in a fairly common brokerage scam in the '90s. They'd quote the customer one price, buy the stock at a lower price, and pocket the difference. Mike shakes his head. Did anyone advise you when you went in there and said to alert you to the risks associated? Yeah. Yeah. He said they're going to make you fill out a form. What is your tolerance for risk? Blah, blah, blah. $5,000, at the time, to you, was a lot of money. A lot of money. When you come in to a discount brokerage house, and you walk in off the sheet, I don't know what you looked like. I don't know how you were dressed, but you clearly were clutching your 5,000 and Alex's 1,000, and you came in with a very specific stock in mind. And you came in, and you queried about a stock that he had, surely, never heard of. And then you decided that you wanted to buy that stock. I'm sure alarm bells were clanging in his head, for sure. It was shocking to hear Mike lay out the broker's perspective on this. Shane and I had never stopped to consider how we might have looked to someone who actually knew about this stuff. We knew we didn't know anything, but we had no idea just how clearly everyone else could see that. And if you walked in off the street with this $6,000, I would say, "Sonny, go home and save your money." I would say, as an honorable broker, that's what an honorable-- an honorable broker should not have processed this trade. He should have just said, "Go home. Don't buy this stock I've never heard of." At some point during this dispiriting lesson on how not to buy a stock, it occurred to me that maybe things were worse than I'd even imagined. Maybe we hadn't just been foolish, maybe we'd been scammed. Maybe Fountain Fresh had never even existed. And so five years after the fact, and with my stock worth exactly 1/100 of a cent per share, I decided to do the research I should have done before I even bought it. For a while, everything I learn is troubling. In the years between 1985 and 2000 it had at least eight different CEOs. Press releases from 1985 to 2000 all declare the same thing, that the company is just about to turn a profit, but not one says that the company actually has. Big new contracts with Walmart and various supermarket chains in Canada, Australia, and the Philippines, are constantly announced. But, mysteriously, revenue never goes up. I find no SEC filings on the company, no annual reports, no website. And then I find a December 2nd, 1995 article in the Modesto Bee. It says a Fountain Fresh machine was installed in the Sav Max Foods in Ceres, California. It was in the corner of the store in the back area because a lot of tubes had to go to it. All these tubes, because you imagine every tube had to do carbonation and then flavors. You know what I'm saying? When I called the Sav Max store, the person who picks up the phone is Christine Arianne. I can't really tell you the relief I feel when she confirms that Fountain Fresh actually had a product. A product means that they must have had a factory to make it in, and sales people to sell it, and delivery people to deliver it. A product means that it wasn't a scam, it was an actual company that made actual things that actual people had actually seen. Christine talks to me while ringing up customers. They had a blue ice flavor and a lemonade. They had an off-brand Coca Cola or Pepsi. I mean, it was kind of like you just put your soda underneath there and pushed the button that you wanted, and then it would just fill it up. And it filled it up cold. Talk about, as far as you could tell, was it popular with the customers? Yeah. It was? Very popular. I think because it wasn't very expensive. It was like $0.69 to fill a two-liter, and I want to say $0.49 to fill a one-liter. It was a lot cheaper, so I think-- Oh yeah, she did. Where'd she go? She's got to come back. She just took her [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I had a lady forget her groceries. Yeah. So it did good. It went really well. As a matter of fact, a lot of people were all really bummed when it went out of business. They were? Yeah. Did people actually come up to you and talk to you about it? Uh-huh. They were like, where'd it go? We were just getting the hang of that. Where'd it go? It just seemed like we had it and then, all of a sudden, it was gone. The real go-go years for Fountain Fresh were right around the time they installed the machine in Christine's store. In '94, the stock had risen to its all time high, $9 a share. And in '96, a man named Richard Maynes took over as CEO. He was charismatic, capable, everyone loved him, and he set the company on an ambitious new path. To figure out how to better sell the product, he hired Doblin Incorporated, a consulting company so fancy that they called themselves-- An innovation strategy firm. Peter Laundy managed the Fountain Fresh project for Doblin, and he still says that Fountain Fresh had a great product. It was cheaper than regular soda. It took up less shelf space, which grocers liked. You could re-fill the same bottle over and over again, so it had an environmental angle. But its most important advantage had to do with distribution. It allowed you to bottle soda at the grocery store. And that was really efficient because soda is, basically, 95% water with a little sugar and flavoring added, and it's a whole lot cheaper to pipe water to a grocery store than to load it into bottles and truck it. This idea of the bottled soft drink that doesn't need to be shipped turns out as something of a holy grail in the beverage industry. For years, people were trying to figure out a way to do it, Fountain Fresh succeeded. I told Shane about my conversation with Peter Laundy. So I talked to the guy from the Doblin Group yesterday, and he explained to me what the original genius was. Was it the natural ingredients, or the reusable? Or what was the deal? He said that the original genius was that it had figured out a way to make a two-liter soda without having to ship it, basically. Right. You ship an ounce of ingredients, and then you add the water when you get there. Then the machine actually purifies the tap water, and then it mixes it all together. And it does it for you right there. I've got to say I would do it all over again. It's genius. There is a genius there. There is genius, and we don't even know the full genius. It's cheaper, it's way cheaper. Also he said that it's free advertising because, basically, you have a machine in the store, and he said that you can cover that machine, the face of that machine, with whatever image you want. And it's, basically, a huge surface. And he said the problem with Coke and other groceries is that the only picture you can put is on a tiny, two-liter bottle. And yet, despite the problem of the tiny two-liter bottle, Coke and Pepsi still manage to pay their stockholders more than a penny a share. You can really, really do some good brand forming. I explained to Shane how Doblin's first step was to give Maynes a story to tell investors so that he could raise money to finally put Fountain Fresh over the edge. They gave him a PowerPoint presentation and a fancy, wire-bound pitch, which he could take around to rich Wall Street types. The CEO did the typical late '90s suitcases full of cash, which Doblin went to work spending. They hired some of the fanciest industrial design firms around to redo the exterior of the machine. It was no longer going to be a non-descript, chunky box with spill stains down the front. It was going to be a sleek, beautiful box with spill stains down the front. So, how does an innovative concept backed by lots of cash go out of business? Eric Gillette was hired as the liaison between the high-priced designers in the East and the plant in Salt Lake City. When Shane and I talked to him, he said, "For one thing, there was a culture clash. The consultants back East were used to working with huge clients." They're heavy hitters. These are really smart people and they work for multimillion dollar contracts for big US corporations. And then the antithesis of that is this dumpy warehouse in Salt Lake, which was the headquarters for Fountain Fresh, and guys drive pickup trucks, and wear T-shirts, and have wrenches in their hand, you know? And so it's these two completely different cultures that were trying to pull this off. For a long time we were not even sure that Fountain Fresh ever existed as a company. So it's sort of comforting to hear you say that there actually was a warehouse with guys in T-shirts driving trucks. And that they had wrenches. Yes. Exactly. Especially that they had wrenches. No. I mean, I think it had existed for a long time on this kind of really small level with these guys, basically, tinkering with this machine. What happened to Fountain Fresh is what happened to the US economy as a whole in the late 90s. Fountain Fresh was a bunch of regular guys trying to take a good idea and make a little money with it. Suddenly, these suits show up saying the idea is the next big thing. They rent out ballrooms and hire event planners for shareholder meetings. Talk about fundamental shifts in economic paradigms, convince everyone that their vision is real despite evidence to the contrary. The whole summer Fountain Fresh was preparing for their big roll out, their stock price was steadily dropping. And Shane and I knew it, we were watching, and we knew just what to do. The one thing I had heard about investing, buy and hold. So you're not supposed to sell it, even when it goes down, especially when it goes down because that's what the suckers do. Well, it makes sense, though, because if you thought well, if you still had faith in it, which we both did, we were so sure. I remember, for the whole first year, thinking well, it's going to bounce back. Well, the thing about those little investment chestnuts that they don't tell you is, for example, the buy and hold idea is premised on the theory that you've made a good decision in the first place. So what went wrong? I tried to reach the eight presidents of Fountain Fresh. Several, I couldn't find. Others refused to talk on tape. But here's what I was able to piece together from people inside the operation. Explanation number one, the idea was actually bad. One of the ex-presidents in Fountain Fresh told me that they never figured out a way to do the most basic thing any business has to do, make a profit. "Even if the machines dispensed soda all day long," he said, "they still wouldn't have sold enough product to cover their costs." And even worse, everyone agreed that the wrench guys never figured out how to make the dispenser work right. They never came up with a design that could be mass-produced. Here's Eric Gillette. When you actually looked at the guts of the machine, it kind of looked like tubes, and pipes, and parts, and it just was this jumble of technology. And there would always be dripping syrup coming out of these pipes. And it was just kind of, OK, what is this, and why is that dripping? And those kinds of conversations-- Why is that dripping is never a good question. Explanation number two, it wasn't supposed to succeed in the first place. One of the biggest investors in Fountain Fresh was a man whose businesses were the subject of an August, 2000 Wall Street Journal article about overseas stock scams. He also financed the business that was the exclusive distributor for Fountain Fresh products. To do this, he issued millions of dollars in stock, but a special kind that can only be sold overseas and isn't subject to the same regulations and scrutiny that normal stocks are. And the document he showed to these overseas investors told the story of Fountain Fresh. In a sense, this guy didn't need Fountain Fresh to succeed. He'd make his money whether it did or not. He only needed it to look like it could succeed. He needed to tell a convincing story about the holy grail of the beverage industry and how these fancy consultants and designers could reach it so he could sell his $10 million in stock offerings to Australian, Filipino, and Korean versions of me and Shane. He'd make his millions on the stock, not on the off-brand cola or Dr. Pepper. I couldn't locate him or his company to comment on any of this. If this was his plan, the guys in the factory and the suits at Doblin might never have even known about it. Explanation number three, random circumstance did it in. It turns out there are a lot of ways for a small company with a good idea to fail. Richard Maynes, the charismatic president who came on board in 1996, was, by many accounts, the glue holding Fountain Fresh together. He was from Salt Lake and could talk pipes with the guys in the shop, money with the guys on Wall Street, and theories of branding with the guys at Doblin, all with equal fluency. He was also a devout Mormon, and sometime in the summer of 1997, right around the time Shane and I bought into his company, the Church sent him to do missionary work. Without him at the center, people say, the whole thing blew apart. I ran this notion by Shane. God is not on our side here. God was not on our side. If God is not on your side, how can you expect to make any money in the stock market? Right. We had no idea what we were doing. We had no idea of what we were up against. The Fountain Fresh warehouse at 2030 Redwood Road in Salt Lake City now sits empty. It's on the same lot as a window cleaning company and a small metallurgical factory, but no one at either place seems to remember what used to be in the vacant warehouse next door. Fountain Fresh eventually got folded into another company which went quietly defunct. It still exists on paper, but all that remains, physically, are a bunch of files in a storage locker somewhere in Solana Beach, California. I imagine it doesn't look too different in there than Shane's basement. Alex Blumberg. Act Three, The View From The Mop. Well, so far on our program, we've heard from the middle-class, from the stock-owning class, and now we turn to the people making minimum wage. About seven million Americans work at minimum wage, or near to it, right this minute. Two thirds of those people are not teenagers, by the way. The Federal minimum is $5.15 per hour, which works out to under $11,000 per year. A guy who writes under the pen name Greg Tate wrote a book, which is really nothing more than a year by year account, one vignette after another, of things that happened to him in his minimum wage job as a janitor in a fast food burger place that, in the book, he calls The Burger Store. All names in his book are changed. He worked there for 11 years. Justin Kaufman reads excerpts for us. It's September 7, 1985, my first day of working at The Burger Store as a janitor. The first thing I had to do was clean the stairs. 1987, during August, everybody was trying to get rid of Ward, the store manager. He played favorites. He had Janie Mulder, Candy Rackson, and Samantha Corsman wrapped around his finger because they were good-looking. Bob Hopson was tired of the way Ward was doing things. Some time during August he sent the store office a letter. The letter said, "My co-workers and I have a problem with Ward. He has the good-looking women wrapped around his finger. He does not treat the good workers fair. Whenever the store runs out of product, we tell him right away. He says he's going to order it. Then, as time goes by, we are still out of that certain product. We tell him again, and he gets mad and says, "Why didn't you tell me?" I just feel Ward is not a good store manager. Sincerely, Concerned Employee." Bob had the letter typed, that way no one could detect his handwriting. The first week of June, night shift was leaving trash bags beside the dumpster. Trash bags were supposed to be put inside the dumpster. Brett was pissed. He said he was going to leave a note on the dumpster. I asked him what he was going to write. He said he was going to say, "Hey, you dumb asses. Throw the trash bags in the dumpster." He never got to it, so I wrote that note. The note said, "Hey, you dumb asses. Trash bags go inside the dumpster, not beside it or behind it." The note worked for one night. Night shift caused me one problem the third week of June. Someone punctured a carton of caramel sundae topping. It leaked onto the shelf. The puncture was caused by someone sticking a pen or a pencil into the carton. The puddle of sundae topping was about a foot and a half in diameter. Of course, I had to clean it up. 1988, during the third week of June, Dave, Jaris, and Cody were in the basement having a conversation. Cody was eating a piece of bacon. Dave saw Ward coming downstairs, so Dave went back upstairs. Ward caught Cody eating the bacon. That piece of bacon was going to be thrown away anyway, but according to Burger Store rules, eating expired food is considered stealing. Ward suspended Cody for a week. A few days later, Ken Beaker was on break. He had ordered a cheeseburger. Actually, he was fixing himself a double cheeseburger. Brenda Wiland caught him. She told Ward Ken had paid for a cheeseburger not a double cheeseburger. Ward fired him. Earlier that week, Ward's car got egged. At the same time, Ward was giving Kerry Mullinger a hard time. Well, the night of July 23rd Kerry worked and Ward didn't. Kerry had an idea. Kerry decided he would really get back at Ward. He put on the outside reader board, "Ward sucks." I thought that was so funny along with everybody else. The next morning, Ward found out what Kerry did. I heard Ward say to Mike, "Your job could be at stake if you don't tell me who put that on the reader board." Well, Ward got his information from Mike. He then fired Kerry. A day later, I worked my 10th day in a row. Mark asked me how I was doing. I said, "I'm tired." On November 30th, Kip Durkowitz quit that day. He told Ward that in his office. Ward said, "No. You can't quit. We've got some busy times ahead and we need you." Kip said, "I quit." Ward got mad and said, "You're not quitting." and pushed Kip. Kip, angry, said, "I quit." and punched Ward in the nose. Ward landed in a chair. Ward said to Kip, "You'll never work in Peddleton again." Two days later, Kip was working at the local pizza place. 1989, during the first weekend in August there was a sign in the break room that said certain employees were going to get paid vacations. Well, come to find out, The Burger Store was not going to do that. Jay was pissed and wrote bull-- [BLEEP] on the sign. The sign was taken down the next day. The next weekend, another sign appeared in the break room. This sign said employees should bow down to their managers. The next day, the sign was taken down. During mid-December, Darby was going out Trisha Bayland. About a week later, Trisha no-showed and Darby wrote her down as a no-show. Trisha found out about it and broke up with him. 1990, in mid-June, the restrooms flooded. The drains had been stopped up. I put out of order signs on both restroom doors. Customers were still going in the restrooms. It was obvious they couldn't read English, so I put signs on both restroom doors that said, "Toilettes fermee." That means toilet closed in French. Surprisingly those signs kept the customers out of the restrooms. 1992, in late September, it was 12:45. I was supposed to get off work at 1:00. Celia Brothing comes up to me and says, "Tony said for you to do the dishes right now." That was not my job. I was so pissed off. It was almost 2:00 before I could get off work. When I got home, I grabbed my shirt and ripped it to shreds. It was OK. I had another shirt. During the later part of the first week of April, Carlton Jebbards threw a cup of Dr. Pepper at Lisa Jillard. The next day, Carlton asked Lisa for a date. Lisa, of course, turns him down. About two weeks after Thanksgiving, I did not go on break until 11:00. I got called off my break twice to help them out. I wound up having to get ice for the front counter. You talk about being pissed off. I went downstairs and ripped my shirt to shreds. It was OK. I had another shirt hanging in the break room. In early September, Devon returns to The Burger Store after a year and a half absence. The moment Devon came back, he would act all crazy. Whenever we loaded truck, he would put wrestling moves on boxes. Devon would say, "Hulk Hogan off the ropes. Boot to the head." I remember, one time, Devon power bombed an empty shortening container six times. When the truck driver threw plastic wrapping off the truck, Devon would wad the plastic wrapping up and drop back to pass. He would pass the plastic wrapping to himself, then he would run about 40 yards and say, "Touchdown!" He would sometimes take Leah's hand and start dancing with her. While he was dancing with Leah, he would sing Strangers in the Night. Devon had me laughing so hard I practically had tears in my eyes. There was never a dull moment when Devon was around. A few days later, Dobey and I got to talking. He said he had heard of me. I told him I had been at The Burger Store for nine years too long. He said, "No, you haven't." I said, "Oh, yes, I have." He said, "No, you haven't." I, angry, said, "Oh, yes I have." He said nothing else. 1995, in May, the pipe that had been leaking since 1986 finally got fixed. Before I get to my last day, I would like to tell you all the things that happened over the years, over, and over, again. Night shift would always wash the grill towels and the regular towels together. That was a no-no. Wayne would continue to drop things. He would make mess after mess. Sometimes he was called butter fingers. Certain people got away with certain things. A lot of times Judd would stand out at the back sidewalk. He would drink coffee and smoke a cigarette. I know he made $9 or $10 an hour. One time I said to myself I wish I had a job like that. My last day, June 12th, was finally here. Everything went really well that day, although Eva said something to me that I didn't like. She said, "Greg, I think you're making a mistake by quitting." I told her the mistake would be for me to stay here. I was getting nowhere working at The Burger Store. 1:00pm arrived. It was the end of an era. The sad thing was, when I left, I was only making $5.85 an hour. About two weeks after I quit, The Burger Store started hiring people at $6 an hour. A few people said that my quitting had nothing to do with Mark starting people at $6 an hour. My quitting had everything to do with it. Mark would never pay me $6 an hour even after I had been there 11 years, 9 months and 5 days. The book is titled, 11 Years, 9 Months and 5 Days. Justin Kaufman read excerpts for us. The author goes under the pen name, Greg Tate. This book was self-published on xlibris.com. He now works as a janitor and maintenance worker at an elementary school. He makes almost twice as much as he did before, though he says the politics of the school are as tough as at The Burger Store. Well, our program was produced today by Wendy Dorr and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Dave Kestenbaum, and Starlee Kine. Senior Producer: Julie Snyder. Production help from Katie O'Donnell, Kelsey Dilts, and Todd Bachmann. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for free or buy CDs of them. Or you know 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 by Torey Malatia. We all asked him if we could have this weekend off, work five days this week instead of seven. His reply. You're not willing to work? I don't know anything to call that but lazy. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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It's This American Life from WBEZ Chicago distributed by Public Radio International. A couple weeks ago, one of the producers of our show, our senior producer Julie Snyder, was out with a bunch of friends. And they ended up in a conversation where they stumbled on this thing that had happened to all of them, though they never realized how universal it was. For all of them, back they were kids, back in the '80s, their parents got divorced and then remarried. And they all agreed the re-marriage was way harder than the divorce. Divorce had come out of nothing. There had been enough literature about the whole thing and enough books about everything that was like here's how to talk to your kids about divorce. I mean, so much so that we all even had the exact-- I mean everyone had the same vocabulary about it. Number one being it's not your fault. And number two being that we love you more than anything. Mommy and daddy still love you, and you're the most important thing. Yeah, yeah, we know you love us, yeah. I mean, I remember even, I got told so many times that it's not your fault that it just started freaking me out after a while. I started thinking like, it never even occurred to me that this was my fault. And, after being told so much, I started thinking, like, really? Maybe this is my fault. And in comparison, when the new husband, the new wife showed up, there hadn't been books about that. People didn't know what to do with that. Apparently there were not books about that, because we were all definitely the Guinea pigs for the re-marriages. And it was sort of like chaos. Everyone sort of had different stories that were just remarkable to tell. I understand that it's a really difficult thing to go through. And all of us have a lot of sympathy for our parents in this situation, and that they were trying to figure it out as they went along. But the mistakes that were made were so egregious in some situations. Like for example? Like one of the girls said that her dad's secretary, all of a sudden, one morning, she woke up and came into the kitchen and saw her dad's secretary standing there. And then she called her Mrs. Smith, as she always referred to her, and then the woman said to her, no, now you call me mommy. Sure, I guess so. I tend to call random women, standing at the kitchen sink in the morning, mommy. So why not? Mommy, the name that carries more meaning than anything for a child. I will grant you that name, congratulations. Yeah, this is not traumatizing for me whatsoever. How long after the parents are re-married, how long do people say that it took before the new person seemed like something other than an invading army? I actually think that for a lot of people it took for them going away, moving out of the house. So it could be like a decade? It could be, like literally, until they were done growing up? Sure, yeah, probably until they are about 18. They never they really accepted their hearts like, this is our new family, this is the new person in our family? I don't think so. I don't think fully. There's a level of where, obviously, you accept reality. But when you're sort of being occupied, it's pretty hard to understand that they want love for you or that they feel love for you. It's a lot about just trying to get used to their relationship with your parent. It's very hard to figure out where you are in the priority list. Oh right, of course, because one of the things that they are, is not just your new parent, but they're basically a competitor for your other parent. In the most literal way. For time, and affection, and energy, and for being a priority, and everything, you really are competing. It's not the divorce that kills you, it's the re-marriage. Just like it's not the war that's so difficult sometimes, it's the reconstruction after-- trying to build something new, trying to put a new regime in place, even if the old regime wasn't so great. New people are jockeying for power. It's unclear who gets what, who'll get their way on a 1,000 little issues. It's hard even if everybody really wants it to go well. Was your step-dad the kind of person who launched like a hearts and minds campaign to win you all over and be super sweet to you, and do stuff with you and all that? Yeah, he did launch a whole campaign. One of the things he did, which we all really enjoyed, was that he got us HBO. And he did away with the whole, you can't see R-movies until you're 16. Brilliant. Yeah, and that I have to say, that went over big. And, oh, he cussed in front of us, which we all enjoyed. I really love my step-dad. And there were mistakes made, but they really did a lot to reassure me, and he did a lot to love me and to provide for me. I sort of feel like, maybe I even got the best you could expect. And I still would probably say, it was the most traumatizing experience of growing up. And you still didn't accept him until you moved out? Not really, yeah. Well today in our program, regime change. Like charity, regime change begins at home. We have three stories of the new people coming in, shaking things up, doing things their way. Forget about doing it in a foreign country with over 20 million people who don't speak your language and share your religion, even in the smallest possible setting, it's daunting. Our program today in three acts, act one, unconquerable. In that act, the story of that one store, that one place on the corner. You know what I'm talking about. Every neighborhood has one. Where the new owners come and go. New businesses come and go. And none of them can make it work, none of them can make a profit or stay very long. Act two, or give me death. The story of a political party that wants to take over a state, impose their will on the locals, and what happens when they show up in a state that they're thinking of conquering, Vermont, and meet the natives for the very first time. Act three, the heart is a lonely junta. The story of a man reluctant to accept a very, very local regime change. Stay with us. Act one-- unconquerable. There's this storefront in Washington DC, it's got location, location, and location. The neighborhood is gentrifying. Property values are high. There's lots of money everywhere. It's right by a bus stop. It's 10 minutes from the subway in the most densely populated neighborhood of the city, a place called Adams Morgan. By all rights, it should succeed. Yet every business that goes in there fails. Like some colonial country that throws off every conquering nation that tries to take it. Katie Davis has lived a block away from that storefront since she was 10 years old and decided, once and for all, she was going to look into it. Everybody in the neighborhood talks about it. What's wrong with 1801 Columbia road? It's weird. The storefront straddles the biggest intersection we've got with huge wraparound windows. But they're always dark. Eight businesses have tried this space in 35 years, eight. In 1968 there was Eddie Leonard's-- incredible steak and cheese sandwiches. Then-- Al bought it from Eddie. Eddie was getting old then. And it became Al's Supreme, exact same menu. Very, very greasy. Next, the Long John Silver's opened and never did well. Fish was not the appealing food at the time. So for a while, it was a Latino disco with pink walls and mirrors And then a place called Cosmos. God knows what it was. It was awful. And here it gets a little fuzzy. No one can remember the name of the next place. OK, we had-- it's some kind of grill? Then there was a Boston Market, and a kebab place that never took. And finally, a Chinese restaurant tried its luck. I don't think we could ever figure out what exactly the name was. Restaurant Number One or something like that maybe? Chinese Restaurant Number One is what the sign said. But they took it down. And after again and again that doesn't make it, why? I went to see the old-timers about the store, people who've been here forever. Mr George Dravillas holds court in the wood paneled real estate office he opened in 1953, just a half block from the storefront in question. Mr. Dravillas fingers through a withered school notebook pasted with tiny, I mean, minuscule real estate ads that go back decades. He's had his name on at least half the leases and deeds in the neighborhood, but Mr. Dravillas has never handled any transaction at 1801 Columbia Road. He has a simple explanation for why any business there is doomed. The corner door is the bad thing. They don't want to go through the corner door. I don't know why. I suggest that to open two stores and close the corner, then we'll have success. But they don't listen. Constantine Stavropoulos has a different theory. He owns two successful restaurants in the neighborhood, and he's the head of our business association. When Constantine arrived five years ago, the neighborhood myth was that there was no daytime business. And then he opened his coffee shop, Tryst. People sat on the lumpy sofas and made it a hang-out. Pretty soon, Constantine opened a 24-hour diner just two doors down, same whomping success. So the guy has instincts along with his MBA. And when Constantine had a chance to open his diner at 1801 Columbia Road, those instincts told him, stay away. 1801 only looks like a good location, he says. Really, it's a mirage. People are at that intersection but never on that corner. It might be, I don't know, crowd dynamics or something that sort of get people into this thinking that they don't want to hike across the street and go over there. So in a way, it's like this little island. You can see it, but it's a question of just getting to it. At this point, it might help if you picture the corner. 18th and Columbia Road has wide roomy streets and bus stops on three sides. There's a bank and a McDonald's that's always busy. To the south, there are 60 businesses crammed into the first and second floors. All of this feeds into the intersection. Just a few steps to the north, though, all retail stops, taken over by somber row-homes, a dead zone merging into dead space. Which brings us to the whole chicken and egg problem of how to explain this corner. Do businesses fail because there's no foot traffic? Or is there no foot traffic because the businesses are crummy? Gee, is it warm enough for you out there? Mention the failed storefront to Sid Drazin at Comet Liquor and Deli and be prepared to stick around for a while as he launches into his business-according-to-Sid talk. He paces behind the register, lecturing, ringing up a turkey on rye. He says, remember the guys who leased the storefront back in 1995 and opened a Boston Market franchise? They were sure roasted chicken would draw a crowd. They sat in my place six months before they did it and asked me my opinion. I told him they were crazy if they opened it up. And they continued to tell me there's 15,000 cars go by there every day. There's close to 4,000 or 5,000 people walking around in the neighborhood. They'd have to get 5%, maybe 1%, but they'd do enough. And I looked at them, and I said, have you ever been in business, gentlemen? And they said, no, we're MBA's. And when we have that much traffic going by and so forth, we have to calculate that's enough to make our payroll and everything else. I said, OK, you want to throw your money away, be my guest. The Boston Market guys didn't listen to him. Sid's been four doors down from the corner for 22 years, and they didn't listen. They opened and folded after two years and two months. As we talk about this, Sid sighs, over and over. Look, he says, the only way you'll draw people to that store is if you make it a designated corner. Designated means that it's a item that people need and will go to regardless of where it's at. If it's a good cleaner, I don't care where it is. They'll stop go in and get out. If it's a drug store, has good prices, service, and what they need, they'll go to it. If it's a shoe store, a shoe repair, which is none in the area, everybody needs it. Let me take one of those. Here's the problem with shoe repair. The rent at 1801 is about $10,000 a month. High for the neighborhood, but not unheard of. Shoe makers charge $25 for a new leather sole. You'd have to have 400 come in every month with an old shoe just to make the rent, not to mention taxes, insurance, and a couple of employees. Or you'd have to do what Sid does at Comet Liquor and Deli. There's nothing in the store you can't get at other places in the neighborhood. He sells bagels to the yuppies, truffles to old ladies, and pint-sized bottles of vodka to the guys who drink on the corner. And there's a copy machine that's broken most of the time. It's a store held together by sheer force of personality. People come for Sid. The thing of it is, it is a designated spot in the community. I made it such. In other words, if you're there as a person, and you take the community into your bosom or so-called hands, or you are willing to join the community and be part of it? Then it becomes a designated thing. The bosom theory makes sense to Mary Godwin, although she differs on what it takes to hold the community close. She says, she used to march into 1801 Columbia Road and tell the owner. Get a bar in here. You don't remember. He didn't even have a bar in there. You can't make it around here without a bar. I really think so. I say, yeah, you got to have a bar around this neighborhood. Mary was a neighborhood star back in the 1950's when she was a champion roller skater, and then tended bar down at Millie & Al's. Mary always wanted to own a pub with regulars. She always wanted to put it at 1801, but whenever it came up for lease, she never had the cash. If only though, if only Mary had gotten that lease, her husband Tony would have worked the door. They would have called it Bailey's. I told Tony, I guarantee you, if you and I had go that place some time ago, it would've been the neighborhood bar. At that time, the people we knew, and the people that would follow Mary and come and listen to me with my stories, we would have been successful. But them people are dead or have moved on. It's a different generation. I'm not into the college set. I'm from the coal mines, and Mary's a skater and a waitress. There was a time that storefront flourished. It was in the early 1970's when it was Eddie Leonard's, a sandwich shop owned by an ex-boxer. Guys, you had lines out the door, sometimes, at 3:00 in the morning. I never saw lines out the door, but I was at home being 12. I know my mom went there after bar-hopping. My friend, Reggie, had a few years on me, and he made 1801 Columbia Road home base, ordering a $0.10 Coke and hanging out for hours on the orange plastic chairs. He says, by 3:00 in the morning, everyone in the place was drunk, high, or trying to get high. Because on 18th Street, you had the Showboat Lounge, and you had Manuel's nightclub. You're always going to get a good show around closing time, because whenever the bars close, people get hungry. Back then 1801 was a destination, an open house for the neighborhood. Women clicked through the door in their heels, Afros and beehives jutting up. Men in popcorn shirts and platform shoes, gamblers, bouncers, dancers, they all came in. Reggie says that the night pizza-man at 1801 was a 17 year old everyone called by his childhood nickname, Stinky. Stinky was weird. Stinky was, I guess, what you would call a nerd now-a-days, when we were kids. He was one of those people who wanted to be a gangster but always got caught. No one said this to Stinky's face though. He was six foot five, 230 pounds and already hard from 22 juvenile arrests and reform school. People steered clear of Stinky. He carried a gun, and he robbed people, sometimes a half block from that corner where he worked. When they finally caught him, they charged him with 69 crimes. So he was busy in this neighborhood, in this neighborhood alone. And what happened was, apparently he robbed this woman in the Mews, Kalorama Mews, those townhomes. And she wasn't that old, and she knew karate, and she tried to use it on him. And he shot her a couple times in the face, and, I believe, he stabbed her, but she didn't die. Matter of fact, she drew-- she must have been an artist-- she drew the wanted poster. And they posted them all around the neighborhood. And he wasn't the brightest guy in the world. He had this one particular outfit, a green leather jacket, I think, a brown leather baseball cap that he would wear whenever he'd commit crimes. And everybody in the neighborhood knew it, because they posted what he'd had on. And everybody knew it was him. In the end, the building gave Stinky up. He stood right in the windows of 1801 twirling pizzas wearing that baseball cap. Police made the connection, and stinky got 37 years to life. Just a couple years later when the sandwich shop closed, the string of failures started. Even people who don't know the real story will tell you, a murderer worked there, and that's what went wrong. The local weekly once wrote a story about the corner and headlined it, "The Curse of Stinky." Nearly everyone I spoke with eventually got around to the idea of a curse. Here's Mr. Dravillas when he was trying to explain the problem with the door at 1801 Columbia Road. Explain to me, what's the problem with the corner? Curse-- the door. Or here's Mark Winstead checking a rim up the block at City Bikes. There's some voodoo going on. It's like the Bermuda Triangle of small business. And this is Pat Patrick, another big real estate broker. That is just a damning site. It's all there is to it. A damning site? Well, yeah, it's jinxed. On the other hand, maybe for a neighborhood to be in balance there has to be an accursed storefront, the one corner that everyone rolls their eyes at, the problem child. It brings people together, and it gives us something we can all agree on. So Starbucks, that's the latest. Starbucks signed a lease at 1801. They're going to load in a bunch of Sumatra beans and Kenyan blend, put cushy chairs in the windows and offer wireless access. How, you might wonder, how can 1801 Columbia Road trip up Starbucks? They've got 4,000 stores. They've got to have the formula down pat, know exactly what makes people walk in and order a Frappuccino. All you can have to do is stand here and know. It's 11:30 and it's packed. Starbucks regional marketing director, Shannon Jones, stands in the doorway of 1801. She offers the track record. Starbucks has 35 stores in Washington DC and has never closed one. We've been looking at Adams Morgan for two and a half plus years, trying to get the right space here for the neighborhood. And finally, the stars aligned, and we were able to get the this great space on the corner. She says this, and I want to say, which stars are you talking about? Think about it though. Starbucks has a product that's physically addictive, and enough money to wait forever for the store to turn a profit. The neighborhood's full of office workers, freelancers, dot-commers, and consultants. Shannon Jones says, what ruins other businesses is often what works for Starbucks. Take the lack of parking, not a problem. It's amazing, the way that people, even when they're in their car, will find a way to get in to Starbucks and get their drinks. So what we really look for is also a great storefront. I want to run a couple of theories by you for why previous tenants haven't worked. And one is, we're standing right under it. There is one realtor in the neighborhood who thinks that the door should be moved. Absolutely not. One of our busiest stores in Washington is Liberty Place, and it has, literally, the same kind of entrance. It's kind of on a corner, kind of tucked in, and, literally, that store is probably no more than a 1,000 square feet, and the volume that it does. In terms of the entrance, definitely, we're excited about where this entrance is, and where it sits, because, I mean, it looks out on the entire neighborhood. So this was one thing we knew we didn't want to change. Another theory is that this is sort of an island, and you can't get people to cross over for some reason. No one can really explain why it's an island, but I wonder what you think about that? I think again that people want to come into Starbucks, which is great. People need their coffee, and they'll cross streets for it. And then the last one is this. When some people have tried to explain to me why other people haven't made it, they just flat out say, well, I think the place is jinxed. I think there's a curse. So what do you say to them? I actually say-- and it's funny, because we've heard all of these things too-- and we're here to stay. And I think everybody will be happy to see us here when we're celebrating our 20th anniversary in Washington. At the end of the interview, I have to say I'm sold. Starbucks will be the one that makes it. When I float this, Pat the realtor predicts Starbucks will last 13 months, no longer. And Sid, well, Sid can't help himself. He just double, double dares them to try. Nobody's been in there for a long period of time. Boston Market went running real quick. Long John Silver's disappeared. What do you think, those people don't know what business is, that Starbucks knows everything? OK, we'll find out. Let them have it, and we'll watch them go into the ground. The truth is though, many people will cross their fingers for the new Starbucks. They've been waiting for someone to light up those windows. Because as entertaining as it is to project all this drama onto that corner, it would be a relief to see someone figure out what works there. Every time it goes dark, you get this feeling that the dead space is gaining power. That it's swallowing up projects, life savings, and dreams. You start to use the other side of the street. Katie Davis in Washington DC. Coming up, casing the state of Vermont before you try to take it all. 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 show, regime change in everyday life. Stories of the new people coming in, taking over, full of hubris. And how hard it is to win over the locals even in the most mundane of settings. We've arrived at act two of our program, act two, or give me death. Libertarians, you've probably heard of them, right? Maybe you aren't exactly sure what they stand for. All right, here is a short list: no gun laws, no restrictions on drug use, no income tax. And I'll say that one again, no taxes. They'd like to make government as small as humanly possible. Maybe you also know, they almost never get elected to office, any office. Last year a guy named Jason Sorens came up with a plan to remedy that. His plan, gather up some 20,000 libertarians, move to a state, a small state, vote the friends into office, and then slowly take over. Sarah Koenig got herself invited to a recruiting meeting of The Free State Project. The meeting was in College Park, Maryland at a restaurant designed to look like a French farmhouse. About 35 people were waiting for Jason to arrive. I thought they were going to be sort of like republicans, only more so but that wasn't quite it. There was something at once bookish and eager about them, like people in love with an idea and happy to chat about it if you show the least amount of interest. This is Nixie Chesnovitch. She looks nothing like my libertarian stereotype. She's young and hip and has cropped purple hair. I often think about what it must have been like for the founders of this nation. They were trying a very radical sort of idea. When they signed the Declaration of Independence they thought they were signing away their lives, and yet they did it. You got tears in your eyes when you were talking about the founding fathers. I guess-- I think it's kind of egotistical to say that I think about The Free State Project that way, that I am founding a whole new nation. But I do think that we are carrying on the founder's dreams. They said that if you see tyranny, you have to do something about that. Here's a Republic if you can keep it. Tyranny might sound a bit extreme coming from these people; they hardly seem oppressed. They have multiple degrees, good jobs, some with the government, families, and they like where they live. So what's their big complaint? It's not only that there are too many tax laws and too many gun laws. There are too many laws period. They all have this injured feeling that it wasn't supposed to be this way. As if the promise of American freedom born in 1776 was made to them personally, and 227 years later everyone but them has forgotten. I can't tell if I'm breaking a law. It has gotten to the point where there's so many laws on the books that by carrying a simple lock-blade knife in some states, which is a common accouterment where I'm from, it's something you just have. She's from rural Tennessee. That is illegal in some states. I mean, it's illegal to carry pliers in your pocket in Texas, I learned last night. It's just ridiculous. Jason Sorens arrives. It turns out the leader of this revolution is 26 years old and looks about 19. He's wearing a white turtleneck, pale-blue jeans, and resembles a dark-haired Macaulay Culkin. I wonder if maybe this is all part of some experiment for his doctorate, which he is getting in political science at Yale. It isn't. He stands in front of the gathering while they order food-- mostly burgers and curly fries-- and lays out the plan. Thanks Steve, and it's good to see you all here. For those of you not completely familiar with the Free State Project, we're circulating a statement of intent, basically saying that you agree to move to a single state of the US. Once 20,000 people sign up, the move begins. And there is a five year period in which to move. Hearing him talk, you feel not so much as if you're in the presence of a political rabble browser, but a supremely intelligent and gentle rabbit. The initial goals of the Free State Project, he tells them, would be to get rid of taxes, privatize all public schools, and abolish eminent domain and zoning laws. He thinks the 20,000 and their allies could start to win local elections by the year 2010. By 2020 they'd have state offices. A governor and a sympathetic state supreme court by about 2025. The project is about freedom, so bigots and homophobes need not sign up. And yes, they have a mascot. A cartoon porcupine because Jason says, it's cute and not aggressive, but you wouldn't want to mess with it. Later Jason tells me how it all started. Libertarians have been derisively called the party of 2%, because there's so few of them. Jason thought, well there are fifty states, each is 2% of the Union, why not all move to one? Well, I wrote this essay for The Libertarian Enterprise, which is an online journal, and I submitted it to the editor, and he was really excited about it and thought it was really good. I said, oh, maybe this idea isn't so bad after all her. And he decided to publish it. The next day I had gotten probably 60 or 70 email messages. And they kept coming in the days after that. About 200 total saying, let's do this. Let's do this project. Libertarians have tried other projects, some have sounded like sci-fi: a long term rental of a valley in Somalia, or building a city on pylons somewhere off the coast of Honduras. By comparison Jason's plan seems eminently sensible. Before he knew it , he was in charge of a somewhat ragtag internet movement, one he now works on practically full-time. The website, which Jason created, includes statistical analyses of each state under consideration. Prospective members learn encouraging facts like that the cheapest place to mount a political campaign is North Dakota, and that Alaska has the lowest state and local taxes. The government has treated the Constitution like a dirty rag, basically. There was a time when it was clear that the government didn't have any role in education, social security, or crime control. That's a state matter, not for the federal government. And now the federal government does all those things. I've never had anyone adequately explain to me why we needed an amendment for alcohol prohibition, yet drug prohibition requires no such amendment. The government simply does it, and there is no constitutional grounds for opposing it, apparently. Jason's not like anybody I've ever met. He's so steeped in theory that even when the tape recorder isn't rolling it's hard to get him to talk like an ordinary person, like someone who isn't say, actually participating in the Constitutional Convention. But no one at the meeting seems fazed by this. Maybe it's just his elegant posture and impossibly clear skin, but Jason has this quiet charisma. He seems selfless, and so completely motivated by his idea that when you're around him, you wonder if this is someone you'll talk about some day and say, I met him when he was 26, before anyone had heard of him. People ask him questions about his favorite state on the list, but as the leader, he demurs. One guy asks about states with long coastlines and the s-word. And for a minute I have no idea what he's talking about. Wouldn't it be kind of easier to do the s-word with a state like Delaware or somebody like that or even Alaska, rather than something like Wyoming, because it's kind of hardest if they decided to close airspace. You're not going to get anybody in or out, that kind of thing. Then I realize he's talking about secession. Consider this, more than 3,000 people have already pledged to move. When the list reaches 5,000, they'll choose a destination from the 10 states. Jason expects that to happen this year. One of the candidate states is Vermont. Yes, Vermont, the only state that elected a socialist to Congress. Jason gets invited to Vermont to talk to a property-rights group about his project, and I go along. We pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America-- It's in a Best Western conference room in the town of Waterbury. About 40 people show up, mostly conservative Republicans wearing sensible winter boots and carrying mugs of coffee from home. This is a good crowd for him. What he calls, liberty friendly. We learned that adding 20,000 people to the state could actually swing some local races. The only libertarian in the state legislature just lost reelection by 127 votes. David McCullough is an eighth generation Vermonter, and a former state rep. Vermont is still small. 600,000 people and like 220,000 don't vote. And when they don't vote, they're yours baby in politics. People are sheep, that's my opinion. They're interested in the football game. In Rome, they had the gladiators. It's the same, exact thing. You talk, I don't do politics, I just do football. I don't do politics, I just do snow-machining. I don't do politics, I'm just into arm-wrestling or whatever. We took a quick poll of the room. About five people said they'd be interested in signing up for the project. One of them is Bill Sayre, a lobbyist for the forestry industry and a dead ringer for Ted Koppel. He tells Jason how encouraging it is to see someone so young with such promising new ideas about liberty. And then he signs the pledge. So I'd be happy to, and I will do so right now. What does the statement say? It says, I hereby state my solemn intent to move to a state in the United States designated by a vote of the Free State Project. It could happen, people at the meeting tell us. It happened before. And then they talk about the so-called liberal takeover of Vermont. Back in the '70s, the demographics of the state began changing. Outsiders were moving in, a mixture of city-people, and hippies, and back-to-the-land types. And they were liberals. They elected other liberals to office, and left-leaning state policy followed. Vermont is now the only state to legalize civil unions of gays and lesbians for instance. And the explanation that made the most sense to a lot of people was that there had been a conspiracy. Almost everyone we talked to brings it up. They mentioned, darkly, an article in Playboy magazine that supposedly incited the movement. The article exists, April 1972. A writer named Richard Pollak found two students at Yale, Jason's school, who proposed moving all the like-minded anti-war liberals to one state, basically Jason's plan plus hippies. None of our interviewees had actually ever met anyone who'd crossed state lines because of Playboy magazine. Still if liberals could take over Vermont, why not libertarians? The next morning we drive to Burlington to have breakfast with the mayor, Peter Clavelle, a Democrat. I notice, a little warily, that the mayor has actually prepared for this meeting by reading the Free State Project website. He's printed out a copy of Jason's essay called "Vermont Report" and highlighted various phrases like hippie-takeover. The mayor orders an omelet, and we ask him to draw a map of Vermont showing where Jason might get support for the project. [INAUDIBLE] Vermont that's a little bit like this. And then fitting nicely into Vermont is New Hampshire, which is like so. And here's the Connecticut River. And I think, in terms of building this libertarian stronghold, the best bet might be to cross the river, "Live free or die," state. And so it begins. They start debating drugs, housing, taxes, and the big one, public schools. Jason wants to eliminate them. He explains, that since taxes would be next to nothing in libertarian Vermont, people could afford to pay tuition or home-school their kids. The mayor doesn't buy it. That's fine, but how about those in our society that are less advantaged, our low and moderate income citizens, others that are vulnerable, seniors, people with physical and mental disabilities? I think if we embraced, wholesale, the libertarian philosophy, I think a lot of those folks would be left behind. I haven't heard much discussion as to how their needs and issues would be met in this utopian society. Then Jason does something I've never seen him do. He drops the economic theory and tells a personal anecdote. It occurs to me, this is the first time he's ever been in a situation where he had to persuade nonbelievers, liberals, or people who just don't care. Well, I think my own views on that come partly from my own experience. Because I did grow up in a single-parent family, sort of at the poverty-line, four kids. I was the oldest of four. And my mom didn't believe in taking government subsidies or anything. We did kind of rely on charities for a while, and she eventually got a job at a private school. So we were able to go to the private school for free, basically. The public school he went to was terrible, Jason says. The private school was good. So disadvantaged kids like he was might be better off without public schools, which he considers a state-run monopoly. Pretty soon, the mayor has to go to church, and Jason talks to other people in the diner. For about 20 minutes Jason debates with one guy, who keeps saying he just can't see how it would all work. Well, you're backpedalling. I mean, a moment ago you wanted private schools, and now you're willing to settle for just repealing Act 60. Right, repealing Act 60 would just be a first step. By the end of it, Jason has held his own, but he's sweating. Several people we meet warn Jason about the logistical problems his plan would invite. Among them is Anthony Pollina. He's a Progressive who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor last year. You'll find, if you were to live here, that it's very difficult to change the Vermont Constitution, actually, on a practical level. Which is just something that you might want to keep in mind. It takes about eight years. Then there's the car situation. What this movement would represent to Vermont is a major problem with adequate parking. It simply would overburden the system. And we are talking about a state, largest city in the state has 30,000 people. So that would certainly represent a major influx of people. And while their intentions may be the best, their strategy of saying that we will bring this large number of people to Vermont tells me two things. They don't understand Vermont, because Vermonters will react very negatively to that, I believe. And secondly, that it actually will present a very practical burden to the state of Vermont. Which, if nothing else, will generate a lot of resentment from Vermonters. When we leave, Jason seems downcast by what he's heard. I mean, I don't care if Massachusetts goes communist or Utah goes fascist or whatever. They can do that if they want, so long as they maintain a democratic system. I'm just looking for a place where I and others like me can settle down and have something to call our own. I mean, the problem is, is that other people already call it their own. We've built this up in a certain way, because this is the way we like it. And, essentially, who are you to try to undermine that or try to change that? And aren't you going to run into that wherever you go? Well, we'll run into a little bit of that wherever we go, but I also think we should be given a chance. Do you feel a little bit homeless? Yeah. I mean, I've lived in a variety of places, and that is part of the reason. I never really had that kind of a place growing up that I could say was my home. So I feel kind of homeless. I think a lot of other people do simply because of their views, they don't feel at home where they are. We walk around downtown Burlington, and I ask Jason to give me a tour. I tell him to pretend it's the year 2050 and libertarians have been in control for 30 years. I want to know what will be different. So what's that seal up there? We're looking at city hall. Well, city hall would probably still be a government building. You probably still need one. It might be smaller. Or we could probably just rent space for our meeting every month or so on the third story of this corner building or something like that. So would you sell city hall? Yeah, if we're able to do that, yeah. He tells me private companies would pick up the cigarette butts and styrofoam cups from the streets. On Sundays you could buy scotch and visit a brothel. Roads would also be owned by private companies, which would set speed limits and solicit billboard advertising. Zoning would disappear, so McDonald's could open up next to your house, which you could paint any color you wanted. And everyone has more money, because no one pays taxes. We cross a street to a snow covered park. The sign says, City Hall Park, City of Burlington, Department of Parks and Recreation. So we we would be eliminating that department and privatizing this common here. Privatizing the common? But the sign, you didn't finish reading it. That's right. It says, for everyone's enjoyment please no skateboarding, dogs must be leashed, no alcohol or glass bottles. Now, see, after this has been sold off, probably some of those rules would still be there. I think no skateboarding is probably kind of a silly regulation. I think that's just pure prejudice on the part of the city officials. No glass bottles, I mean, come on. That's a bit extreme too. Sort of joking, but I don't think areas like this should be tax funded certainly. It's theft, ultimately. You get something for it. You get a public space where people come together and play chess or eat their lunch. People want to come here. But if they get something from it, then they should be willing to support it in some way without having to be coerced into it, which is really what taxation is. A company buys it, they're not going to keep it as a public park. You don't make money off a public park. So would we have no-- it would be gated. So would there be any public space? Would there be, in the city of Burlington, would we have any public space, purely public space? Purely public space? I don't think so. So this is how Jason wants to live. The free market would dictate everything and not big corporations, he says, since without big government support, they wouldn't exist. But individual business people, free to thrive in a regulation free world. What's a little weird about this vision is not that it's necessarily wrong. After all, the Founding Fathers probably would be shocked at how much power the federal government now has. It's that these fights have already been fought, and the libertarians lost. It's very frustrating, because we're taught when we're young that the American system is an open one, that you can have an influence on, that abides by rules. But it doesn't abide by rules anymore. The government does what it wants. And the courts are in the pocket of the legislature, and we have no recourse. In other words, it's almost like we're facing a monolithic system that is almost irretrievably lost. Jason's hopeful anyway. As he frequently points out, seemingly stranger things have happened in America. Look at the Mormons, they basically took over a state. And there have been other historical migrations-- the pilgrims, freed slaves who fled north after the Civil War. So why not 20,000 libertarians agitated about the state of modern capitalism? Why not a group of people inspired by the anti-federalists Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry? Do you ever imagine yourself having conversations with them? Actually I do imagine myself sort of in their milieu. Yes, I have imagined myself. At the Constitutional Convention or something? Well at the Constitutional Convention or, especially, during the Revolution. Would I have been one of the people who took a stand and joined the Revolution? I think there's a very important question, because, in a lot of ways, you could argue that Americans are now much more oppressed than they were under King George. After all, that was just about a Stamp Tax. And now we have a lot more than that. The problem for Jason is that people were mad about the Stamp Tax. But, it's safe to say, the vast majority of Vermonters are not mad about the fact that they have public parks and public schools and zoning laws. Jason doesn't see this, or if he does, he doesn't mind. After all, if he were the sort of person easily intimidated by rotten odds, he wouldn't be leading this movement. As he's waiting for his flight at the Burlington airport, I ask him whether, after everything he's heard, Vermont has moved up or down on the list of takeover states? He thinks for a second, and then says, cheerfully, up. Sarah Koenig is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Act three, the heart is a lonely junta. So what if you didn't want the regime change? What if you didn't see it coming? Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown found himself in that position in his personal life. He was writing this book-like comic about his love for his girlfriend. If you've seen this, it's these scratchy little drawings, hundreds of pages of them. Here is a typical page. So this is from the first page of a story called "Morning Shower." And in the first panel, we've just woken up. And she says, Teresa says to me, hi. And I say, good morning. In the second panel, I kind of lean over and I'm kissing her, and she's got her arm around my neck again, and her eyes are closed. And the third panel, I'm looking into her eyes and I say, you're pretty. And in the fourth panel, she just kind of smiles back and puts her hand on my cheek. And the next panel, I ask her, hey, do you want to take a shower together? And in the last panel, she smiles and says, OK. Now this is from your book, a novel in pictures and words, called Clumsy. It's 200 pages long, and every page is pretty much some moment of you adoring her. Yeah, yeah. It was kind of intended to be this kind of tribute to the relationship, like a celebration of it. And while I was writing it, we ended up breaking up. So that kind of changed the ending I had planned. Was she when one of your first girlfriends or your first girlfriend? She was my second girlfriend. The only other girlfriend I'd had was a two month long relationship. So it was a new experience. And so how long after you broke up were you still drawing the comic book? About two weeks, two and a half weeks. I just remember a lot of moping, just a lot of being obviously sad. And then drawing 10 pages and then crying afterward. It's not necessarily the best way to get over someone, I guess. So for two and a half weeks, you're basically drawing her face over and over and over again. But, I mean, when you break up with someone aren't you just drawing their face over and over and over again anyway? So it's just like I was doing something instead of sitting there thinking about it. So you've agreed to adapt some of these to read over the radio. I should say to listeners who are listening with children, you do refer to sex, the fact that sex occurs, not with a lot of explicitness. So let's hear it. OK. So this is one of those linchpin stories that anyone with any sense realizes that something is horribly wrong with their relationship. It's called "Cigarette." We're sitting outside in the motel parking lot. Someone asks if anyone else wants a cigarette. "Do you mind if I have one?" Teresa asks me. "You know how I feel," I say, "it's your decision." She smokes, and I go inside the motel room and listen to them through the window talking about drinking and smoking. When she's done, she comes into the room, and my shirt that she's wearing smells like smoke. "I came to see how angry you are with me," she says. "You know I hate smoking," I say. "I don't need you making me feel like an evil person every time I do something," she says. "I gave up smoking weed for you and that's a pretty big thing. I can't hold your hand 24 hours a day, can't kiss you 24 hours a day, can't have sex with you 24 hours a day." I stare at the wall above her head. She sits there calmly with her arms crossed, waiting. After you broke up, what's the strip you wrote immediately after? What's the next one? I think it was this Christmas story. OK, why don't you read that? This is called "Book of Kisses." For Christmas I draw a book of kisses for her. It has drawings of 112 different kisses, soft kisses, French kisses, nibbles on the ear, pecks on the forehead. She wants to open presents right away, and she has me open mine first. I give her the book, and she looks at it and kisses me and hugs me. She looks at it again. "My presents are never as good as yours," she says. Is there a part of going back and drawing and then having these moments which is partly about just figuring out what went wrong? Yeah, only in retrospect, though. Some of the stories that like seem like total foreshadowing we're just like, oh, that was something that I remember happening. I didn't think it was too bad. Then I write the story and then looking back it's like-- everyone that reads Clumsy seems to see it coming, and I just never did. Read more. Toward the end of the book I kind of alternate these horrible foreshadowing stories with the sweetest possible stories that I can I think up. So this is a sweet story. It is called "Stay up Forever." The night before she has to leave to go back to Florida, she's putting her underwear back on. "What are you doing?" I ask. "Putting clothes on." "But it's your last night here. Don't you want to sleep naked with me?" "But if we have sex again," she says, "I'll fall right asleep. And I don't want to sleep. I want to stay up with you forever. I don't want this night to be over." I tell her I don't want her to leave, and I'm glad we met, and 100 other nice things. One day, she'll tell me, she wishes she could remember all of them. There's a lot of really short one-page stories that I thought were just kind of really meaningless and specific to me. But apparently it's all very universal and ordinary. Did friends tell you afterwards though, that these are experiences we've all had? Yeah, I thought, look how unique my experience was. I'm going to write about it. But that's just the opposite. It's amazing how un-extraordinary everything that happened to me is. You're disappointed that it's so universal? Well, not now. I was just surprised, surprised that it was so universal. But, I mean, it was only my second girlfriend too, so it was all new to me. Read another. OK, and this one's called "Bath." The last time we had sex was at an airport hotel. Afterwards, she asked me if I would be too angry if she took a bath alone instead of a shower with me. And I say, "OK." I ask if I can help. "It'll be boring for you," she says. "How could I be bored when you're naked?" She lies back in the tub, and I run soap over her. "That's enough soap," she says. I sit on the toilet seat watching her float there with closed eyes. "I told you this would be boring." "It's not," I say. She holds her nose and slides completely underwater for what seems like a minute. She pops up and pulls the hair out of her eyes. "The water is so soapy, you probably just have to get in the tub, and you'll be clean," she says. She leaves and that's what I do. When I get back to the bedroom her eyes are closed, and she has the covers pulled up. I climb into bed and fall asleep holding both of her hands. Jeffrey Brown, his comic book novel is called Clumsy. It's available at TheHolyConsumption.com. Well our program was produced today by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and Starlee Kine. Senior producer Julie Snyder, David Kestenbaum, Jonathan Goldstein also worked on stories in today's show. Production help from Tom Bachman Katie O'dunn. Katie Davis's story was from her ongoing series, Neighborhood Stories, which gets funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Special thanks today Chris Babcock, Hugh Hamrick, Patricia Pyle and Susan Burton. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. He says that if all those new programs that are now on public radio: Tavis Smiley, On The Media, The Next Big Thing, they want to move into that store on the corner. Go ahead, just go ahead and try. Boston Market went running real quick. Long John Silver's disappeared. What do you think those people don't know what business is? Let them have it. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International
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Alex spoke Russian, lived in Russia for a year, worked with Russian refugees in Chicago for two years. And his Russian teacher thought that he only needed one thing to make his life complete. She thought I needed a Russian girlfriend. She thought that only Russians would be able to stand up to me the way that I needed to be stood up to, or something. I don't know. Our American women are just too soft. I don't know what you-- I truly don't know. But anyway, that's the thought she had. So she kept trying to fix him up with Russian women. And this one night, she had him come out with a whole bunch of people, including this woman Elena, who was going to be his date. And so I meet them for dinner. And we're at the sushi restaurant, and we're all eating, and everybody's telling stories, funny stories. And I'm sitting across from my date. And my Russian teacher is turning to me and saying, you know, tell them this story! Tell them that story! And so then I tell them this story and that story, and everybody's laughing, except for my date. And so we leave the sushi restaurant and we go to this club. And we're all dancing. Like, my Russian teacher's dancing, and all of her friends are dancing, and everybody's sort of like, you know, exchanging partners, and it's sort of this fun scene. And everybody's dancing except for my date, who's just sitting at the table and sort of nursing a drink. And looking--? And looking bored. Really bored. And so, you know, I keep on coming back from the dance floor, and saying, are you sure you don't want to dance? You want to dance? And then she will sort of smile bitterly, and just shake her head, and-- and so then somebody else will drag me out. So finally I come back and I sit down, and I'm sitting next to her, and I'm trying to strike up a conversation. And you know, something about like, I guess you don't like dancing, or something like that. And she sort of looks out at the floor, and there's people having a great time all around. And she sort of like nods her chin towards the floor and she's like, "This is an American dance number." And I drove away thinking, well, that was a horrible date. Like, neither of us enjoyed each other. And that was a disaster, pretty much. Like, we were not going to be seeing each other again. I get to Russian class the next week, and my Russian teacher says, "hey, so are you going to call Elena? She said she had a great time." And I was like, I was floored by that. I was trying to figure out what that could possibly have meant, right? And so I was like sort of mulling it over in my head, because it was really fascinating to me. And I realized that I have a very sort of like clear and perhaps culturally informed idea of what a great date is. And it has to do with the idea of, like, what it means to fall in love. And I realized that in my head, what I think about as a great date is what sort of you see in the movies. Like sort of the "falling in love" montage of the movies. You know, you go on a great date. It often involves a boardwalk. There's a great deal of sort of like, throwing your heads back in laughter. You might chase each other around a tree. There's the splashing of water. Splashing of water is almost always involved. And I think for her, and this is something that I always noticed when I was in Russia, I think that for her, it's totally different thing. In Russia, and in Russian literature, there's a lot of talk about the soul and soulmates. And I think for her, like, falling in love means finding the one person on the planet who understands the misery of life as deeply and fully as you do. And they can talk to you about it. And so when she acted all depressed on their date, she was not actually blowing Alex off like he thought at the time. She was flirting. So Alex decides to ask his Russian teacher about this theory, that Americans and Russians have completely different views of what it means to fall in love. And I have to say, he's a little bit nervous to try this out on her, because he's worried that maybe it's insulting or stereotyping Russians. But he explains the theory to her. And she totally agreed. She was like, that's absolutely right. You're right. And and then she just went on a rant about Americans. And she was like, Americans, they have no understanding of what it's like to fall in love. And like, Americans, I never understand, why do you say, "he makes me laugh?" Why is that so important? "He makes me laugh?" Every American I've ever met, all they say, when you ask them how the relationship is, and they say "he makes me laugh" as if that's the greatest thing in the world? What's so great about "he makes me laugh?" She just, you know, went off on like, something that I have actually said many times. Like, I just want somebody who makes me laugh. Some days seems like every story in the world is the story of cultural misunderstanding. Between people of different countries, Muslims and Christians, blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats, men and women, Spanish speakers and Anglos, adults and children, rich people and poor people. And so today, in this era of misunderstandings abroad and at home, we bring you an hour of stories about what gets lost in translation. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three culture-bridging acts. Act One, The Chasm Between Comedy and Music. In that act, two brave people step into that chasm. Drop into that chasm. However you put it. Act Two, Star of Bethlehem. We bring you the story of the most important, most respected newsman on television in the town of Bethlehem, who does a program that is unlike any news show that you have ever seen. Act Three. Translating For the Very, Very, Very, Very, Very Tall. In which we have, for a change, on our program a story that gets us close to someone so famous that you may have actually heard of him if you follow pro basketball in the tiniest way. Stay with us. Starlee and I talk quite a bit about chops. Comedic chops. Pacing, placement of the zinger. When to employ whimsy and when to employ wit. Chops. Back when we worked in adjoining cubicles, we'd kill time by arguing over what was funny and what wasn't. Blowing cigar smoke in a baby's face? Not funny. A baby smoking a cigar? Funny. We were like Borscht Belt comedians without the borscht, the belt, or the audience. But the fact that we weren't knocking them dead at Grossinger's every night didn't keep us from coming up with titles for our showbiz bios. Starlee's book was going to be called The Woman Behind the Chops, while I intended to call mine Sir Chops-a-Lot. Why, just the other day, I was giving young Starlee a quiz. What's the most important thing in comedy? I asked her. I have to say-- Timing. Chops. So finally, Starlee and I, after years of talking about comedy, actually decided to go out and create comedy. We were going to take it to the stage and tell jokes for an audience at this karaoke bar. We were going to exchange the tweed vestments of the armchair humorologist for the rainbow-striped suspenders of the practitioner. We wanted to see if we had what it took. The karaoke bar is called The Hidden Cove, and it had catalogs of different comedy routines, all from the late '80s, early '90s. Starlee had already looked through them. She decided she was going to do a man-bashing routine called "Men are Perfect-- Jerks." We talked about the proper delivery. Men are perfect. Jerks. How was that? Too deadpan. Like, imagine yourself walking away from the mike and then coming back to the mike, turning your head and saying into the microphone, "Jerks!" OK. Men are perfect-- jerks! That's not bad. I'd give it maybe a little bit more pause. The difference in our comedic approach is vast, as is our approach to life. At the office where Starlee and I used to work together, people whose names she didn't even know would seek her out, bringing her homemade bread, presenting her with souvenirs from their vacations, and even setting aside her favorite caramel taffies from the communal office candy dish. I, on the other hand, had made the effort to learn the names of their children, grandchildren, and in one case, their pet hamster, Mr. Jinglepot. For all of this, I got nothing. Starlee had concerns about the caliber of the jokes on the karaoke machine at the bar, how stale they might be. I explained to her that the material, no matter how cliched or boorish, did not matter. A true humorist, I said, could stand on stage and get laughs while reading an eviction notice. It was all in the delivery. It was all about chops. When we showed up, we learned that The Hidden Cove is a very popular and beloved karaoke bar and it was filled with patrons who came there every week to sing. This was the first week of the Iraq war, and the regulars, just like everyone else, had wanted some diversion, a night away from the news. They took their karaoke very seriously, too. One man was hunched over a tattered notebook that he brought from home in which he had neatly penciled the code numbers of his favorite karaoke songs, row after row of them. As people got on the stage to sing and dance, there was a general feeling of warmth and beery encouragement in the air. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. And when we asked them about the comedy routines on the karaoke machine, no one could recall ever having seen them done. Even the owners of the bar weren't quite sure what we were talking about. We finally found a lone page of comedy karaoke material and we signed up to go on. I was after a woman singing a karaoke classic. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you! My routine was called "My Parents Hated Me." My strategy was to deadpan my way through, following each punchline with my patented hapless look. I tell you. I had one hell of a childhood. I'm not saying my parents didn't love me, but my bath toys were a radio and a toaster. Nothing. Complete joyless silence. Some things just don't translate to the karaoke stage. A karaoke machine, for instance, has no instinct for comedic timing. It just keeps scrolling down at the same pace. This means that sometimes you have to wait for a punchline to a joke for several awkward moments after having delivered the setup. It was messing up my chops. When I got lost, a cop helped me to look for my parents. "Do you think we'll ever find them?" I cried. The cop said, "I don't know. There are so many places they could hide." As I walked off the stage, no one in the audience would meet my gaze. Still, given the circumstances, I didn't think I had done that bad. Next up was Starlee. Hey, how about a little male-bashing? Starlee pulls out all these moves. She shrugs her shoulders as if to say, what can you do? She breaks free of the staccato rhythms of the karaoke screen and makes the material her own. She even does this thing where she points your toes inward to make herself look littler, and thus cuter. She was like a pigeon-toed puppy taking its very first steps. Where's the best place to hide money from a man? Your forehead. She was winning over the crowd and getting laughs. My laughs. They took to her in the same way people in the office did. Thank you! I decided to head back up on stage. I was warmed up and the audience was a little more familiar with my work. Plus, I chose a better routine this time. Earlier I had self-deprecated myself out of laughs. Now, armed with a new selection of material from the karaoke machine, celebrity-bashing jokes from 1992. I hear Cher named her daughter Chastity in memory of her preschool years. Not only were these jokes old and dated, but they were also tasteless and offensive. Did you hear about Roseanne Arnold's new soap opera? Still, I soldiered on, unaware that the grandest failure of timing in the history of comedy was about to unfold. Before I play you this next bit of tape, I should say, in my own defense, that a karaoke screen holds a weird, hypnotic power. You can't help reading whatever rolls down the screen, and you only figure out the meaning of the words you speak as they are tumbling out of your mouth. And then it's too late. I'm going to play you the tape now. Please remember, it's not my fault. Don't judge me. What's the difference between Ted Kennedy and the Iraqi army? Ted Kennedy has at least one confirmed kill. I don't write this stuff! Let me just reiterate. This was during the first week of the Iraq war, and things were not going as easily as America had hoped. American soldiers were dying, and there was no end in sight. A few days earlier or a few days later and my words would not have stung in the same way. It was not even clear what the audience was booing. It was like they just didn't know what else to do. Perhaps they were booing the sheer extraordinary coincidence at all. Here was this leftover joke from the first Gulf War being told for the first time in over a decade, and being told the very week we had gone back to war with the same country. It was like I just delivered a punchline after a ten year pause. Stupidly, I still somehow believed I could redeem myself. Instead, what rolled down the screen next was the second most tasteless joke from 1992. What's Mike Tyson's definition of foreplay? Jesus, that's-- At this point, the owner actually turned off my mike. Thank you! I've always held the greatest gift an entertainer can receive to be laughter that turns into applause. You know, that moment where a wave of laughter climaxes and breaks apart into the kind of appreciative clapping that says to a performer, we can no longer laugh because our sides are hurting with the pain that is too great, so now we will switch to clapping. God bless you, funny wise man. Now, instead of laughter turning into applause, I was experiencing boos turning into applause as I slunk off the stage. There wasn't an aspect of that applause that was sort of-- that they were kind of with me, that they were sort of, hey, you're all right? Like we both just went through a bad situation-- Are you kidding? A little. I mean, because a little, I have to admit that a little bit, I kind of felt like there was sort of sympathetic applause. A little bit. Oh, you're crazy. You're so crazy. I can't believe it. You're in total denial. No, I mean, I just wanted to run that by you. Because I thought maybe that was possible. No. Trust me. They were against you. So I think what this whole experience has taught us is that certain things just don't translate. Really? Yeah. I mean, karaoke is best served for music. I think that's the lesson that we've both learned from this experience. That it's better to stick to, you know, songs and music, like "These Boots are Made for Walking," and leave comedy off the karaoke stage. I would have to say, I disagree. Oh, do you? Comedy translated just fine when I went up. Since karaoke night, I was so pumped up from my success-- Oh really? Yeah. That I thought up some new titles for my book. Do you want to hear them? Uh, sure. OK. My Chops, My Life. Chopzilla, The Chop That Was Heard Around the World, Queen Choptifa-- Is this your idea of a victory lap? I'm funnier than Jonathan. That's nice. The Kid Stays In the Chop, A Chip Off the Old Chopping Block, Li'l Chop, It's Lonely Near the Chop, They Call Me Choppy-- Jonathan Goldstein with Starlee Kine. Or is that the other way around? Because he's translating, Nasser Laham is reporting things that have never been reported in the territories before. Things that in the normal course of events are not even talked about in public. When Yasser Arafat slapped the former head of security for the West Bank, stuck a gun in his face, and said, "I'm going to kill you," Nasser's translation of an Israeli TV report was the only Arabic language broadcast to mention the incident. When an Israeli newspaper published an expose about corruption in the top leadership in Bethlehem, Nasser was the only one who picked the story up, and he broadcast his translation in spite of a flurry of increasingly threatening phone calls from the leaders involved. Soon after, they were all ousted. And even though the story came from a newspaper in Jerusalem, which is only 15 minutes away from Bethlehem, most likely, no one would have heard about it if Nasser hadn't told the story. There is no comparing between the Palestinian newspapers and the Israeli newspapers. Because our newspapers are, I mean, very bad. It's hard. It's hard to take the truth from your enemies, on the Israeli side. Not from the Palestinian leadership. All Palestinian media-- newspapers, radio, television, except for private television stations like Bethlehem TV-- are tightly controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Take the way the Palestinian papers covered the recent power struggle between Arafat and the new prime minister, known as Abu Mazen, whose appointment was supposed to be the first step toward a new peace process. In the period of Abu Mazen government, they didn't include anything about Abu Mazen. They start to search for Saddam Hussein and the SARS. So they were writing about the SARS virus rather than Abu Mazen? Of course, yeah. Why weren't they writing about Abu Mazen? You know. You know, Nancy. I keep the newspapers in my house for the history. To say it in 20, 21, 22 [UNINTELLIGIBLE] when all the newspapers in the world, they talk about Abu Mazen, the Palestinian newspaper, they didn't do that. Whenever there's a suicide bombing of any size in Israel, Israeli TV goes into nonstop crisis coverage, and Bethlehem TV carries this live, with Nasser translating for hours. You see emergency workers running stretchers with burned and bloody people to ambulances. I watched with a translator of my own. You'll hear Nasser's voice in Arabic, then my translator in English. You been at the cafeteria, yes? We were sitting. I heard explosion. And she's talking while she's shivering. Nasser interjects these kind of details when he's translating-- she's shivering as she's talking-- because he wants his viewers to know exactly what's happening. They can't hear her voice shaking, so he tells them. If the Israeli knows what's happening in the Palestinian lands with details, and the Palestinian knows what's happening in the Israeli cities with details, trust me. The decisions would be different. Do you think that watching the coverage of a suicide bombing, do you think it makes Palestinians watching it more sympathetic to Israelis? No. I think that the question is wrong. Your question is wrong. Why? Because they saw before. Big chance they saw. Anyone can open the Israeli television and saw the pictures. But they didn't understand what they are talking in the television with the Hebrew. This is my work. To translate emotions, facts, numbers. In fact, plenty of the details Nasser translates have got to stir outrage rather than sympathy. Nasser's producer told me that one of the reasons Bethlehem TV decided it was important to follow Israel's continuous coverage after a suicide attack is that Israelis speak then without filters. Politicians openly called for what's known as "transfer"-- the removal of all Palestinians from the territories. Ordinary Israelis call for revenge, say the peace process is hopeless because Palestinians are all terrorists. Nasser translates it all without hedging. Palestinians never use the words "terrorist" or "suicide bomber." They say "shahid"-- "martyr." But when Israel TV says terrorist, Nasser does too. I'd wanted to meet Nasser ever since I saw this book he published about Arafat, which is so strange and provocative that it's not in any Palestinian political category so much as orbiting all of them. The cover of the book is red with a picture of Arafat smiling, and the title is The Truth, the Whole Truth About Yasir Arafat, The Man Who's Led Fatah and the PLO for 37 Years. On the back it says, "In this book, I put between the hands of the reader what has never been said before about the man who led one of the greatest and longest liberation movements in the world. With all modesty, I present the reader with information in opposition to what Palestinian, Arabic, Islamic, Western, and Israeli research and study have determined about this man. When you open the book, it's empty. All the pages are blank, except the very first page, where Nasser invites the readers to fill the book with their own opinions. "I'm confident that you'll have something to write," he says "because every person views President Arafat as he wishes." Half the Palestinians I show the book to get really angry. The other half burst out laughing, at least in part due to shock. You just don't see this kind of joke-- an absurdist prank-- in the Territories, where the situation is so dire, where everyone feels like the entire world is against them and their leader. In general, Nasser's sense of humor is pretty dark. One time, he was telling me how much the Arab world hates Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon He offered this prescription for fighting al-Qaeda and achieving world peace. If Sharon supported al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, maybe all the Middle East will be against al-Qaeda. It's a good idea. Try that. Nasser drives to work in the morning in his beat up '84 Opel hatchback, a car so crappy it's like a giant neon sign saying, I am not on the take. He turns on the TV and Israeli army radio and starts looking at the breaking news in Israel over the internet. He lights a cigarette. He smokes all the time and in this way that makes you feel like everyone else who smokes is just messing around. With every drag, he takes all the smoke in in a big gulp. He smokes each one down into the filter is about to melt. I've never seen him eat. Nasser taught himself Hebrew in prison from an Arabic Hebrew dictionary he asked his parents to send him. I should mention that so many Palestinian men have been to prison that it's almost a given, especially men around Nasser's age, 36, who were young activists at university during the first intifada. As soon as he learned Hebrew, he started teaching other prisoners. He's taught it ever since-- to friends, relatives, students, businessmen. It's sort of a compulsion. His crusade to teach and translate Hebrew raises a question. What good is it, in a violent conflict that's been going on for decades, to speak your enemy's language? What can it change? Nasser reads and enjoys Israeli novels. He listens to Israeli pop, has Israeli friends, mostly journalists. He's an idealist. He believes that learning the language of the other side can be the first step toward understanding them, toward peace. A 28 year old named Mohammed with a big, sad face, a guy Nasser taught Hebrew to, tells me this story about being in an Israeli hospital, in a room full of Israeli kids, when he was 16. Mohammed asked the kid in the bed next to him, in Hebrew, "So what are you in for?" "Car accident," the kid said. "And you?" Mohammed said, "I was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier." They asked me, why they shot you? Are you one of the terrorists? Are you Hamas? Are you jihad? And I said, no. I'm not Hamas. I'm not jihad. I'm a student. I go to my school. It wasn't a war. It was nothing. I mean, six in the morning. There was no clashing. No throwing stone. Nothing, nothing. And he was, yeah, I feel, like, sorry. We are sorry. I'm sorry. They said. I told him that you don't have to say sorry because you are not the one who shot me. And he was just, [INAUDIBLE]. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. His mother, because she can every day to come to the hospital. My mother, she can't, because there's a checkpoint. But his a mother, she can come every day. And she was bringing food to me, also. [UNINTELLIGIBLE], food, shaving machine. She brought you a razor? Yeah. She give me her phone number. If you need anything, just call. We are here. They asked me a lot of times to come to visit. And I hope, when I can. Not everyone Nasser taught Hebrew to is so hopeful about it. Nasser taught this guy in prison. He says speaking Hebrew helps if you want to have a personal conversation with an Israeli, gets to know their life. But when it comes to politics, knowing the language doesn't make any difference at all. The same walls are there, just more clearly. Still, if your only two choices or violence or talking, Nasser chooses talking. He and Mohammed are part of a group of people who do training for community leaders in nonviolence and what they call "compassionate listening--" how to listen to someone you really, really disagree with. Nasser is against suicide bombings, feels that the Palestinian people have a right to resist, but that the armed resistance is not working at all. Given all this, given his politics, I was surprised by some of the things I saw on Bethlehem TV. One day there were hours of song celebrating martyrs to the Palestinian cause, including suicide bombers. Another time, I saw an unforgettably baroque video celebrating Saddam Hussein. Picture a plump man in a long, blue tunic smiling, singing, and pumping a machine gun up and down in time to the music. Behind him, a crowd of men in uniform is moving their guns and dancing in time, also. They're holding a large picture of Saddam Hussein in front of them. Then Saddam himself appears onscreen in a fedora, firing a pistol in the air and smiling. Then the Iraqi army is jogging, followed by anti-aircraft guns shooting, and soldiers marching, and tanks moving against the sunset, and mosques, and more of Saddam in the fedora. This was April. The war in Iraq was long over. When I ask Nasser about it, he tells me not everything on the program reflects his own political views. People call and request these videos all the time, so he plays them. But then he also broadcasts stuff they don't request. Look, Nancy. Yesterday I translated all the speech about the Holocaust. And the people asking, why? They are our enemy. I said, we have to know also they are suffering. We have know a lot about the Holocaust. They're surprised, but I know that they trust me, because I was in the Israeli prison six years, because I am living in the [SPEAKING ARABIC] camp, refugee camp, because I am a Muslim, because I am poor, not rich-- they trust me. They said, OK. If you say that, we will know a lot about the Holocaust. By the time he was done, Nasser translated several days of Israel's annual commemoration of the Holocaust. Rest assured this doesn't happen on any other Arabic language station. I spent a day interviewing people around Bethlehem about what they think of the show. It's excellent. He's a good journalist. It's fantastic. It's very good, because they give us the opinion of the people who are in Israel. Almost everyone I talk to watches the program and loves it. People say they do get information there that they can't get anywhere else. One man told me that when the second intifada started, the only way you could find out which Palestinians were wanted by the Israelis and why was by watching Nasser's translation of Israeli TV. Did you ever learn something new about Israelis that you never knew before? Yeah. Like what? That there are some writers or journalists that are on our side of the Palestinian problem-- --against their government. It's good to know that there are Israelis who are with us. I saw a very poor Israeli family in the program of Nasser. You know, they are very bad economically. More than us. They have maybe bread to eat. This was a new thing for us. Bethlehem, where the TV station is, is a dusty, broken down, depressing place. Most businesses are dead or on the ropes. No parks, no pools. In the summer, people often have running water only once a week, or even every two weeks. Israeli army vehicles roll through practically every day, sometimes to demolish a house, and the neighbors pull chairs onto their roofs and sit watching the destruction, since most don't have jobs. There are 12 Israeli settlements within 10 miles of Bethlehem, and they're growing. Nasser told me that when he was at work one day, he looked up at the television and saw his own kids, his 11 year old twins, on TV, throwing stones at Israeli tanks and soldiers. He was alarmed. Kids have been shot and killed throwing stones. He talked to them about it that night. "Why are you throwing stones?" he said. "Because they're the enemy," they told him. "Who told you that?" he asked. "The kids at school," they said. I asked him if he told them to stop throwing stones, and he said of course. Three, four, five times he told them. And then they started lying and saying they hadn't thrown stones when he knew they had. He doesn't know what to do. When he talks to friends, Israeli journalists, on the phone at home, his 11 year old daughter Beirut says, "I heard you talking Hebrew. Don't talk to those people." Nasser has been trying to teach his kids Hebrew, so I interviewed the four of them. None of the kids see learning Hebrew as a bridge to peace the way their dad does. For them it's way more utilitarian. It helps you talk to soldiers, they say. Maybe it can get you out of a bad situation. What words and phrases do you know in Hebrew? [SPEAKING HEBREW] in Hebrew, which is in Arabic [SPEAKING ARABIC], which is soldier. [SPEAKING HEBREW]. Good morning. Please, which is [SPEAKING HEBREW]. [SPEAKING HEBREW], OK. [SPEAKING HEBREW], come here. [SPEAKING HEBREW], dumb. And the baby, [SPEAKING HEBREW]. Why do they know the word for dumb? Beirut's twin brother Marcel, a tiny boy with a large retainer in his mouth, jumps in. The soldiers are saying this to the kids, and the kids are saying this to the soldiers. When I talked to your kids yesterday, they definitely said that the reason that they wanted to know Hebrew was to know the language of the enemy, and-- Yeah, that's right. Does it worry you that your kids aren't getting to meet Israelis at all, and that for them, it is the language of enemy? Of course I am worried. I'm very worried. I'm worried also because they are throwing stones against the Israeli tanks. I'm worried I don't want them to do that. You can imagine. You are sitting in your office writing and worry about them. What if the soldiers shooted them? What can I say? What can I do? How can I live? What can I say to the others if one of them has been killed? They're not just the tanks, the soldiers who are shooting. Why they are not in the same schools? Why? Why they are not in the same pool to swim? My kids don't know the Israeli people. They don't know the kids in Israel. Someone stop that. He takes a drag of his cigarette and smiles. Maybe you can. Try. Nasser speaks Hebrew and he's teaching his kids, but actual Israelis are a world away, and he can't convince his own children, a genuine captive audience, not to hate them. Nancy Updike in Jerusalem. Coming up. Start a show in a karaoke bar, end a show in a karaoke bar. No matter how little it has to do with the last story and the last act, can we do it? Dare we do it? Answer is in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public International when our program continues. My earliest memory of my cousin Colin is fighting with him over a Fernando Valenzuela baseball card. We were both seven years old, both way into sports and pretty competitive. Mainly we'd play basketball. If you ask me, I'm a little bit better than he is. Don't ask him. After graduating from college, Colin headed straight to Taiwan and stayed there for almost three years, just knocking around, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with this life. He took classes, worked a few jobs. He also played a lot of basketball with locals at nearby gyms. This left him with a very specialized, but seemingly a marketable vocabulary. Slam dunk? Weak side defense? In Chinese, I just say the side without the ball. When I caught up with Colin two summers ago, he was working for the US government in a dead end job, translating Chinese documents. He was determined to start being practical. The words "law school" forced their way out of his mouth. You could tell he was hitting the career default button. Then an old friend stepped in. And she had this piece of paper with a job description. "NBA player seeks full-time interpreter. Looking for a native English speaker, fluent in mandarin Chinese, interested in basketball." It was like, yeah, right. Two weeks later, my cousin had made the jump from owning baseball cards to working for one. Sort of. Now, FOX 26 Sports with Keith [? Guggans. Hi again. Yao Ming in Houston for what, 24 hours or so? The hoopla includes plenty of wide eyes and lots of curiosity seekers, as if they'd never seen a 7'6" Chinese millionaire before. It turns out that Colin's new job wasn't with some benchwarming experiment. Yao Ming is the starting center for the Houston Rockets. And if you haven't heard of him, congratulations. You officially know nothing about sports in America. He's the biggest story out of the NBA this year. The first foreigner ever to go number one in the NBA draft. His style of play is supposed to revolutionize the game the same way that Michael Jordan's did. Add to this, he has the hopes and dreams of a billion emerging NBA fans in Asia riding on his shoulders. And Colin met him for the first time the same day the rest of America did. Yao Ming. You know, at the airport at first, there weren't that many people, and all of a sudden, you get this whole lobby. It's just crowded. And the people are surrounding him, and you know, I had to get up and translate right away. He had to give a few brief statements to the crowd. And we had never met. Speaking through interpreter Colin Pine, Ming says he's anxious to get on the court and work on his game with his new teammates. After waiting such a long time, it's like opening a door and having a breath of fresh air. I think my heart was about to burst through my chest. And I'm up there with the lights on me, with Yao Ming sitting next to me, and then-- I've heard of instances of people who had to do translation in situations like that just choking. Just not being able to say anything. I'm floating above the ceiling, looking back at myself doing this. Just for me to get through the first time, I was pretty happy. Fans, it's time to stand up, make some noise, and get ready to meet your Minnesota Timberwolves. Early in the season, I catch up with Colin at a game in Minnesota. My first chance to see his new life from the inside. Yeah, you're right here. We stand in a nondescript concrete hallway near the visiting locker room. Players are walking by, ribbing Colin and smacking him on the ass. Superstars like Glen Rice and Steve Francis, Colin's idol since college. Guys I'm used to seeing on TV. Colin disappears into the Rockets' locker room. A few minutes later, he reappears with his new boss, Yao Ming. Yao is 7'5". Colin's my height, 5'9" in shoes. Yao slouches up against the locker room wall. Colin leans in next to him. A crush of TV cameras, microphones, and notepads descend on the pair. Lots of the reporters are from Asia. Wait! Excuse me. Hey, wait, wait, wait! Excuse me. Let me translate, please. Thank you. It's a month into the season, and media fascination with Yao's story is bigger than anyone imagined. Yao is the only player who reporters want to talk to before and after every game, regardless of how he plays. The questions tend to be the same in every city. Questions about adapting to the NBA and life in America. What do you do in your spare time? Have you sampled the local cuisine? And of course-- Does he see himself as a role model to other Asians in America? For the most part, Yao feeds them straight sports cliche. One day at a time. I'm still learning the game. But every once in a while, he'll give them an answer that leaves reporters scratching their heads. Like this question, when the reporter asks, what's it like to play against Minnesota star Kevin Garnett? He seems like a spider, [INAUDIBLE] Spider? He's got strong arms and strong legs. Spider. [SPEAKING CHINESE] Yeah, like a spider. The bulk of Colin's translating work is just getting Yao through these daily press conferences. Yao speaks enough English to communicate with coaches and players during games and practices, but Colin sits with the team courtside, just in case. You sit right there, behind the bench and the red seats like that? They don't need me that much. So what do you do most of the game? Watch and cheer and try not to say too much. I've got to be careful. I'm a very enthusiastic fan. But I need to maintain a professional demeanor, I suppose. Fast forward two hours. Fourth quarter. Rockets down by six with a few minutes to go. Oh, come on! So much for professional demeanor. Argh! Colin's up out of his seat, looking like he wants a piece of the ref. But if anything, this actually helps him fit in with the team. Here's backup center Kelvin Cato and backup point guard Richie Norris. And it's not just the players who glow about Colin. A Rockets executive tells me that most NBA translators are just linguists with no feeling for the game, but Colin's made it way easier for Yao. Even the press loves him. Sam Smith is a veteran basketball beat writer for the Chicago Sun-Times. Yeah. We're going to go to Burger King right now. Right. Where's his dad? I don't know. Here, talk to Yao Ming. I'm going crazy here. Here's what most of my cousin's glamorous job looks like up close. Usually he and Yao are nowhere near a basketball court. Usually he's not even translating. Right here, Colin is trying to get Yao to the DMV so he can take his driver's test. It's part of Colin's job to be Yao's driving instructor. The problem today is, a National Geographic film crew wants to tag along. Colin can't find Yao's dad, who's also taking the test, and Yao is hungry. Colin literally can't go 10 minutes without having his cell phone ring, and it's never for him. Yao's agents, people from the Rockets, from the press, from the companies Yao endorses, even Yao's parents-- they all get to him through Colin. Hey Angie, it's Colin. I just wanted to find, when is a good time? When am I going to be able to give you this stuff? After the game, or? Like, the tea, and I have something I need to give you, and I think I have a check from Yao Ming or his mother-- Here's something else. Colin lives with Yao in a huge house, in a gated community, in a Houston suburb, together with Yao's mother and father, who keep a tight leash on their 22 year old son. Originally, Colin was supposed have his own place, but the Yaos invited him into the house early in the season. He thought about it and decided it made sense, since he'd be spending almost every minute with Yao anyway. It also felt like, you know, they were being very nice in offering, and I thought I didn't want to offend them by turning them down. But it made sense. It just made a lot of sense. But I mean, I'm 29, and I'm not accustomed to living with a family. Sometimes I think that his mom looks at me as a little kid. I know she worries if I don't eat enough, or you know. And it's really sweet. It's nice. But it's a little strange. It'd be strange to move back in with your own family at 29, let alone a Chinese family you just met, which doesn't speak English, and whose shortest member, Yao's mom, is a half foot taller than you. Colin doesn't like talking about his home life with the Yaos. That's private. So private that he never has anyone over to visit, friends or family. He can't even invite me in for a beer. No, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no. Two days after Yao passes his driving test, I tag along with him and Colin as they head home from practice. They sing along to the radio together. They finish each other's sentences and tease each other in a mixture of English and Chinese. You know, before I met him, I think Colin is maybe 40 years old people. When I saw them, I think, oh, my God. It's a young boy. Maybe younger than me. But I ask him, he say 28. I said, 28? He looks very young! Does Colin have any annoying traits? Does he not clean up his room anything? Does he hog the Nintendo? He can't beat me, so I'm the one who's always hogging it. Their bond has been formed through an intense mutual experience. The world of the NBA is foreign to both of them. There were lots of times, especially on the road, you know, we'd have dinner in a hotel room, and we'd talk. And we'd say-- I would get stressed out over a press conference or something, and I'd tell him, you know, this is why I'm stressed. And he'd do his best to help me after that. And it was harder for me to help him, because you know, the pressure on him was so much greater. I mean, for instance, was it the second Laker game in LA? We lost in overtime, and he fouled out. And he was really upset. And I did my-- I said, if you hadn't-- he had a great game, though. And I said, if you hadn't played well, we probably wouldn't have gotten here. Gone into overtime. The only thing I can do is just be an ear. Be somebody, you know, who says, I understand. And then mean it. Because I got to see it firsthand. Three fourths of the way through the basketball season, I catch a Rockets game at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It's a packed house, despite the fact the New York team, the Knicks, suck. Almost a third of the crowd is Chinese, many of them attending their first NBA game. They're here because of Yao, who's now a full-fledged phenomenon. He's only been in the US for four months, but he's already the new face of Apple Computer, Gatorade, and Visa. To the surprise of the normal Knicks crowd, Yao's army comes ready to scream, and many have made homemade signs proclaiming their love of Yao. What's your sign say here? Yao Ming, The Next Big Thing. What's so exciting about him? Honestly, I feel very proud. I plan on opening a basketball camp in Pakistan in the future because of this. And I want to, like, open the doors for Pakistanis to get into the game of basketball. That's right. Pakistan. This is the power of Yao Ming. He's united the Asian mainland with the Indian subcontinent. Just to see how far his celebrity extends, I ask this 22 year old fan about my cousin. He's got a translator. What do you think of that job? Well, I actually have a sign for him right there. What does it say? Right here. "Move over Batman and Robin. We have some new heroes in town, Yao Ming and Colin Pine. Citizens of Houston have no fear. Ming and Pine are here." I'm just a huge fan. Colin Pine-- he's Yao's right hand man right now. I mean, he's the one that's doing all the talking for Yao in English. So we get Yao's word through him. Is he a celebrity? Oh, definitely. When you're anyone around Yao, it's a celebrity. I'll tell you that much. I'm floored by this. And my question of the night becomes, who's Colin Pine? You guys know who Colin Pine is? The interpreter. Yao Ming's translator. We actually ran into Colin Pine in Chinatown in Houston at a tiny karaoke bar. Colin Pine was singing perfect Mandarin. One woman knows so much about him, that she could have written this story. Well, he worked in the State Department, and he applied online and didn't think he would get the job, and was shocked when they called, and basically he was told he had to be here like yesterday. And he was excited because he was a huge Steve Francis fan. Before I think he was translating documents with the US government. He must be the luckiest man in the world right now. That guy's got the best job in the world. I'd like to have his job. In my very informal survey, 50% of the crowd knows my cousin my name. One Chinese-American coed who carries a sign saying, "I'm single and bilingual-- hey Yao, you and me, let's mingle" tells me my cousin's hot. Colin's heard it before. I've had girls pass me cards. Not often. It's not like-- the players get it all the time, I'm sure. But consciously and subconsciously, there's part of me that is really wary of the whole thing. You know, I want somebody to like me for the witty, intelligent, charming person that I am. My friends are like, this job is so wasted on you. You're up. Oh, it's me again. On a warm spring night, Yao, Colin, and I are out at a Chinese karaoke bar. Yao just passed his driving exam and he wants to celebrate. He never goes out. This is a really big deal. He's out of the house and his parents aren't around. The club sits in a stucco Chinese mini mall in a cookie cutter Houston suburb between a nail salon and a takeout place called The Fancy Noodle. Everyone has a couple of beers, but this is definitely the G-rated version of an NBA night out. Colin loves karaoke. He sings a Chinese love ballad with an English chorus-- "I Only Want To Be Your Friend." Yao, appropriately enough, responds with the Backstreet Boys hit, "Larger Than Life." Yao later tells me this night was the most fun he's had in America. Five years from now you're going to be veteran in the league. You'll be superstar. And you'll speak English, and you won't need an interpreter. So who will Colin Pine be to you then, in five years? Still friends. Still friends. Do you think you'll hang out still? If you don't mind, and you don't mind me stealing your girlfriend, then it's OK. Jesse Hartman. Hey, how about a little male-bashing? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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So many of us, we wander through this country. We wander through our lives. We wander in darkness. Often we feel lost. Like Chris. He was doing pretty badly. Living on the street. Hair to his shoulders. I called it the Unabomber look. I was just living in the woods. Just an open wooded area at the corner of Pond Drive and Route 347. I'd have fresh clothes on usually, but I only could do the wash every so often, and they were outside, so I smelled like the great outdoors, whether I liked that fact or not. And I very much knew I needed medical help. So Chris needed this medical help, but of course, he had no money to pay for the medical help. He made money collecting cans and bottles on the street. Whenever he'd go to doctors or social services, he was so wacked-out looking that they wouldn't even talk to him like a person. They wouldn't even look him in the eye. It's a hell of a thing, isn't it? Wanting eye contact, not getting it. But then if you're lucky, somebody puts up the lights. Welcome. WBEZ Chicago. It's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today recorded on a live tour of five cities: Boston, Washington DC, Portland, Oregon, Denver, and our hometown, Chicago. So Chris was stuck. He needed money to go to a doctor. And then he got this idea. He remembered how a couple years before that, he had wandered off the street into a shopping mall to get warm, and there the State of New York had set up two laptop computers on a folding table. And to see the lady just look at me, nod her head, and smile when I walked up to the booth, like I was just one of anybody, was great. So he sits down at the computers, and on these two computers you could look up your name and see whether the state was holding money for you that you did not know about. And there was all sorts of money. Utility bill refunds, tax refunds, lost checks, owed to all sorts of people and institutions. Lost money. Or not even lost, since most people didn't even know it was missing. This is like money in purgatory. This is money in limbo. And thinking about all this, Chris Sewell realized how he could pay for his doctors. He would look online, find money of theirs that they did not know about, money that the state was holding for them, and then he would present that to them. Well, I was hoping that I would suddenly get a couple of phone calls and a couple of checks, and people say, "oh, wow, thanks for having done this." And then I was hoping that these doctors would just even talk to me in a civil manner. And then work my way up from there. Now the crucial fact that I have to tell you about Chris Sewell at this point in the story is Chris is great at finding other people's money in these databases on the internet. And when he looked for money for the doctors at his local university hospital, not only did he find hundreds, hundreds of unclaimed Blue Cross Blue Shield checks, reimbursements, lost trust fund checks. He also found 100 checks that were owed to the hospital itself. It was a huge victory. But when he went to the hospital to tell the doctors there that there was this money out there for them, he always got the same reaction. There was a total wall of silence. Except for the people who were telling me to buzz off. I actually went out and I printed out the claim forms. And I had a cover letter for it. And tried, in my own humble fashion, to appear professional. I went to the Salvation Army, bought myself a blue pinstripe suit. Even with my long hair and my beard, I went around and hand-delivered all of them. And how did that work? That was the one that-- it didn't work. I didn't get responses. There was no conversation. As soon as I talked, security people would just appear out of the woodwork. He tried letters. He tried emailing. Everybody just thought it was a scam. Eventually he got doctors to help him out through other means. And then he turned this talent elsewhere. He used it wherever and whenever he could. When his local public TV station was doing the pledge drive, he couldn't actually give money, of course, but he looked online, found $1,000 of theirs, called them up. In setting up this interview for our radio show, he was talking to one of our producers on the phone, Julie Snyder, and while he's on the phone with her, he found $400 bucks owed to WBEZ, the radio station where we work. And using nothing more than a normal internet connection, he found $610,940 owed to the City of New York. So much money that the city comptroller honored him with an old fashioned letter of commendation. Who knew that that was a real thing, and not just something that Commissioner Gordon would give to Batman now and then? And a press conference. It's impossible to overstate what that meant to him, that press conference. I was extremely nervous. And there were big security lines. And I finally got there and walked into a room full of TV cameras. And I don't think I'd spoken to anybody before that in like two weeks. You hadn't spoken with anybody at all for two weeks? For two weeks you hadn't had a conversation with another person? Yeah. Again, I don't have a lot of friends where I live. I'm, you know-- trying to just reach out in the middle of a social void is very difficult. I mean, on the street, I think my record one time was I don't think I'd spoken to anybody for something like three months. And I just-- I sort of tried to put a party face and soak it all in and radiate it back as best I could. The city comptroller actually recognized me. I feel that I've somehow helped create a place for myself in society, that I'm somehow a little less lost. I'm creating a purpose for my own life, and a direction. Our program today: Lost in America. Stories of people who are lost, and how they sometimes, temporarily, if they're lucky, get found. On our program today, Sarah Vowell finds a terrorist, hiding and lost in a patriotic song. Jonathan Goldstein tries to lose something and finds that it is harder than it seems. And there is an entire magazine devoted to writing that people have lost, dropped, thrown away, and tried to destroy. Its creator reads samples on stage. Plus Jon Langford of the Mekons, the band OK Go and more. Stay with us. Act One. Losing It. Well, if you're going to do a program about people who are lost, you pretty much have to do a story about adolescence. Jonathan Goldstein is a regular contributor to our show. A quick warning before we begin, for parents listening with kids, he talks about sex in this story. Please welcome Jonathan Goldstein. Dying a virgin happened to people. Hans Christian Andersen, Queen Elizabeth the First. My grandmother's prophetically named brother, Uncle Hymen. And I knew it was the kind of thing that could happen to me. Days would turn into months, months into years, and eventually I would drop dead in a men's hotel and be buried sexless in a single cemetery plot squeezed in on my side between my parents. And so I began, at an early age, what I thought of as my life's work, the work of not dying a virgin. At 10 I met Varid, my first crush. She was in from Israel with her family, and was staying with our neighbors. Since this was the summer Grease came out, I invited Varid upstairs to our living room, where I played the soundtrack on our stereo. While it played, I danced for her. My feeling was that you had to give girls everything you had-- your showmanship, your best moves, even your dignity. As the music played, Varid sat there with quiet indifference. At one point, I tried to bring her soul to life by lying down on our coffee table and spinning around on my stomach like a spastic Lazy Susan. When I did the splits, I fell to the ground with a ferocity that almost tore my scrotal sac in two. Before Varid went back to Israel, I handed her all 10 Archie digests that I owned. I stacked them so all the spines lined up perfectly. I wanted them to look solemn and substantial, like a package wrapped in rope from the old country. "It's how I feel about you," I wanted to say, but her English was not good enough to understand. For the next several years, I would say some variation of these words to many different people, but no one's English was ever good enough to understand. At the age of 13, I entered the service industry. The self service industry. I spent all of my time listening to music like Yellow while fantasizing about the high school gym teacher play tether ball in her brassiere. Or Stevie Nicks strumming a guitar in her brassiere. Or in my darker moments, Golda Meir ruling a nation in her brassiere. And then at 14 our family got one of those early model elephantine video machines. I rented early 80s teen sex comedies like Private Lessons, Private School for Girls, and Reform School Girl. I would make each 20-second shower scene last anywhere from six to seven hours. Pause, rewind, frame advance became my version of the holy trinity. One time, having lost the remote control to our VCR, I watched the entirety of Sorority Girls on Vacation lying on the basement floor with the VCR on my chest, hitting its buttons like a 70 pound accordion. It was around that time, inspired by a potent cocktail of sexual desperation and movies starring Phoebe Cates, that I left the comfort of home for the streets. A 4 foot, 10 inch, pheromone-drenched Cabbage Patch doll with acne on the prowl. And thus at 16, I met Tamara. Everyone had a locker partner at our school, and I shared mine with Tamara. Just knowing that no matter what, our winter boots were alone in the dark together for six hours a day was enough to make me feel at least that something in my life was going all right. One day I finally worked up the courage to ask her if she wanted to see the Eurythmics concert with me, because I knew she was a big fan, and she said yes. I don't know where I came up with the idea, but I had decided at some point during the concert that I wanted to hold Tamara from behind and sway with her back and forth to the music. It was all I could think about all night. It wasn't a kiss or a held hand I was after, but something else, something less definable. It was like I wanted to prove that I could get us into some kind of groove. Finally, during a slow song, I snuck up behind her and put my sweaty pocket hands on her hips. I tried to ease us into it. My movements were halted and completely non-musical. Rather than dancing, it looked like I was trying to hoist a resistant woman into a mailbox while in the throes of a painful piles attack. Tamara freed herself, and for the rest of the evening, she was afraid to come near me. At home that night I ate a bowl of cold cereal was staring at a bottle of my mother's nail polish on the kitchen counter. Carefully I painted my nails. In bed, my fingers spider-walked the length of my ribs. "Quit tickling me," I told myself. "I have to make this an early night." I grabbed my hand and flung it away from myself roughly. but it always crept back. If early 80s teen sex comedies had taught me anything, which, unfortunately, they had in abundance, it was that college was going to be a nonstop nookie fest. I wasn't fat enough to be the one who sees undressing sorority girls shortly before falling backwards from a ladder. Nor was I daring enough to have sex with a friend's mom. Nor was I near sighted and good enough at science to create a fellatio bot. But I did know that I was the nice guy, the one that drove everyone around on their way to getting action, and that before the credits rolled, I would receive my due. It was only right. Well, the credits had rolled, the curtain had come down, there was a man sweeping up popcorn, and still no due. For winter break, my friend Howard and I decided to spend the week in New York City. As we rode the train there, we passed a burned out school bus in a field, and I thought, yes, that is my heart. My heart is a burned out school bus with no windows sitting in the middle of nowhere. But then after about 15 minutes, the train passed a little gray wooden control booth, the door flung wide open, and I thought, no, that. That is my heart. The train continued along through February fields, and I looked for more things to call my heart. A rusty bridge. A chopped down evergreen. A discarded can of Mountain Dew. It turned out my heart was everywhere that winter month. We stayed with Howard's aunt in Flushing, and every night we would go to the local bar and take pictures of ourselves scribbling in our notebooks, our faces illuminated by the neon jukebox. It was at that bar that we met a 25-year-old Venezuelan furniture salesman named Jose. Howard and I thought Jose was the coolest. While we drank our rum and Coca-Cola's, Jose drank bloody caesars, something we considered very sophisticated, sort of like drinking a salad. Howard explained his dilemma to Jose, and I explained mine. Howard had had cancer when he was 16 and was concerned he wouldn't ever be able to produce semen and have children. I explained that I had grown weary of being a virgin and really, really wanted to see naked chimichangas. Jose furrowed his brow and listened to our problems with concern. Then he said he was taking us to a whore house. I cottoned to the idea of a whore house by telling myself that I was very old school, very Neil Simon, or Burt Reynolds, or something. It was probably how my father and his father before him did it. I imagined my grandfather had lost his virginity to a kind-hearted madam, who, after the deed, had cooked him a brisket. Jose took us to an apartment above a fruit store in Spanish Harlem, where we were invited in by a small, older Latino man wearing a shoulder holster. Jose told us not to worry, that this is how things were done. We were seated on a couch facing an East Indian man and what appeared to be his two teenage sons. There were three women dressed in nighties who walked by carrying balled-up faded linen and punch bowl-sized metal basins with soapy sponges. It was after seeing the basins that I realized I would never be able to pull this off. There was something too medicinal and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. Not only that, but I was terrified. Sex was one thing, but if I was going to be getting naked on a strange bed with sheets that were dubious, I at least wanted to be with someone who mildly liked me. And that, of course, is something impossible to gauge when the exchange of Canadian travelers cheques is involved. I told Jose I would sit this one out. Howard, on the other hand, was raring to go. A woman came over to him and introduced herself as Crystal. Howard introduced himself as Mr. Cohenovsky, which was the name of our grade seven math teacher. Crystal took Howard by the hand and led him into a room. Each person got 20 minutes. Howard remained in the room with Crystal for 40. The Indian man sitting opposite me kept pointing to his watch while smiling and winking. There's nothing that makes you think about dying a virgin more than sitting on the couch in a whore house waiting for your best friend to finish having sex. That couch just then felt like the loneliest place on earth. As it turned out, Crystal saw Howard's scar, and they spent most of their time together talking about what it was like to have had cancer. Crystal had lost a brother to leukemia several years earlier. She told Howard that when her and her brother were kids, they poked toothpicks into bubble gum, which they ate like hors d'oeuvres. She told Howard that she missed her brother very much. On the walk back to the subway, I lagged behind Howard, just watching him. Eventually we asked Howard how it was with Crystal, and he said that it was different than he thought it would be. And Jose told him he was being too emotional. What I hadn't taken into account was that before you lose something-- in this case, the albatross of one's virginity-- you had to first find something to enable that loss. At 18, sort of by accident, I found Galeet. Her name meant, "little wave," and when we kissed, it was like a little wave of blood was sweeping through my chest. We kissed long and hard, our eyes wide open. Galeet's face was always sad. I told her she had a frown that lit up a room. Galeet would be the first person I would ever sleep with, yet losing my virginity with her, even just after it happened, was something I can never remember. I could still recall what her breath smelled like after she had eaten chocolate, how she would almost cry when she saw little boys with big glasses. I remember a thousand other small things, too, yet our first time together, this thing that I waited forever to happen, to lose a virginity I had waited forever to lose, was completely and utterly lost to me. I'm not sure I understand why this is. Maybe when you're coming towards it, it looks so big and all-eclipsing. It looks like the finish line. You imagine champagne, well wishers, certificates of merit. Then you reach it, and pass it, and you understand it's only the entry point to a lot of other worries, worries that prove to be much more immeasurable and complicated. My fear of losing my virginity was nothing compared to my fear of losing Galeet. I could never fathom how she could love me, and so I tested her love all the time. "Let's say I smashed your car," I said. "Then I'd kill you," she said. "But you'd still love me?" "I guess so," she said. Before I met Galeet, I called myself a virgin. It was very clear and definite-- a virgin. Now there is no name for what I am. But I'm sort of partial to Leroy. Thanks. Jonathan Goldstein. He's the author of the novel, Lenny Bruce Is Dead. Jonathan's next book, which he's working on right now, is a rewrite of the bible. OK Go. Act Two. Teacher Hit Me With a Ruler. Can a song have skeletons in its closet? For this next act, Sarah Vowell decided to excavate the lost mongrel past of a patriotic song that I am sure you know. As songs go, it definitely had its wild party years before it settled down into the sort of thing that is played now at the White House, much like the current resident of the White House. I have to say, I love the fact that that man was a drunk. That's one of my favorite things about him. Is that wrong? Shows character. Please welcome Sarah Vowell. At the memorial service at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, those gathered in the pews to mourn the more than 2,800 people who were murdered by terrorists three days before sang "The Battle Hymn of The Republic." [MUSIC - "BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC" BY JON LANGFORD AND THE LOST IN AMERICA TOUR BAND] Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. President Bush sang it. Ex-presidents Clinton, Carter, and Bush sang it. Watching it on television in New York City, I sang it. And across the sea at another service in another church, Queen Elizabeth sang it with tears in her English eyes, having sung the song 36 years earlier at the funeral of Winston Churchill, as Churchill himself had sung it along with FDR on the White House lawn in 1943. Because that's when we sing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," at wars and funerals. So "The Battle Hymn" was doubly appropriate on September 14. It was a funeral, we were at war. And yet there we were, we gathered Americans, her Majesty the queen, chanting this beloved battle cry at the terrorists of the world. And buried inside the melody of the song was the rotting corpse of an American terrorist. Here are the lyrics that used to go to that tune back in 1860, lyrics that honor the terrorist as a hero. [MUSIC - "JOHN BROWN'S BODY" BY JON LANGFORD AND THE LOST IN AMERICA TOUR BAND] John brown's body lies moldering in the grave, John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave. John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave; his soul goes marching on. I don't throw around the word terrorist lightly, but if it's John Brown-- Brown, a white man who hated slavery so much that even his friend, the famed abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass, wished Brown would shut up about it every now and then. Back in 1856, Brown and his men massacred five pro-slavery settlers from the south near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, dragging them from their homes as their wives and children looked on screaming. They hacked them up with knives, though Brown shot one man's mangled body in the head just to make certain he was dead for sure. Then hoping to incite a slave uprising, Brown led a guerrilla attack on the Federal Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia on October 16, 1859. 17 people lost their lives, including 10 of Brown's men, two of whom were his sons. Brown was executed on December 2, 1859. Across the land, Brown's execution was either celebrated or mourned with the ringing church bells, depending on which side of the Mason Dixon Line one hung one's heart. In Concord, Massachusetts, Brown's friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, held a service in which Henry David Thoreau called Brown a crucified hero. Thoreau was so excited about Brown's martyrdom to the abolitionist cause, that he cheered that Brown's death gave people who were contemplating suicide, quote, "something to live for," exclamation point. And, as Lincoln puts it in his second inaugural, "the war came." Then John Brown got a song of his own, sort of. Like every turn in this story, the song "John Brown's Body" is an accident of history. What happened was Union soldiers-- the 12th Massachusetts Regiment-- were stationed at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. As they went about their duties, the soldiers sang. One of their favorites was this Methodist hymn: [MUSIC - "SAY, BROTHERS, WON'T YOU MEET US" BY JON LANGFORD] Say, brother, will you meet us on Canaan's happy shore? There was a singing quartet in residence at the fort: Sergeant Charles Edgerly, Sergeant Newton J. Purnette, Sergeant James Jenkins, and Sergeant John Brown. One day in December of 1859, news arrived at the fort about the famous abolitionist. John Brown is dead. Some smart alec, thinking of his singing comrade Sergeant John Brown, is said to have replied, "but he still goes marching around." A soldier named Henry Howgreen reportedly turned this wise crack into the first verse of the song about his comrade, "John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave, his soul goes marching on." A soldier who played the organ set it to the music of "Say, Brothers, Won't You Meet Us." So the song was a joke, joshing among soldiers, the sort of ribbing a sergeant in today's army might get if he had the misfortune of being named Uday Hussein. "John Brown's Body" became the regiment's marching song. They sang in public for the first time, here in Boston on State Street, on July 18, 1861. After that, they sang it marching down Broadway in New York City. They sang it so often they became known as The Hallelujah Regiment. On March 1, 1862, they sang in Virginia on the very spot the abolitionist John Brown was hanged. Three months later, Sergeant John Brown drowned while crossing the Shenandoah River on his way to battle. Heartbroken, The Hallelujah Regiment never sang "John Brown's Body" again. But by that time, they were the only ones in the Union Army not singing it. Northern soldiers would sing it on parade, marching from battle to battle, sitting around camp fires at night. And since no one had ever heard of Sergeant Brown, every soldier who sang the song thought he was paying tribute to the famed abolitionist. Lyrics kept getting added on, including one doozy of a stanza about the president of the confederacy. [MUSIC - "JOHN BROWN'S BODY" BY JON LANGFORD AND THE LOST IN AMERICA TOUR BAND] We'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, we'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree. We'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree; as we go marching on. In November of 1861, some white abolitionists from Boston, including Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Gridley Howe, and their minister Reverend James F. Clark, were touring a Union army base on the outskirts of the nation's capital. They heard some soldiers singing about John Brown's body "moldering in the grave." Reverend Clark turned to Mrs. Howe and wondered if she might like to write new, more uplifting lyrics to that fine melody of "John Brown's Body." Not that Julia Ward Howe had a problem with John Brown. She had even hosted Brown at dinner in her home on one of his trips to Massachusetts, trying to drum up money he could use smiting the slave mongers. Basically, abolitionist pledge drive. You are the public in public hanging. Julia Ward Howe would recall of the morning she wrote new lyrics that she had "the feeling that something of importance had happened to me." Back home in Boston, she gave the poem to her neighbor, James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He paid Howe $4.00, gave her poem the title, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and published it in the February 1862 issue. "The Battle Hymn" became a huge hit. Who knew the Atlantic Monthly was the TRL of its day? Soldiers and citizens alike couldn't stop singing it. When Abraham Lincoln heard it at a rally, it is said that his eyes filled with tears and he yelled, "sing it again." Sing it again. [MUSIC - "THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC" BY JON LANGFORD AND THE LOST IN AMERICA TOUR BAND] I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel, since God is marching on." That line in the hymn about the hero born of woman, which is a shout-out to the Virgin Mary by way of William Shakespeare, takes on an extra meaning in light of Julia Ward Howe's biography. Though she was married for 34 years, raised six children, and is, in fact, the creator of Mother's Day, Julia how was not without ambivalence about domesticity. For example, she wrote a poem entitled "The Present is Dead. " On her honeymoon. In writing to her sister about what she called "the stupor of marriage and motherhood," Howe complained, "it has been like blindness, like death, like exile from all things beautiful and good." So in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Howe reminds the nations that the Son of God had a human mom who did all the work. Hence, "let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel," Howe is rubbing in the fact that even Jesus had to be potty trained. Like a lot of your bigger hit songs, "The Battle Hymn" has been ripped off numerous times. Countless renditions have been sent to its tune, which is fair enough considering that Julia Ward Howe ripped off a song which was a rip off of a previous song. There was "Solidarity Forever," a union number from the IWW songbook. [MUSIC - "SOLIDARITY FOREVER" BY JON LANGFORD AND THE LOST IN AMERICA TOUR BAND] When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run, there can be no greater anywhere beneath the sun; yet what force on earth weaker than the feeble strength of one, for the union makes us strong. There was "Glory Land," the official song for the 1994 World Cup, in which Darryl Hall, of and Oates fame, proclaimed to the soccer fans, "with passion rising high, you know that you can reach your goal." I know. And of course, that playground classic: [MUSIC - "PLAYGROUND VERSION OF 'THE BATTLE HYMN'" BY JON LANGFORD AND THE LOST IN AMERICA BAND] Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school, we have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule; we have marched unto the principal to tell him he's a fool, the school is burning down. The school is burning down. In the 1950s, around the time of the Korean War, something else happened to Julia Ward How's "Battle Hymn of the Republic." A word changed. The line "let us die to make men free" got change to "let us live to make man free." The new wording acknowledged that sometimes war isn't always the answer. Plus, less of a downer. And through the years, a civil war of sorts has broken out between those who would die and those who would live. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings "live" on their 1959 Grammy Award-winning recording of the song. Joan Baez, leading a sing-along at a black college in Birmingham in 1962, went with the traditional "die." In my opinion, die is the way to go. When you get rid of the word, "die," you erase the most moving idea in the song, that if Christ died for us, we should be willing to die for each other. Why give that up? This the one clear-cut case where you can ask yourself, "what would Jesus do," and you know the answer. What would Jesus do? Die. And, of course, people disagree about the wording. We disagree about everything else in this country. And when we sing the song today, I think we even disagree about who the serpents are that our heels should crush. Some of us see our enemies abroad, some see them at home, some of us are still mad at France. And that's the way it's been with this song all through its history. It gets adapted for one use, than another. The melody is so powerful, the words so strong, you feel like you really would lay down your life for a just cause. Of your choosing. When we sing "The Battle Hymn"-- and I say we because that is how the song is traditionally performed at public events, as a sing-along in which a group of citizens turn themselves into a choir-- we sing about taking action, about marching on, about doing something. And this is the best part about singing "The Battle Hymn:" you're not standing there alone doing something, you're part of something. The song starts off with "mine eyes," and "I have seen," and by the end it's "you and me" and "let us die" or "let us live," whatever-- "us" being the point. We're all in it together, if only for the length of the song. Sarah Vowell. She's the author of several books, including The Partly Cloudy Patriot. Word about the band that's here in the stage. On this tour, we have the band OK Go. And we have this bad, headed by the seme-legendary Jon Langford of the Mekons in the Waco Brothers. A while back, John did a story with us and producer Starlee Kine on our staff in our show about the classified ads, we he put together an entire band from the musicians classifieds. And he's brought two of those musicians from that story with him here on the tour. On the far end you'll see Eric Muller on the theremin. Eric used to work for a company that made parts for the railroad. And on this end is Nathan Swanson, who still works part time for Home Depot, playing electric violin and mandolin. Alan on bass and Dan on drums, they're old pros. That was great. Coming up, scraps of paper, personal letters, handmade signs, all discarded and then found. Maybe there's something of yours in there. You'll find out 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, of course, we choose theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, taped on the road in Boston, Portland, Oregon, Denver, Chicago, and Washington DC: Lost in America. Stories of people who are lost, words that are lost, things that are lost, and, now and again, found. Everyone can find stuff. And I want to give you just a sense of some of the stuff that people are finding and sending in to us. This right here is a note that was found in LA. And it says, "Jesse, I did not take anything. I know there's no convincing you once you've made up your mind. And although I cannot offer you any other explanation as to what happened to it, that doesn't mean I did it. How could I have? You say your car was locked and Katie had the keys. Anyway, I don't need to take something of yours when I could get my own. It doesn't make sense. But here's a replacement, because I can't stand when you think I've wronged you. Mom." The authors of some of these notes, they don't always paint themselves in the best light, you know? Sometimes they're going fine, fine, and they just skewer themselves at the end. And this is one that was found in Tacoma, Washington. And at the top, OK, it just says, "what kind of relationship do I want? How do I see myself in it? I'm nurturing, I'm relied upon, I'm getting my ya-yas." But then down here it says, "what I hate about women: they're hard, impossible to please and satisfy. They talk a lot without saying much or being intimate. And they're self-involved and self-absorbed. I want them to be absorbed with me." This one was found in Berkeley, California, actually on the front lawn of a fraternity house. And it was a whole book of letters back and forth from the elders of the house to the pledges, the young kids who are trying to get into the fraternity. So this is one of the notes that's from one of the elders to one of the young pledges named A.J. And he says, "A.J., tonight's event was just a tradition of the house. It was not gay. Even though you had to pull down your pants, at least you didn't have to show it to all the actives, just your pledge master. Its meaning: to prove your manhood and that you are not a boy. But none of us are gay. Aside from all this, I want to know that I've seen some improvement out of you since your first pledge. Keep up the effort and have a positive attitude of things. I tell ya, it's all worth it once you've crossed. Take my word for it. Just hang in there, OK? Listen, I want you to have dinner with me when you're free someday. It's a great chance for you to get to know me better and for me to answer questions you may have, all right? Aaron." And so many of the notes, as I read through them when they come in the mail every day that people are finding, they deal with love and relationships, you know? And one of the favorite notes that I've ever found myself is this note I found in Chicago on my windshield. I came out of my friend's apartment late one night. It had snowed a little bit. And you know, with like a thin layer of snow, every car looks a little bit the same. And my name's Davy, but there's a note on my windshield that was addressed to Marco. And it said, "Marco, I freakin' hate you. You said you had to work? Then why is your car here at her place? You're a freakin' liar. I hate you, I freakin' hate you. Crystal. P.S. Page me later?" And then this one just came in last week from-- it was found in North Carolina. And it says, "Dear Will, the longer I think about what I'm doing, the sicker I feel. Will, I'm sorry, but I don't think we should continue to have a relationship together. At least not as a couple. I love you, but things have not been the same since we found out that we were related." My little brother, Peter, he is the best finder I know. He amazes me with what he brings home. And this is one he found when he was visiting me in Chicago. And it's written in like a kid's handwriting. It looks like maybe a 12-year-old kid. It says, "To cashier, will you please sell my son one pack of Newport Lights." Ah, that trick. "Thank you for your help." On there's just this scrawled, adult-looking signature. And then this one my brother found pinned under the back tire of his bicycle. And it's this handsome looking sign. Someone spent a good deal of time putting this thing together. It says, "After leaving the building please lock this door. It will prevent unauthorized people from entering the building and defecating in the washing machine. Many thanks." And when you send your finds in, I ask that you name your finds. And also that you write one line, you know, a sense of response or interpretation to it. About this one, my brother wrote, he says, "Note that those who are authorized to defecate in the washing machine will be given a key for entry." And yeah, I applaud for whoever made that sign, but also for my brother, who just picked it up off the ground. And I asked him, you know, "how do you do it? What's your secret?" My brother says that it's been scientifically calculated-- by him-- that one in five, 20%, of all finds are gems of finds. So that means if you pick one thing up a day, that every week you'll have a real jewel of a find. Let's read this one here. This is from Erie, Pennsylvania. And it's a note, a kid writing a letter to his dad. It says, "Hi, Dad. What's up? Not much here. Just working to save money. I'm working at Old Country Buffet starting at $6.50 an hour cooking. Dad, are there any cooking jobs down there? Let me know when you write me back. I gave Cleav your letter, OK? Without Mom knowing, OK? I can't wait to come down there. Erie sucks bad. There ain't nothing to do. Too cold. The weather sucks, too. Dad, I drink, too. Beer. Budweiser. But I don't drink a lot. And I do a little drugs, too. I smoke joints. And I got a bowl that's cool. I'll let you see it, OK? I talked to Grandma. She said she's going to send you a letter and some money. Dad, I don't know if Cleav or Beth is coming down, but I'll talk to them and see. If not, it will be just me only. Dad, you're going to rent a mobile home. That's cheap. $100 a week. That's cheap. Dad, try and see if there's any apartments for rent and let me know how much, OK? Dad, I'm going to take a Greyhound because it's cheap-- only $49-- but I'll call you ahead of time. Dad, all the money I'm saving from working at my job and my income tax check, I should have a lot, OK? With the money, we should be able to get a place for us, OK? Dad, I can't wait to come down there pretty soon." Turn over. "Dad, I'm a cook, and I can cook us some [BLEEP] up. Cook some meals up for us, get a grill and cook on that. Also, I got a lot of CDs, like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and all that. We can jam out and have lots of fun. Davy Rothbart. You can go to his magazine's website, foundmagazine.com. Our program was produced today by Julie Snyder, Diane Cook, Todd Bachmann, me, with our other producers, Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and Starlee Kine. Production help from Katie O'Dunn. Engineering for our show in Boston by Miles Smith. In DC, Jonathan Cherry and Big Mo Recording. In Portland, John Frazy. In Chicago, Mary Gaffney. Our March guru, Jorge Just. Thanks to Adam Beckman. Ken Sleuter mixed one of our bands. Brand Cutsman the other. Thanks also to Robbie Willard. Thanks to the public radio stations who have been our hosts and presenters in the five cities. WBUR in Boston. WAMU, 88.5 FM in DC. Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland. Colorado Public Radio in Denver. And Chicago Public Radio in our hometown. Special thanks today to our bands in all of our cities but DC. Dan Massey on drums, Alen Doughty on bass, Eric Muller on theremin, Nathan Swanson on violin and mandolin, plus Pat Brennan on piano and John Rice on guitar, and the great Jon Langford on guitar and vocals. In DC. OK Go is Damian Kulash on vocals, Tim Nordwind on bass, Andrew Duncan on guitar, Don Konopka on drums and Burleigh Seaver on keyboard. Our web site, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Mr. Torey Malatia, who begs, begs you, Quit tickling me. I have to make this an early night. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. You can download audio of our show at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, best selling books, even the New York Times, all at audible.com. PRI. Public Radio International.
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All right, now this moment from the life of a teenage girl in these United States. School has just let out. Perfect spring day. Kara and her boyfriend, Jeremy, come outside, and he jumps on her back. Get off me. Jeremy, come on. You're hurting my back. You love it. I don't. When I recorded this, I'd been doing documentary radio stories on Kara and her friends for two years. So it was natural that at this point, Kara would just turn to me and say-- Ira, kick his butt. Get away from me. You're too violent. Jeremy, stop. Well, today on our program, the lives of teenage girls. From WBEZ Chicago, you're listening to This American Life. I'm Ira Glass, back for another week, to kick your butt. Not really. Back for another week documenting everyday stories of these United States using all the tools of radio storytelling-- documentaries, monologues, overheard conversations, found tapes, anything we can think of. And to consider the question of what it's like to be a teenager in America today, consider this incident between Kara and Jeremy and their friends. They had just come outside after a rehearsal for a school play that Kara is putting together based on the writings of Henry Rollins. And if you don't know his work, Henry Rollins is a pop star. He plays this sort of testosterone-loaded post-punk rock. And at the time of this recording, he was Kara's favorite writer. So, Kara, do you have a favorite piece in the Rollins show? "Ladies, you want equality." She pulls out the papers that comprise the show's script, and she reads to me. And I should say here that Rollins and our 18-year-old teenager get rather graphic here in a way that might not be suitable for younger listeners. Rollins, in this poem, says that guys are basically scum. Basically just scum. His vision is very unambiguous. They're scum. And he gives heartfelt advice to all women who he addresses as "ladies." "If you want equality to men, it's not going to come to you in the mail or in your sleep. You're going to have to take it, grab hold of it, wrench it out of their hairy-fisted grasp. What I'm getting to is this-- go to the gunsmiths, get a 0.357 magnum with a long barrel. Load it. Put in your bag. Go on with your life. OK, it's just another day. You're walking down the street. You pass this gas station. Some gas station attendant is standing there, glaring at you, checking you out, smiling at you. This ugly, greasy, stupid guy comes over to you and blocks your way as you try to walk down the street. He breathes on you and says, hey, baby, looky here, seven inches. You pull out the gun, stick the barrel in his face, and scream, I've got eight mother [BLEEP], I've got eight. There. Now you're speaking in terms he can must surely identify with. You're not only equal. You dominate. Believe me, it's come to this. Take advantage of their weakness. They take advantage of yours. You're entitled." The guys in the group all look at each other. Finally, Kara's boyfriend, Jeremy, says, "There's nothing wrong with a guy looking at you and thinking how good you look." Kara tells him that isn't the point. No. They say things. They'll follow you. They'll come up to you, and they'll talk to you like this. And they'll make sure that they do that, that their pelvis is pushing against you here. I have never, ever seen anybody do that, though. But you're not a woman, though. Kara tells him a story about some guy who was staring at her in a pool hall. So when I was leaving, he went-- he came up real close to me. He's like, "Bye." I turned around, and I was like, "I hate rude men!" I screamed it, and then the entire pool hall was like-- and I was like-- Man. You guys are rough. I'm never saying bye to a girl again in my life. Mary's boyfriend, Aaron, has joined the conversation. "So how should we treat girls?" He asks. "If we like a girl, how do we let her know without offending her?" Right. That's why I'm asking how should we do it. And sometimes we don't know. And sometimes we don't know. Don't look at women like they're pieces of meat. Because they're not. But what if they're dressed like that and want to be looked at like that? There's always that instinct in the guy. And if he sees something he really likes, he's going to look at it. If you would see a guy that you really like and really think is hot, you don't sit here-- Wait, wait, wait. Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me. One, two, microphone check. Wait, listen. You're going to say, if a guy walks by that has a real nice butt that you like, you're not going to be like, damn. They talk about this for 20 minutes. The boys ask over and over, what should we do? What do you want us to do? How should we act? And over and over, the girls name a few simple rules that anyone could follow if they pay attention. One, do not invade a girl's personal space. Two, don't say anything rude. Aaron says that certain things are only seen as rude if the girl doesn't like you. If she thinks you're cute, then they're OK. Say if I was real-- if I was good looking, and I was sitting there staring at you, and if I was all-- But I don't want to talk to a dork. But how does he know that? If I was a dork, maybe I think I'm looking. What if we're just at the staring stage? No, no. Because if you don't know somebody, you've got to go by their-- What's striking is that there are certain moments when it actually seems like the boys really do want to know how they should act. They really want to know. And in those moments it's clear that this conversation could only happen in high school. After high school, everyone's opinion about these questions is pretty much set. But in high school, sometimes there's still a feeling that everything's up for grabs. So you can tell your boyfriend not to be a jerk, and he might actually listen. That's a good side of everything being up for grabs. There's also a bad side. With everything up for grabs, it's hard to know how you're supposed to act. Which brings us to today's program. Our program today is made up of three stories about teenage girls who have to decide how they're going to act in situations where the ground rules are unclear and very malleable. Act One of our program, Jo Carol Pierce bends the rules in a small town in Texas. Act Two, Chicago writer Rennie Sparks struggles without rules in suburban America, somewhere. Act Three, a man tries to lay down rules for a girl. Stay with us. Act One, Texas Girl. Jo Carol Pierce is this performer from Austin, Texas, who just put out her first album at the age of 51, squarely outside of the teenager category. But she talks about her teenage years in the record. And she's working this really unusual style on this record. The CD is called Bad Girls Upset By the Truth. I have it here. And over the course of the record, she tells this funny, emotional story punctuated periodically by songs she's written. It's a version of American musical theater, one of the most American cultural forms. It's a kind of American musical theater that no one is bothering with, except for her. And it's the kind of CD that is not going to get much radio air play anywhere, and so we thought that we would begin today's show by playing you just a chunk of this record, a couple songs and some of the story. And the story that she tells on the record begins with a suicide attempt, a teenager's suicide attempt. In real life, Jo Carol says that she thought about suicide well into her 30s, and she also worked at a suicide hotline. And the suicide on the record comes during a fight with her boyfriend. Me and my boyfriend were driving around the loop, and we were having a terrible fight. I remember that he called me a son of a bitch. And that confused me, so I opened the passenger door and flung myself into traffic. First, I was hit by a pink Coupe de Ville, knocked me into the path of an out of state semi and just squished me flat into that burning asphalt. But after I had committed suicide, I started seeing things in a whole new light. I noticed what a cute boy my boyfriend was. Couldn't understand why I'd been calling him a decorated rat only moments before my fatal plunge. I took his hand. It was chaffed and slightly smaller than mine. We went home, and I made him some biscuits and gravy from scratch, because I really wanted to. It's good to commit suicide when there's something you just can't figure out. Like when I hit high school and I found out you're a bitch if you don't and a whore if you do. Commit suicide when you've got a burning question that no one can answer for you. Mine was, what are these boys for, and what am I supposed to do with them? Don't get upset about the war in the Middle East. Do something. Kill yourself. It's good to commit suicide over small things that other people might neglect, like grocery shopping. I can't imagine walking into that ATB without first committing suicide. Think about it. Commit suicide first thing in the morning. And that way, you feel better all day. Do it your first day on a new job, and the next day you can call in dead. Do it early in a love affair and just get it over with. That's why me and the boys are going to commit suicide right now. We hope that you will join us. Just start getting really pitiful and morose, and in the third verse, we will slit our wrists. The main story of Bad Girls Upset By the Truth is this man, or this series of men, actually, who appear in Jo Carol's life. She calls them Secret Dans. And she falls for them, sleeps with them, and it's a lot of them. More, in fact, than anyone around her thinks is proper. I got in a world of trouble going from Secret Dan to Secret Dan. I got a bad reputation in my peer group. Lots of my friends were getting married, and when they did, they would just drop me flat. And my friends that weren't real mad at me were real worried about me. And everybody was discouraging me from falling in love. They said, Jo Carol, why don't you do something you're good at? So I tried to explain to them why I had to do these very upsetting things. I said, look, the reason that I cannot pass up a single Secret Dan is that each one of them is just another side of Jesus. And I know that because every time I kiss another one, I can feel Jesus right through his skin. And I need to know Jesus fully. Jesus in a brown leather jacket. Or the kind of thuggy Jesus with the hooded eyes like Robert Mitchum. Or the Jesus you want to make biscuits for. Or the Jesus you want to wrestle with. Or the Catholic Jesus. Or the Jesus who's so good in bed you think he's Catholic, but really he's not. There was even a Yankee Jesus. And my friends said, nuh-uh. But I could tell my friends were upset by the truth, because they'd go off in small groups and whisper. And every once in a while I would hear this phrase, "mental hospital." And it made me nervous, so I got married. And when my husband slipped that golden wedding ring on my finger, it was the first time I'd ever strayed off of that spiritual path that Jesus had set out for me so specifically years before. It was back in high school. One sunny night I was out jumping bar ditches in my parents' car when it overheated and stalled and left me stranded out there on the Idalou highway. I didn't know what I was going to do until this darling boy named Joey came along in his shiny truck, and he fixed my car on the spot. And then he witnessed to me about Jesus. It was his Highway Witness for Jesus Program. And he was so darling that I just went to church with him that night. I liked sitting next to him so much, and before I knew what I was doing, I had grabbed his hand. He jerked and turned pale, but he did not get up and move. His heart was beating just like a hammer in the palm of his hand, and it was pounding home the sermon about the burning bush and the tongues of flame like never before. And I knew I had to keep that beat forever and ever. And then we watched the preacher baptize Naomi [? Stutler. ?] And maybe it was the way her back arched when he pulled her up out of the water, or maybe it was the way that white robe clung to her body that inspired me to the point that I knew Jesus in my heart for the very first time, because he said something right in my ear. He said, "Don't you ever even worry about keeping that beat. You just let that beat keep you." I pretty much knew what was going to happen with the boys if I let that beat keep me, and I wasn't all that surprised that Jesus wanted me to go all the way. Because, after all, he did. I took my first step on my new spiritual path that evening after church when I suggested to Joey that we park at a prairie dog camp and discuss Jesus a little further. Later on, Joey was real disappointed in himself for what happened out there, but I wasn't. My new spiritual path was just like walking on cloud nine. I didn't hear from Joey for quite a while, but I didn't think anything about it. Because I had asked my question, what are these boys for, and what am I supposed to do with them in the plural. And it had been answered in the plural. And so I was real busy. But one evening Joey threw pebbles at my window, and I sneaked out behind the playhouse to meet him. And I found out why I had not heard from him was he had been saving up to buy me something very special. But unfortunately, the day he got it out of layaway was the very-- Jo Carol, I heard you drove through the [? Hidey-Ho ?] take-out window naked today after school. Oh god, I am so relieved. I was afraid I had made that whole thing up in my head and was turning out to be crazy like Mama. Because, see, what happened was I drove up, Buddy [? Grays ?] gives me my change and my chili dog. And I just sit there waiting for something to happen. And finally I say, "Buddy." He says, "What?" He says, "Hi." He says, "Hi." And I drove off feeling like I wasn't even in this world. I am so relieved somebody besides me thinks that happened. How could you do this to me, Jo Carol? Well, sometimes I get real bored. Well, if you're bored, there's plenty of constructive things you could do. You could raise a sheep or some chickens for the FFA. Or join the UFO Watch or go with me on the Highway Witness Program. Now, wait, Joey. What did I ever do to you? You went out with Gary [? Cooney ?] tonight. Yeah? After he took Martha Lynn [? Searsey ?] home? Yeah? You ruined my life in my senior year. Oh, Joey, I am just sick I ruined your senior year. But how did I do it exactly? I worked all my spare time to buy you this ring. Oh, Joey, that is so pretty. Bless your heart, it really is. It was my college education. Look how it sparkles almost like a genuine diamond. If I wore this, people might think it was really real. And that's when he took it from me. And he pulled it across the glass of the playhouse window, leaving a very deep scratch there. [SINGING] This diamond is really real, Joey. [SINGING] Do you think I'd buy you a rhinestone? [SINGING] Do you really wanna marry me? No. [SINGING] I just wanna go on home. [SINGING] Oh, Joey, how did it come to this? I'm so depressed. Well, Jo Carol, why do you think they even call it premarital sex? What are you going to call it if you don't get married afterwards? Oh, you could call it a whole lot of things. Like if you're trying to be-- Oh, I don't want to hear. [SINGING] I should have gone the way I came, like a flicker in her flame. Left her there remembering how my diamond scratched her window pane. Should have gone the way I came, in the darkness, in the rain. In the morning all that would remain is my scratch upon her window pane. [SINGING] I'm so flattered, I can't tell you. But Jesus has another plan for me. And, Joey, it'll be better for you, too. Some day you're gonna thank me for all the girls you would have missed and never kissed if I said yes. Jo Carol, you're only worried about all the boys you want to kiss and mess around with. Well, that too, yes. [SINGING] I should have gone the way I came, like a flicker in her flame, and left her there remembering how my diamond scratched her window pane. Should have gone the way I came, in the darkness in the rain, in the morning all that would remain is my scratch upon her window pane. [SINGING] So it really has to be goodbye? [SINGING] I don't know what else I could do. [SINGING] One more time to remember me by? Don't worry. [SINGING] I'll remember you. [SINGING] One more time so I'll remember, too. No. I don't want to. Joey, do you take me for a fool? I know you do. Oh, god, she knows I do. And I do. [SINGING] I should have gone the way I came, like a flicker in her flame, and left her there remembering how my diamond scratched her window pane. Should've gone the way I came, in the darkness, in the rain. In the morning all that would remain is my scratch upon her window pane. Jo Carol, if you keep on like this, who will every marry you? Act Two, Suburban Girl. Well, you're listening to This American Life, where each week we take a theme and invite a variety of writers and performers and artists of various sorts to tackle the theme. This week our theme is teenage girls. And our next story is by Rennie Sparks, a Chicago writer and musician. Her band, The Handsome Family, does the musical scoring under the story. This story is about a girl who is struggling in a situation where some rules-- there was a friendship, how you act with your best friend-- those rules are strict and completely binding. But all the other rules in the girl's life are totally in the air. And in the world she's in, she actually never worries about whether she's being good. Instead, she has other worries. Dawn and me eat scrambled eggs with tall glasses of tomato juice for dinner because we're on a diet. Dawn knows how to throw up, so she eats toast and butter, too. But my fingers go so far down my throat, and still nothing comes up. I'm a fat cow. Dawn and me are best friends. I sleep over at her house now ever since my stepfather called me a pig for eating all his cocktail onions. I'm waiting for my mom to call and beg me to come back home, but it's been almost two weeks now. I'm wondering if maybe their phone is broken. Sometimes my mom spaces on time. She drinks a lot of green Hi-C with vodka in it. I've seen her sit down with a drink in the morning just as Oprah is coming on, and then it's like next thing she knows, Hard Copy is coming on and my stepdad is walking in the door, screaming because he can't smell any dinner. But I'm over at Dawn's house now. We share a single bed with the quilted pink covers. We stay up late smoking cigarettes, talking about love with the ashtray balanced between us on the sheets. Dawn loves guys who give long, wet kisses that make her eyes roll up in her head. I love bites that last like red splashes on my neck for weeks, so that everyone knows I've been going at it. Dawn and me both agree, though-- mostly, we just want to fall in love. Tonight we're going to the mall to fall in love. Dawn's mom is divorced, and Dawn gets to call her Lorraine instead of Mom. We smoke Lorraine's Marlboro Lights at the kitchen table with a green ashtray. Lorraine is in the shower with her loofah pad and her pineapple-smelling shampoo, getting ready to go out with an optometrist she met at work. Lorraine works behind the counter at the U-Haul center on Motor Parkway, and she gets to wear this tight, orange dress that says U-Haul on it. She meets a lot of men because of that dress, not to mention that any guy who gets divorced ends up at U-Haul sooner or later with a sad look on his face. Lorraine comes out of the shower and models new underwear for us. Her hair is slicked back, wet and shiny. The underwear is red lace, with a fishnet heart cut out in the center, so you can see Lorraine's hair down there. And it's sort of dirty blond, even though Lorraine's hair on top is jet black. There's a long, purple scar up Lorraine's stomach from where they pulled Dawn out, but Lorraine's stomach is flat and tight like a boy's. She must know how to throw up, too. "Ta-da," Lorraine says. "You look fox, Lorraine," Dawn says. "Yeah," I say. "No doubt." The optometrist pulls up in a Chrysler, a dark blue car with brown interior. I'm thinking, loser, but Lorraine runs out of the kitchen, shoving her earrings in, smoothing down a red satin dress she bought at Shoes and Things for $20. She's blushing and pursing her lips to smooth her lip stick down and breathing fast as she let's the optometrist inside. He looks bewildered, unprepared to be stepping into a woman's house. "Dawn," Lorraine says in her giggle voice that is saved for men only, "I'll be home late, or not at all." Dawn rolls her eyes. "Watch it now, young lady," "OK," Dawn mumbles. "I'll feed the fish." "OK, Lorraine," the optometrist says nervously." "Seafood OK?" Lorraine just giggles and takes his arm. They head out to the car and drive away, and I want to cry, thinking of that skanking old guy with his hands all over Lorraine's perfect, tight body. But then I remember Dawn and me are on our own now. We sit down at the kitchen table and light cigarettes and drink half a glass each of Lorraine's pink Zinfandel wine, because more than that she notices. "Man," Dawn says, "I can't wait to get a place of my own. All I'm going to have in the fridge in pink Zinfandel and powdered doughnuts and 7-Up. Dawn loves powdered doughnuts because they're the easiest thing in the world to throw up. Tonight we're off to the mall to hunt for babes. Dawn says if she falls in love at the mall, she'll go out to the pit. "And leave me hanging by the fountain," I scream. "No," she says, plugging in her crimping iron. "There'll be a babe for you, too. We'll find two babes and fall in love and make them take us to the pit." Dawn's going to be a stewardess when she graduates high school, or work at the U-Haul with Lorraine. I'm going to Wilfred Beauty Academy to learn acrylic nails. When I get out of Wilfred, no one will call me a fat cow. They'll call me a nail stylist. I have a new makeup stick in dark coral pink. I put it on above my eyes like I saw in Beauty Digest. Dawn puts it on her cheeks and outlines her lips in burnt sienna. She rubs a stick of musk behind her ears and under her arms, filling the room with the smell of a jungle. We lie flat on the bed next to each other to zip our jeans. When I stand up, there's a role of fat over the waistband, so I borrow a loose sweater from Dawn, something with draw strings at the bottom. Dawn is straight and thin and wears padded bras that make tiny puff breasts under her shirts. I wish I could throw up like her. We each swallow four of Lorraine's Dexatrims and two of her No-Dozs and then fluff our hair out so we look like wild animals. We only take one each of Lorraine's Valiums, because those she counts. The cab lets us off at Sears. We go in through the luggage department and straight into the bathroom. Dawn doesn't like the way her hair turned out, so she wets it in the sink and kneels under the hand dryer, on knee on the tile floor to do it over. I look at myself in the mirror. My hair and nails are perfect. I know how to copy the looks. But my cheeks are full and red, not hollow and sharp like Dawn's. Tomorrow I'll eat nothing but tuna fish and water. We walk out to the benches around the fountain and spot Carol and Gail. Even from two stores down, I can see Carol's lost weight, and I'm instantly jealous. She was always a pudge like me. Then she had to go to the clinic for an abortion, and she threw up for two days after the anesthetic. It makes me wonder why no one sells anesthetic to fat people for a diet. I guess it's against the law, but still it isn't fair. Two weeks before Carol went to the clinic, she said, "Janine, walk with me to the deli." So I walked with her to the deli and got a ham sandwich with only a little mayo and even pulled the crusts off and threw them away. Carol got change for the phone. She called the clinic and said she got raped and wanted the morning after pill. This wasn't true. Carol told me about the moment down in the pit when Scott Malone had finally got off her, and she had to squat and search for a full minute before she found the rubber. It didn't matter, anyway, because the clinic said she had to tell the police first if she got raped. So Carol hung up and fell against gallon jars of pickled cauliflower, crying her eyes out. But when I tried to put my arm around her, she said, "You smell like ham, Janine," and pushed me away. I don't care. Dawn is my best friend, anyway. Dawn and me and Carol and Gail are sitting in front of the fountain waiting for babes. Gail is beautiful and goes out with Joey Cosmo, who has a roll bar in his truck and wild blond hair like a rock star. But he's at some truck show in Garden City tonight, so Gail is a free agent. I never told anyone, but I have a secret about Joey Cosmo. Once I walked by Sheer Impact, and I saw Joey sitting under a dryer with perm rods in his hair. It made we want him even more, seeing him with the plastic sheet over him, the white towel around his neck, and blue and yellow perm rods covering his head like a helmet. Any guy who thinks he ought to try and look good, even if he's a babe already, has got to be sort of sweet. I wouldn't cheat on him just because he went to a truck show without me, but I'm not beautiful like Gail, and the rules are different. Tonight Gail has done her eyes in blue liner. Her hair is soft blond that curls at her shoulder, and she's long and thin in pink cords and a black sweater that shows a beige bra under her arm when she lifts a hand to flip her hair back. It's hard to believe we're both girls. I've never come close to looking anything like her. "What's up?" She says, throwing her cigarette into the fountain. There's a hiss as flame hits water. "Nothing," Dawn says. "How you feeling?" I ask Carol. She gives me a look. "I'm staying at Gail's." "Janine's staying at my house," Dawn says. "How come?" Gail asks, suddenly interested, thinking something's up like I'm pregnant or something. "My stepfather's a skank," I say quickly, feeling a moment's pride being the center of attention. "They're all skanks," Gail says. "My stepfather stole 10 bucks from my purse last week." Dawn's elbow sinks into my side. "Babes," she whispers. And there they are. Janine and Dawn make their move for the babes in a minute when our program continues. It's This American Life. Rennie Sparks's story "Skanks" continues. A little reminder that some scenes and language in this story might not be suitable for younger listeners. Dawn, Janine, and their friends, if you recall, are sitting on the bench by the fountain in the mall. Three guys turning the corner from Monkey Ward's. We lean back with our toes stretched out in high heels. I can feel the water spray against my back, but I don't move. The waist of my jeans is like an iron band. I can hardly breathe. Dawn stands. "Janine, let's go." "We just sat down," I say. "Look at that babe in the red leather," Dawn says. "He's checking me out." "Can't we just sit here a while?" I say. "Janine, do you want to be a fat cow all your life?" Dawn says. "The blond one isn't bad. He's got long hair. Let's go." We go after the babes. They strut around the corner of Camera Hut with long, pink combs sticking out of their back pockets. Dawn's right. I have to do something with my life. We follow them down the north corridor of the mall. I watch the babe in the red leather. His thin hips jut back and forth in tight black denims. I feel myself slow and heavy at Dawn's side. They go into Orange Julius, and Dawn clicks fast on high heels behind them. The two bomber jackets buy chili dogs, but the red leather buys fries. He turns as he squirts ketchup, and he has these unbelievable sea-green eyes. I feel a butterfly come alive in my stomach, and I could almost collapse with the feel of it coming over me. But I force myself to look at the blond one, like Dawn wants, even though he's ugly. "What's up?" The babe asks, staring down at the floor. He smiles, and I see his teeth are white and clean like a commercial. He has dyed black hair with brown roots. "Nothing," Dawn says, moving in. I try and give the blond one a look, but he's worse close up. His hair is long but hangs flat against the sides of his face, and his body is round and square like Barney Rubble. I feel myself rolling loose, bursting against my jeans, and I can see from his face that I'm just as unappealing to him. I manage a weak smile. They slide into a booth with their food, throwing fries at each other across the table. We order cheese fries and sit across from them. We suck cheese off the fries and then put them back on the plate, waiting. I suck only five fries. Dawn sucks down practically the whole plate. She can. She's already thrown up twice since breakfast. Finally the babe finishes his food and looks across the table at Dawn. "Hey," the babe says. "Hey," Dawn says. "What's up?" he says. "Nothing," she says. "You want to hang out?" "Sure," she says. "I'm Dawn. This is Janine." "Hey," he says, looking my way for the briefest moment. He's a definite babe. Tall and thin with hollow cheeks and a square chin. "Listen," Dawn says, leaning in towards the babe. She gives a look-- perfect, all eyes and lips. "Janine was checking out your friend," she whispers. "The blond guy. She's in love with him or something." "That's Stevie," the babe says. "He's cool." The babe stands, pressing his hips into the edge of the table. Dawn's fingers stroke the tabletop. Her nails, hard pink shells, click against the tabletop. "Cool," she whispers. She stands, brushing against the babe as she pulls out of the booth. There's the sizzle of fabric against fabric. "We'll meet you by Macy's," she says, and struts fast out of Orange Julius, heading back towards the Sears bathroom. I follow, running to keep up. In the bathroom I open my eyes as wide as possible, feeling tears building up at the edge of my mascara. "I can't believe you, Dawn." My voice is heavy and scratched. "Telling that guy I was hot for his skank friend." "He's all right," Dawn says, putting on lip gloss with a fingertip. "He has long hair. What's with you?" "I don't want to hang with him is all." I press my index fingers to the corner of my eyes. The tips of my fingers are black with mascara and tears. There's a noise at the back of my throat that wants to come out, but I know Dawn will be mad if I let it. My stomach feels huge. The thought of that skanky Barney Rubble out there makes me want to puke, though he's no worse than some of the others I've had to put up with. It's no coincidence that every babe Dawn finds has a skanky-looking best friend along with him. That's what people see when they look at Dawn and me. I've noticed how beautiful people like to have a skank friend to hang out with. It makes them look even better. "Oh, man," Dawn says. "Are you my best friend, or what?" "You know I am." My voice cracks in half. Carefully I wipe away the black tear running down my cheek with a twist of Kleenex. "I just don't want to be with that guy," I tell her. "He's a skank, and you know it." A lady comes into the bathroom carrying a shopping bag. She goes into a stall. Dawn turns the hand dryer on so we can talk privately. "Look," Dawn whispers. "If you're my best friend, you'll do this for me. Because I'll tell you one thing for sure-- only my best friend can sleep over at my house tonight." I stand there weeping. It takes forever to get my breath. "Janine," Dawn says finally, tiring of my crap, "fix your face and let's go." I get out my compact and brush powder across my cheekbones, and then redo my mascara and eyeliner. I work quickly, knowing Dawn will leave me behind if I don't hurry. A woman comes in with a little boy, chocolate ice cream smeared down his cheeks. She lifts him up to the sink and wets a tissue to wipe his face. I want to go away with her. I want to be a child again. "Look," Dawn says, leaning into me, her voice softer now. "You don't have to do anything. I just don't want to be alone with the guy the first time. We'll stick together, I promise. And later when we get home, we'll eat some eggs or something. OK?" I nod my head. My face is glowing again in the mirror. I open my eyes wide, testing my mascara. A toilet flushes, and the woman with the shopping bag comes out, washes up, looks at herself in the mirror. She slides her lips together, evening out her lipstick. She's pretty for an old lady. She must be at least 40. It's depressing to think about all the years I'll have to worry about my makeup and my hair before I get old enough that no one cares. We leave the bathroom, head to Macy's, and there they are, waiting for us by the exit. The babe sees us and pulls a wig crooked on a mannequin to show off. I smile. My skin is tight with layers of powder, but underneath it I can feel my face swollen from crying. "Hey, what's up?" The babe says. "This is my buddy. Stevie. He's cool." "Hi," I say. I bend my lips up into something like a smile. Dawn is giggling with her hand over her mouth. "What's up?" Stevie says. His eyes are crooked and small. We head out to the parking lot. It's dark out. Headlights reflect off cars as we walk out to the strip of grass that separates the highway from Macy's parking lot. Thick, green bushes are planted in a row that lead out to the entrance and exit signs that separate the lanes of traffic in and out of Macy's. Dawn and me lean against the enter sign. Stevie and the babe stand across from us. The babe has a pint of Southern Comfort. He passes it around. A wind is blowing, drying the sweat under my arms. "So," the babe says, finally, "what's up?" "I'm cold," Dawn says. "Here," he says. He takes off his leather, wraps it around her, leaving his arm on her shoulder. Suddenly they're going at it. She falls against the enter sign with a bang, and I move away quickly as he presses into her with his hips and chest. I look at Stevie and past him at the cars streaming by on the highway. He makes a noise in his throat and spits on the grass. "What's up?" he says. "Nothing," I say, looking down. He put his arm around me. The babe has a hand up Dawn's shirt. I catch a corner of her bra under his cupped hand. Stevie's hand curls around my shoulder slowly. I can tell he thinks I won't notice. The babe breaks away from Dawn a moment and says, "time to hit the pit?" Dawn looks at me. "Come on, Janine." I shake my head. She puckers her lips. We go behind the exit sign. She's sweaty, her makeup rising like a film over her face. "Janine you want a place to sleep tonight?" Her voice is thick, breathless. It's dark enough out that I just let my mascara run with a flood of tears. I know Dawn can see, but she just flips her hair and steps back away from me, talking loud so the guys can hear. "You think you can do better?" she says. I look at her. Even in the wind from the cars and the sweat on her face, she's still something I'll never be. From the tiny points of her shoulders to the long swoop of her legs, down to her ankles, like glass balanced on high heels. I give in. We cross the highway and take the path down to the woods we call the pit. It's just dug up land from where they took the dirt to make the cement for the mall a million years ago. Thin pine trees planted along the highway have grown tall to block out the streetlights, and below, sticker bushes divide the pit into narrow pathways and openings where people hang in the dark to fool around or do drugs or hide from the cops. Stevie has a hand on my ass. He whispers in my ear, "You got at nice body, OK?" The babe and Dawn have disappeared into the woods. I call her name, but she won't answer. From up the hill I hear a truck shifting gears, a horn. Some guy screams, "Dildo." Stevie says, "Shh, relax." We walk further into the pit, passing the dark outlines of couples against trees or rolling slowly in the dirt. We find a clearing with an overturned shopping cart, and Stevie sits. I go to sit next to him, but he grabs my head tight over my ears so that everything sounds like an ocean. And behind the roar I hear him whispering, "I love you. Yeah, I really love you, OK?" Pushing me down to my knees, pushing my face into his zipper. And then there's the smell of him, gagging me through his jeans. I've been in this position before, lots of times, because of Dawn and other girls who were once my best friend. And lots of times when I thought maybe a guy might really like me. I know I'm supposed to go numb, just open my mouth and let it happen, and then wait for Dawn to call me to go home. But this time I can't seem to. This time there's no pretending that I'm doing it for Dawn or for myself or for any reason at all. Because this time I can see suddenly that Dawn is getting tired of me. Even if I play this right with Stevie, my days are numbered as her best friend. I open my eyes. After a moment, the gold thread along the zipper of his jeans appears. Tears are running into my mouth. My M up is shot. I try. I try so hard for Dawn, for my best friend. I try to keep my face pressed against his zipper, but I can't. And when his hand comes down and unbuttons his jeans, I pull away and stand up. "You're a skank," I hear myself say. "Hey," he says. "Come on, help me out here. You can't leave me like this. It's killing me, OK?" I call for Dawn, but she still won't answer, so I turn and start back up toward the road. "Hey," Stevie yells after me. "You on the rag or something?" "I'm leaving, Dawn," I yell one last time. I know if I walk back to the mall, I'll be doing something awful. I know as soon as I step out of these woods, I won't have a best friend anymore. "Oh, get lost, fat girl," Stevie yells from behind me. Then after a moment he adds, "It's your loss, OK?" I start to run. I run up out of the woods and across the highway and through the lines of parked cars and into Macy's. I run through lingerie and pantyhose and piles of scarves. I run to the center of the mall where I stop, with a burning cramp squeezing my side, feeling my fat stomach covered in sweat under Dawn's borrowed sweater. I stand there panting, my face aching with dried tears. No one seems to notice me. The benches by the fountain are empty, and something tells me if I've lost Dawn, I've lost Gail and Carol, too. I've lost all the girls that sit at Dawn's lunch table at school. I'm all alone, and I have nowhere to sleep tonight. I go into Anthony's and buy three slices with pepperoni with the last of my money. I eat as fast as I can, with warm grease dripping down my neck. My throat burns with swallowing so fast. Inside the Sears bathroom there are two girls at the sink. I don't know them. One girl has her head back, and the other is French braiding her hair. Best friends. When they see me, one of them reaches up, turns on the hand dryer to shut me out. I go into a stall and lean over the bowl, one hand holding onto the toilet paper roll. The other hand turns into a knife. I stick it down into my throat until my stomach starts to shake and my mouth gags open, and the pizza rushes back up me and down, splashing into the bowl. The hand dryer clicks off. One of the girls says, "Lisa should never wear yellow. Have you noticed that? She looks like a frog in yellow. It's weird." I lean against the wall of the stall, my head against the coat hook. My stomach feels thin and flat, empty. I let out a deep breath of air, and just for that one moment, between letting air out and filling myself up again, I feel beautiful, like a puzzle piece sliding in to fit. But then it's gone, and I flush the toilet and come out. "Skanks" was by Rennie Sparks. Music was by The Handsome Family. Act Three, Good Girl. Well, our program today about teenage girls comes to a close with this last story from radio producer Greg Whitehead, who lives in Massachusetts. This story is called "This Mindless Thing." Again, some content in this story may not be suitable 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 hard. So I don't know. He 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, you know--" And he had a little sister who was pestering us. So eventually I said, [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] And he's like, "Oh, no." And asks me do I want to see it. I did. And of course, I want to see it. I mean, I want to know what it looks like. But at the same time, I feel like I'm in this incredibly ominous-- this is a dangerous situation. It's pornographic. 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 [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] --I want to see it jump, this is what I have to do. 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 to get to a safe place. 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 worst 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. And it wasn't loving to coerce someone or to seduce someone-- or to seduce a little girl. It was as if he were 40. So here was this mindless thing. And he would look at me and think that I had been curious. "Want to see it jump?" So he could make it move. And flop around all by itself. --mindless thing, but it has a mind of its own and a body of its own. It sort of moved around. And I was just appalled. I had no idea that this was what happened, that you could make it move all by itself, without touching it. And that it just stood up, stood straight up. It was like his little ventriloquist dummy that he could make talk to me. It wasn't playful. It wasn't erotic. It wasn't loving. We put our clothes back on. My mother came and picked us up. And I walked outside on his nice suburban lawn. I just wanted to get out of there. And his mother was there, and my mother was talking to his mother. And I stared at our mothers. If they knew what had been going on. 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. Could we have chosen a more creepy song than this one to put at this place in our program? I do not think so. Anyway, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and by myself, with Peter Clowney, Alix Spiegel, and Dolores Wilber. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and the fabulous Margy Rochlin. Musical help with today's show from Chicago DJ John Connors and from the mysterious and elusive Rumpty Rattles. Original musical scoring under Rennie Sparks' story by The Handsome Family. If you'd like a copy of this program, it only costs $10. That's 10. You can call us at WBEZ to get one. 312-832-3380. That's 312-832-3380. Or you can email us. All emails get answered. Eventually. The address, [email protected] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass. Time to hit the pit? You bet. We'll be back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Alex Meyer wants my job. He's 16, and he wants my job. But nobody is going to give him my job, or really any job in radio. And so last year he decided to create his own radio show as a high school freshman in Seattle. And he did it with the kind of devotion and attention to detail of a true believer. It's kind of an amazing show actually, starting with the opening, which he lifted from one of his radio heroes, Tom Leykis, who does a syndicated show out of Los Angeles. I was pretty much ripping off Leykis, because at the top of every hour he plays Metallica, "Enter Sandman." And he has this big thing. They're all saying, "Live from Los Angeles, it's the Tom Leykis Show." And he's like "Thank you for tuning into the Tom Leykis show. It's not hosted by a right wing wacko, a convicted felon. No, I'm your host." Blah, blah, blah, blah. And gives out the numbers and everything. So I was like, I want something like that. Yeah that sounds good. I want my big thing. "Hey everybody. It's The Alex Meyer Show. 1-800-421-ALEX, toll-free. Yeah that's free. 1-800-421-2539--" Actually, if you call that number, it's AT&T. And I think they ask you if you want it in Spanish. In Seattle, a lot of the radio station numbers start with 421. That's something I noticed. And put 421, put ALEX, 1-800. Oh, sounds good. Now sometimes you have your friend Matt come on and-- Yeah, my quote, "producer." I gave him that title, because I needed a producer character to pretty much yell at. Because you hear that a lot on the radio here, dysfunctional radio shows. So I figured, wow. He's pretty much just a character. "Well we have Matt the producer here to talk to you about this actually. This is Matt's area of expertise. It's something that happened to him. His ex-girlfriend pretty much wanted him for the dance. It almost seems like-- That's what it seems like. She used him for the dance. That's what it seems like. And I'll tell you something. A while ago, she asked me to the next dance. Wow. And see, I never really wanted to go with her. First I told her I was building houses for poor people in Mexico, and therefore would not be able to make it. What's remarkable is that even though Alex is making the show in his room on his dad's discarded cassette recorder, and even though the show never actually broadcasts anywhere, it sounds like a real commercial radio talk show. The pacing, the fact that Alex is closer to the mic than any of his guests so he sounds clearer and louder. He has phone callers, though of course, since he's not broadcasting, Alex plays those himself. And I have Dan from Eugene. Dan is an irritating character. Yeah, I had to have the guy who hated me. And he's that character. Yeah. So every time he calls, I'm, Alex, I hate your show. You suck. This is Dan from Eugene. I love how part of the formula of having a fantasy radio show is that you have a fantasy person who hates your guts. Well, it's kind of fun being someone that hates you though. It is kind of fun. To make it sound as real as possible, Alex uses real commercials that he tapes off the radio. Sometimes he and Matt pretend to have a seven second delay, like Howard Stern and the other big shows use. And someone has said a bad word, so what you hear is this sudden gap and jump in content, though of course, it's just a cassette in his bedroom. It's not a real broadcast. And like any modern ambitious talk show host, there are right wing rants. That's just part of the formula. You know what makes no sense at all. A dollar bill-- For me to pass high school, according to the state, I need to learn Spanish. Yet-- Or any foreign language. Wait, wait. But yet, foreigners working in 7-Elevens don't have to know a god damn word of English. No they don't. What sense does that make? For me to live in this country, I have to learn a foreign language. They don't have to learn anything. I wondered if you're more like a real radio personality or shock jock, where that's a thought that, actually, you only half believe that. But your views aren't quite as extreme as you're saying in the recording. Yeah pretty much. I mean it's more of an shtick thing, I guess. Alex distributes his show by copying it onto CDs for friends at school. Big ratings for him, he says, are when he gets an audience of six, six people. But frankly, having people listen doesn't seem to be the important part of it to him. He's in training. No one seems to be interested giving a 16 year old a job in radio or a place to learn. So he created his own place where he's learning, honing his skills, preparing for the future, which brings me to the subject of today's radio show. Today on our program, we bring you three stories of people who take on unlikely tasks, put themselves in charge in very unpromising circumstances. And we see what happens to them as a result. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. Act One of today's show, It's Not Just the Aces That Are Wild. In that act, David Sedaris tells the story of how as a teenager he was scared of certain people until he made them scared of him. Act Two, Playing Clinton in the Bush Leagues, in which we bring you the story of a politician with tons of charisma, full of promise, who goes through the fastest rise and fall we have ever heard of in politics. Act Three, You Talking to Me? Yes, we all know we Americans declared ourselves the rulers of Iraq for now. So why is one of the most popular rumors in the country that Saddam Hussein is not only alive, but living in the White House? Stay with us. And let's get right to it with Act One. Here's writer David Sedaris, recorded in front of a live audience in Boston. My parents were not the type of people who went to bed at a regular hour. Sleep overtook them, but neither the time nor the idea of a mattress seemed very important. My father favored a chair in the basement, but my mother was apt to lie down anywhere, waking with carpet burns on her face or the pattern of the sofa embossed into the soft flesh of her upper arms. It was sort of embarrassing. She might sleep for eight hours a day. But they were never consecutive hours, and they involved no separate outfit. For Christmas, we would give her nightgowns, hoping she might take the hint. They're for bedtime, we'd say. Then she'd look at us strangely as if, like the moment of one's death, the occasion of sleep was too incalculable for any real preparation. The upswing to being raised by what were essentially a pair of house cats was that we never had any enforced bedtime. We were the family that never shut down, the family whose TV was so hot we needed an oven mitt in order to change the channels. Every night was basically a slumber party. So when the real thing came along, my sisters and I failed to show much of an interest. The first one I attended was held by a neighbor named Walt Winters. Like myself, Walt was in the sixth grade. Unlike myself, he was gregarious and athletic, which meant basically that we had absolutely nothing in common. "But why would he include me?" I asked my mother. "I hardly know the guy." She did not say that Walt's mother had made him invite me, but on watching her turn away, I knew that this was the only likely explanation. "Oh go," she said, "it'll be fun." There were four styles of houses on our street, and while Walt's was different from my own, I was familiar with the layout. The slumber party took place in what the Methodists called the family room, the Catholics used as an extra bedroom, and the neighborhood's only Jews had turned into a combination dark room and fallout shelter. Walt's family was Methodist, and so the room's focal point was a large black and white television. Family photos hung on the wall alongside pictures of the various athletes Mr. Winters had successfully pestered for autographs. I admired them to the best of my ability but was more interested in the wedding portrait displayed above the sofa. Arm in arm with her uniformed husband, Walt's mother looked deliriously, almost frighteningly happy. The bulging eyes and fierce, gummy smile. It was an expression bordering on hysteria, and the intervening years had done nothing to dampen it. On passing Mrs. Winters waving gaily from her front yard, my mother would whisper, "What is she on?" I thought she was being too hard on her, but after 10 minutes in the woman's home, I understood exactly what my mother was talking about. "Pizza's here," she chimed when the delivery man came to the door. "Oh boys, how about some piping hot pizza?" I thought it was funny that anyone would use the words piping hot. But it wasn't the kind of thing I felt I could actually laugh at. Neither could I laugh at Mr. Winters' pathetic imitation of an Italian waiter. "Mamma Mia, who want another slice of the pizza?" I had the idea that adults were supposed to make themselves scarce at slumber parties. But Walt's parents were all over the place, initiating games, offering snacks and refills. When the midnight horror movie came on, Walt's mother crept into the bathroom, leaving a ketchup-spattered knife beside the sink. An hour passed, and when none of us had yet discovered it, she started dropping little hints. "Doesn't anyone want to wash their hands?" she asked. "Will whoever is closest to the door go check and see if I left fresh towels in the bathroom?" You just wanted to cry for people like her. As corny as they were, I was sorry when the movie ended and Mr. And Mrs. Winters stood to leave. It was only 2:00 AM, but clearly they were done in. "I just don't know how you boys can do it," Walt's mother said, yawning into the sleeve of her bathrobe. "I haven't been up this late since Lauren came into the world. Lauren was Walt's sister, who was born premature and had lived for less than two days. This had happened before the Winters moved onto our street, but it wasn't any kind of a secret. And you weren't supposed to flinch upon hearing the girl's name. The baby had died too early to pose for photographs, but still she was regarded as a full fledged member of the family. She had a Christmas stocking the size of a mitten. And they even threw her an annual birthday party, a fact my mother found especially creepy. "Let's hope they don't invite us," she said. "I mean Jesus, how do you shop for a dead baby?" I guessed it was the fear of another premature birth that kept Mrs. Winters from trying again, which was sad, as you got the sense she really wanted a lively household. You got the sense she had an idea of a lively household, and that the slumber party and the ketchup-covered knife were all a part of that idea. While in her presence, we had played along. But once she said good night, I understood that all bets were off. She and her husband lumbered up the stairs. And when Walt felt certain they were asleep, he pounced on Dale Gummerson, shouting "Titty twister!" Brad Clancy joined in, and when they had finished, Dale raised his shirt, revealing nipples as crimped and ruddy as the pepperoni slices littering the forsaken pizza box. "Oh my God," I said, realizing too late that this made me sound like a girl. The appropriate response was to laugh at Dale's misfortune, not to flutter your hands in front of your face, screeching, "What have they done to your poor nipples? Shouldn't we put some ice on them?" Walt picked up on this immediately. "Did you just say you wanted to put ice on Dale's nipples?" "Well not me personally," I said. "I meant, you know, generally, as a group. Or Dale could do it himself if he felt like it." Walt's eyes wandered from my face to my chest. And then the entire slumber party was upon me. My shirt was raised, a hand was clamped over my mouth, and Walt latched on to my nipples, twisting them back and forth as if they were a set of particularly stubborn lug nuts. "Now who needs ice?" he said. "Now who thinks he's a god damn school nurse?" I'd once felt sorry for Walt, but now, my eyes watering in pain, I understood that little Lauren was smart to have cut out early. When eventually I was freed, I went upstairs and stood at the kitchen window, my arms folded lightly against my chest. My house was located in a ravine. You couldn't see it from the street, but still I could make out the glow of light spilling from the top of our driveway. It was tempting, but were I to leave now, I'd never hear the end of it. The baby cried. The baby had to go home. Life at school would be unbearable. And so I left the window and returned to the basement where Walt was shuffling cards against the coffee table. "Just in time," he said. "Have a seat." I lowered myself to the floor and reached for a magazine. "I'm not really much for games. So if it's OK with you, I think I'll just watch." "Watch hell," Walt said. "This is strip poker. What kind of a homo wants to sit around and watch four guys get naked?" The logic of this was lost on me. "Well won't we all sort of be watching?" "Looking maybe, but not watching," Walt said. "There's a difference." Again, I had no idea what he was talking about. Walt made a twisting motion with his fingers, and I took my place at the table, praying for a gas leak or an electrical fire, anything to save me from the catastrophe of strip poker. To the rest of the group, a naked boy was like a lamp or an extension cord, something so familiar and uninteresting it faded into the background. But for me it was different. A naked boy was what I desired more than anything on earth. And when you were both watching and desiring, things came up, one thing, in particular, that was bound to stand out and ruin your life forever. "I hate to tell you," I said, "but it's against my religion to play poker." "Yeah right," Walt said. "What are you Baptists?" "Greek Orthodox." "Well then that's a load of crap, because the Greeks invented cards," Walt said. "Actually, I think it was the Egyptians." This from Scott, who was quickly identifying himself as the smart one. "Greeks, Egyptians, they're all the same thing," Walt said. "Anyway, what your pooh-bah doesn't know won't hurt him. So shut the hell up and play." He dealt the cards, and I looked from face to face, exaggerating flaws and reminding myself that these boys did not like me. The hope was that I might kill any surviving atom of attraction. But as has been the case for my entire life, the more someone dislikes me, the more attractive they become. The key was to stall, to argue every hand until the sun came up and Mrs. Winters saved me with whatever cheerful monstrosity she had planned for breakfast. Usually when forced to compete, it was my tactic to simply give up. To try in any way was to announce your ambition, which only made you more vulnerable. Here though, surrender was not an option. I had to win in a game I knew nothing about. And that seemed hopeless until I realized we were all on an even keel. Not even Scott had the slightest idea what he was doing. And by feigning an air of expertise, I found I could manipulate things in my favor. "A joker and a queen is much better than a four and five of spades," I said, defending my hand against Brad Clancy's. "But you have a joker and a three of diamonds." "Yeah, but the joker makes it a queen." "I thought you said that poker was against your religion," Walt said. "Well that doesn't mean I don't understand it. Greeks invented cards, remember? They're in my blood." At the start of the game, the starburst clock had read 3:30. An hour later I was missing one shoe. Scott and Brad had lost their shirts. And both Walt and Dale were down to their underwear. If this was what winning felt like, I wondered why I hadn't tried it earlier. Confidently in the lead, I invented little reasons for the undressed to get up and move about the room. "Hey Walt, did you hear that? Sounded like your mother calling." "I didn't hear anything." "Well why don't you go to the stairway and check? We don't want any surprises." His underwear was all bunchy in the back, saggy like a diaper. But his legs were meaty and satisfying to look at. "Dale, would you make sure those curtains are closed?" He crossed the room, and I ate him alive with my eyes, confident that no one would accuse me of gaping. Things might have been different were I in last place. But as the winner, it was my right to make sure that things were done properly. "There's a little gap down by the baseboard. Bend over and close it, will you?" It took a while, but once I explained that a pair of kings was no match for the two of hearts and a three of spades, Walt surrendered his underpants and tossed them onto the pile beside the TV set. "OK," he said, "now the rest of you can finish the game." "But it is finished," Scott said. "Oh no," Walt said. "I'm not the only one getting naked. You guys have to keep playing." "While you what? Sit and watch?" I said. "What kind of a homo are you?" "Yeah," Dale said. "Why don't we do something else? This game's boring and the rules are impossible." The others muttered their agreement. And when Walt refused to back down, I gathered the deck and tamped it commandingly upon the table top. "The only solution is for us all to keep playing." "Well how the hell do you expect me to do that?" Walt said. "In case you haven't noticed, there's nothing more for me to lose." "Oh," I said, "there's always more. Maybe if the weakest hand is already naked, we should make that person perform some kind of a task. Nothing big, but you know, just a token kind of a thing." "A think like what?" Walt asked. "I don't know. I guess we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it." In retrospect, I probably went a little too far in ordering Scott to sit on my lap. "But I'm naked," he said. "Hey," I said, "I'm the one who's going to be suffering. I was just looking for something easy. Would you rather run outside and touch the mailbox? The sun will be coming up in about 20 seconds. You want the whole neighborhood to see you?" "How long will I have to sit on you?" He asked. "I don't know, a minute or two. Maybe five, or seven." I moved on to the easy chair and wearily patted my knee as if this were a great sacrifice. Scott slid into place, and I considered our reflection in the darkened TV screen. Here I was, one naked guy on my lap and three others ready to do my bidding. It was the stuff of dreams until I remembered that they were not doing these things of their own accord. This was not their pleasure but their punishment. And once it was over, they would make it a point to avoid me. Rumors would spread that I had slipped something into their Cokes, that I had tried to French Brad Clancy, that I had stolen $5 from Wade's pocket. Not even Mrs. Winters would wave at me. But all that would come later in a different life. For now, I would savor this poor imitation of tenderness, mapping Scott's shoulders, the small of his back, as he shuddered beneath my winning hand. David Sedaris is the author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and several other books. Act Two, Playing Clinton in the Bush Leagues. And now the story of another precocious upstart, a winner in this case, someone who people love so much that he went into politics and took on some of the trappings of a minor, very minor, demagogue in the small Texas town of Gun Barrel City. Katy Vine tells this cautionary tale. Tye Thomas was one of those kids who appeared destined for success, the one adults look at and say, that kid's going places. The kind of kid who'd buy bulk candy and lottery tickets and hawk them in his classes at a markup of 300%, 400%, sometimes 500%. Now my best idea that I ever had was my dad used to carry me down to the local bar. It was called Captain John's in Gun Barrel City. They have in some Texas bars what they call a jukebox fund. And somebody will go around and collect $1 or $2 from everybody in the bar. And they go stick it in the jukebox. But what I would do is I would go around on a busy day, and collect $1 or $2 or $3 from everybody. And I was so young and cute then, people were just happy to give me the money. But what I'd do is I'd go put about $10 in the jukebox. And whatever was left over I'd stick in my pocket. That's just flat out stealing. However, I made a hell of a lot of money. The elements of most of Tye's stories are contained in this anecdote. He starts with a big idea. The big idea skirts the fine points of the law. Then he feels a little bit guilty about his actions. And he ignores it. When Tye was 15 years old, he founded a little six page newspaper, The Cedar Creek Briefs, which by the time he graduated, he had turned into a 24 page publication, mostly made up of ads. Before he went off to private college, he sold it for more money than his parents' combined income that year. After college, he picked up where he left off. He bought the town newspaper, founded another one, and started buying up residential and commercial properties. Once he had his economic empire established, he started building his political empire. He decided to run for mayor. He launched a direct mail campaign. Every day after work, he went door to door asking people to vote for him. He even staffed a phone bank. For a town of 5,000, it was a well-oiled machine. Plus he was running as a reformer. When Tye Thomas came on the scene in Gun Barrel City as a political figure, Gun Barrel City was somewhat of a laughing stock. Mike Hannigan is the editor of the Cedar Creek Pilot, which had been the main competing newspaper to Tye's two newspapers. We had a city manager that one time came out and said someone had put a bomb under his car. And it ended up being a jug of gasoline. And this is a town that was coming off of watching our mayor kick in a door in City Hall on TV. And Tye Thomas looked like the kind of guy that would make that kind of stuff go away. He knew how to sell things. He knew how to sell himself. People believed that he would be able to sell Gun Barrel City. I mean he was a young guy, new ideas, good personality, had a great smile. Everybody liked him. How could this kid get us into trouble? On election day, Tye went down to City Hall, where the secretary had posted the results. He had won 67% of the vote, a landslide. He was 21 years old. You know after three months of working for something, I felt like doing cartwheels in the parking lot. I felt like taking my clothes off and running down the highway naked. But I contained myself. I remember I wrote a journal entry the next morning, that next Sunday morning, May 7, And it felt so weird waking up on the couch-- because I sleep on the couch every night-- it felt so weird waking up on the couch knowing that I was now the mayor of my city. A lot of people can win an election. But to win an election in a landslide usually takes a certain kind of politician, one who motivates the community and one who also feeds off the affirmation of his people. Tye Thomas is one of those politicians. The first three or four months after I was elected were I would have to say probably the greatest four months of my life, looking back. I was invited often to speak to groups to share my vision for the city. I received lots of positive press, lots of great publicity. The city was receiving wonderful publicity as a result of my winning the election. I was working on the promise that I would return the peace and the serenity to City Hall, which I didn't do. I actually probably made it worse. One of the things that makes Tye such a remarkable character is that he's so candid. His candor was refreshing, maybe even necessary, for success in a town whose motto was "we shoot you straight." But in politics, like in all sorts of careers, there are just some times you are better off keeping your mouth shut. Again, editor Mike Hannigan. I remember the time he went on a Dallas radio station for a win a date with the mayor contest, where they actually had women calling in and talking to Tye and Tye talking to them. And one of them got to have a date with Tye Thomas. So somebody did win a date? Oh, yeah. Were people in the community embarrassed, though, that he did that? People in the community were horrified. One of the best examples was he goes to a bar and admittedly-- in a newspaper article admits that he drank a little too much and didn't think he should be driving home. So the first thing he thought of was to call the police to give him a hand, call for a police escort home. And all this is not quite what the average person would think that the police was supposed to be doing. But Tye never gave it a second thought. I mean hey, he was in trouble. The police were there to serve. I'm Tye Thomas. Let me give them a call. There is more than one story like this about Tye stretching the boundaries of what was acceptable. They eventually led to a DA investigation. And on April 27, 2001, Tye was indicted by a grand jury on perjury charges, a Class A misdemeanor. He was accused of lying about his residency in the town on his application for mayor. Remember, Tye was the town hero. He had won in a landslide, which is maybe why he assumed the public would give him the benefit of the doubt. And so Tye Thomas did what a lot of popular politicians accused of wrongdoing have done before him. He denied the charges. He said the attack was politically motivated. Tye says his problems started right after he declared publicly that he wanted to run for state rep against an incumbent named Clyde Alexander. That's when all of my troubles began. That's when his ally, Democrat District Attorney Donna Bennett opened up all of her investigations into me and things I had done in the past. She used investigations as a political war tool to discredit my character and my job that I was doing as mayor. There is, of course, one problem with this conspiracy theory. And that is that the incumbent, Clyde Alexander, didn't run. In any case, it shouldn't have mattered. Mike Hannigan. Now I think Tye probably could have survived all of that. But that's when he went to the alcohol, and the drugs, and the Xanax. It was a Monday morning. The grand jury was the upcoming Thursday. Even though I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was not guilty of the crimes that she was trying to present against me, there was this little voice in my head that's saying, Golly, four to 20 years in prison? I'd rather die. I was scared. I've got to admit to you, Monday morning I woke up at about 7 o'clock and I was scared to death. And I took two, or three, or four Xanax. I can't remember how many. Xanax is an anti-anxiety medication that my doctor prescribes to me. And then that evening I went out and I started drinking vodka tonics. And by the end of the evening, I was drinking straight vodka. And I was completely and totally intoxicated. Well I don't know when, but sometime later I vomited, because I had had so much to drink. And I was still asleep on the couch. My ex-fiancee [? Kathy ?] decides to come over. She finds me passed out on the couch in a pool of vomit. She picks up the phone and calls 911, and tells the dispatcher that she was in the mayor's condo and that he had overdosed on Xanax. I didn't wake up until there were about six police officers in my house and about eight paramedics. She'd made a 911 call, which is public record. And I knew that the newspaper would pick up on that. And boy it would be the hot story that week. So in some nutso, idiot, ridiculous, drunken state of mind, I decided I wanted to go to jail. Gun Barrel Police Department. Who's speaking, Red? This is Red. Red, this is Mayor Thomas. Get ?] off the phone. I need an officer to come and immediately arrest me. What's the emergency? I am guilty of public intoxication. And I need to be taken to jail. Well, you can't be publicly intoxicated in your own home, sir. Well, I'll be in the parking lot. Mr. Mayor, as soon as I got one available, I'll send him right away. And I think I called five or six times. I didn't know what I said until my competitor newspaper got a copy of all the 911 tapes, and so did the TV stations in Dallas, and played them. It was pretty embarrassing to hear yourself drunk on the 10 o'clock news. These days, having attended his share of AA meetings, Tye Thomas will be the first to admit that he had problems with substance abuse. But you get the sense that he first grasped the seriousness of his trouble just as it was being broadcast to everyone in the Dallas-Forth Worth area. The incident was the nail in the coffin. 21 days later, he resigned as mayor. Afterwards, he had bouts of depression. He sat in his condo with the blinds closed for days at a time, not bathing, wearing only his bathrobe. He became paranoid, and went so far as to re-shred paper shreddings in his apartment. He thought he was being watched. Eventually he left town. One of the most striking things about the whole episode is the extremes of Tye's confidence and his fragility. It seems strange. How can somebody who had such absolute faith in his ability to lead be dragged into a drug and alcohol spiral by charges he could have beaten? But at least in Tye's case, the confidence and fragility seem linked. They both come from a failure to anticipate the thought that occurs to all the rest of us as second nature. What if I fail? What if I can't lead? What if they don't like me? It's a very innocent thought. Tye had an innocence about other people's faith in him and an innocence about his faith in himself. You see when I ran for mayor, and after I was first elected, I really felt that emotionally and mentally I was invincible. I didn't believe that anything or anybody could change my self-esteem or the way that I felt about myself. And I was dead wrong. If you could maybe wipe the town memory absolutely clean, would you go back and try again? No. If they had no memory of who Tye Thomas was and you were going in for the first time? No, I wouldn't go back. How come? I've become very sensitive to how situations that I place myself in are going to affect me emotionally. And that's not something I would ever put myself through again. Even if it had a completely different outcome, even if I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was going to be positive, I wouldn't go back and do it. Despite all that, as Mike Hannigan points out, his term wasn't exactly a failure. He made himself into exactly what he wanted to make himself into. He became a public figure, almost an icon. Light a fire within you. Some will come and join you. And others will come just to watch you burn. And back then, I had a strong fire going with me. And people couldn't get enough of it. Tye Thomas has an unholy hold on the Gun Barrel City imagination. He has been gone for years now, and I still get phone calls with people telling me, hey, he just did this. Hey, he just did that. Let me tell you, it's a wonderful feeling to go to the newsstand and buy a newspaper and not have to worry about your picture or name being on the front page. At first I loved it. And now that's something that I grew to despise. Some politicians take a lifetime to get to the point Tye got to in a year. The stunning rise to the top, the scandal, and the fall from grace. Tye says he hasn't entirely ruled out a future run for office. But he figures he'll have to wait at least 15 years before he can claim it's all behind him, that he's someone else. So he waits. He's not even 25. Katy Vine is a writer for the magazine Texas Monthly. Coming up, US officials, many of them young and charming, come into Iraq carrying their message of hope, and democracy, and freedom. And why even the Iraqis who want to hear that message don't seem to. 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, I'm in Charge Here, stories of people who get filled with American entrepreneurial spirit to take over, create something new, full of self confidence, and what sometimes happens to them. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, You Talkin' to Me? Nearly every day, there's some story from Iraq about how badly the US occupation there is going. Soldiers getting shot, basic services still not working. And one of the big problems there is the information gap between the Iraqis and the Americans who are running the country. One small, telling sign of that gap, even the name of the agency running the country hasn't gotten out to most Iraqis. That agency's name? It's called the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA. When Iraqis know any name, it's usually the name the agency used to be called, ORHA, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Well, reporter Adam Davidson says the information gap is one of the most ominous things about living in Baghdad these days. There's an information void. And as a result, rumors are everywhere. Amjad, my translator, tells me the new ones every morning. And then I hear them repeated by different people all day. People say the Americans are burning Iraqi currency in big trash barrels at gas stations, because they want Iraqis to be poor. They say Israelis are buying up the most valuable real estate in Iraq so they can occupy Iraq just like Palestine. Then there's the rumor you hear most often, that Saddam Hussein is living in the US somewhere in a big mansion. I hear this all the time, that Saddam worked with the Americans, arranged for the American invasion so that the US could take over the country and steal its oil. In the last few weeks this rumor has changed a bit. People now say Saddam is living in the White House. Whether the rumor is right or correct or not, what we do is convey the rumor by itself without giving our own point of view or our own opinion about this rumor. Mustafa publishes Al-Saah, The Clock, one of the newspapers that have sprung up in Baghdad since the fall of Saddam Hussein. So many papers have appeared that nobody knows exactly how many there are. The last count I heard was 105. Mustafa tells me the paper has 30 reporters. Every day they try to find some American somewhere who will answer their questions. We need to interview members of ORHA personally to ask them their questions, to know their feelings, to know what kind of measures they are taking. We always try to get information from ORHA. We are always sending our reporters there to the office. But they found difficulties in getting this information. So they're left printing rumors. One issue of Al-Saah reported that American soldiers were giving pornography to schoolgirls, another rumor I heard a lot. Another explained how the Americans had promised to give $50 to every Iraqi. The photo on the front page was of an American soldier attacking an older man. In red writing along the sides there was a prayer, "Merciful God, deliver us from this damnation." All this was an Arabic, along with editorials denouncing the US occupation. But like a lot of Iraqi newspapers, one of Al-Saah's eight pages is in English. The English page seems to come from some other newspaper. It's completely pro-American. The photo on that page was of a friendly female soldier giving a bottle of water to a grateful young Iraqi girl. There's an article about how the Americans had helped to open a school. As one reporter told me, the English page is for the Americans to read, so they won't get mad at Al-Saah. The Arabic pages are for the Iraqis. In general, Iraqis know the Americans are in charge. But they have no idea what the Americans here are up to. Most people have heard of Paul Bremer, the guy who's in charge of Iraq right now. But they don't know anything about him. These men were standing near the [? Jamuhuri ?] Bridge, about a block from the American headquarters in Iraq. What have you heard from the Americans about what their plans are? I heard nothing. I heard nothing from them. What do you know about Bremer? What do you know about Bremer? I don't anything. If he-- Only promises. Only promises. That's all I know about Bremer. If he were walking down the street, would you recognize him? No. No. [SPEAKING ARABIC] If he was walking along we don't know him. Maybe you are Bremer. Talking to people in Baghdad, I've thought a lot about what it would be like to be back home in America if the situation were reversed. If there were this group of Iraqis who don't speak English running my country, knowing they're making plans that will affect every part of my life and not knowing anything about what those plans are. Not even knowing anything about who those people are. One thing you hear all the time is if the Americans wanted to fix all this with all their money and power, they could. So the only explanation is they don't care. Or worse, they want Iraqis to suffer. The headquarters of the US administration in Iraq is right in the center of Baghdad, Saddam's Republican Palace. It's like a fortress. All you can see from the street is barbed concertina wire and a whole lot of US infantry. In the distance is this large arch and, through it, a tree-lined road. It's like a small city in there. This was Saddam's main governmental complex, a huge area, big enough that the US has set up bus routes inside with dozens of buildings and thousands of Americans living and working there. And this gate is like the border between the country of Iraq and the American country within a country. It's where US soldiers shot and killed protesters this week who were throwing stones. Every day there's a crowd of Iraqis at the entrance off to one side of all that barbed wire. They're trying to get in there, hoping to talk to someone in charge about whatever problem they're having. Two women are there dressed in their best clothes, like they were going to a job interview. They're principals, they say, and they want to talk to whichever American is in charge of the Ministry of Education. In all the postwar confusion, some guy no one knew just showed up one day, and said he's now in charge of their school district. He's awful, they say, bossing everyone around and stealing money. They want a different guy to be placed in charge. Someone prepared a letter for them, which neither can read because they don't know English. Hey, tell these people to back up. A soldier comes up and tells them to get back from the gate. They don't know what he's saying, and he doesn't know what they're saying. So they keep standing there and eventually the soldier walks away. It turns out this is the wrong gate if you want to talk to an American. There is a right gate. It's off to the side behind a bunch of trees where army specialist Laura Moore, a 21 year old in the Civil Affairs Corps, is standing behind some barbed concertina wire. She has blue eyes and blond hair that comes down out of her bulletproof helmet. You can just picture her walking around a mall back home with her friends. And here she is, the face of the US occupation of Iraq. In the whole country, only Laura Moore and a small number of co-workers have the job of meeting with average Iraqis, finding out what's bothering them and trying to offer solutions. Even though she could move into the shade of the trees, she stands with a translator out in the hot sun. A few yards away, there is a long line of Iraqis who are also standing in the sun. Most of them are older men, and they look sick like they're wilting in the 115 degree heat. When they are waved over, they walk up to the barbed wire and tell their problems to Moore's not very good translator, who does his best in a kind of broken English to tell Moore what they're saying. Then he translates her response. It's all sorts of things. People want money. He has a car which was looted one month ago. OK, he's going to have to take his civil complaint to the police academy. Unfortunately, there's really nothing that we can do for you right here. If the Police Academy is working your situation, hopefully they'll find your car soon, OK? Now for temporary aid, I'm going to advise you to go to the Red Crescent in Mansour, because hopefully they'll be able to help you out financially, something like that. Maybe help you get your feet back on the ground and get a new car, OK? Moore says this is what she does pretty much every time. The Iraqis talk to her, and then she tells them she can't help them and tells them to go away. She says nobody gets past the gate. Nobody gets inside the palace to talk to whoever will decide their case. It's for safety reasons. Is it hard sending people away like that? You get worse cases than that. And I see about anywhere between 85 and 100 people a day. So-- You're getting used to it. You get used to it. A few times a day, someone has a complaint that the Army can actually do something about, like their car or their house was destroyed by the US military. With those people, Moore takes their information, and says someone will look it over, make a decision and get back to them in two months. She always says two months. Of course, there are no working phones in most parts of Baghdad. And there is no postal service. So it's not clear how she'll get back to anybody. Are you learning any Arabic? A little. Just some basic greetings, and "thank you," and "two months." Say all that stuff. Say it. Two months? [SPEAKING ARABIC], come back in two months. After watching her for 45 minutes, my translator Amjad and I sit under a tree to get out of the sun. Amjad, you seem very angry right now. When I saw these people, it immediately comes to my mind what was the Iraqi suffering during Saddam Hussein. You can find the same queues asking for jobs, asking their government to give them back their properties. The same things, no difference. And are the Americans more helpful? No, they're following the same procedures. Come tomorrow, come after one month, come after two months and we'll see. We'll find out what we can do for you. And I'm sure, I'm positively sure, that they can't do anything for them. Privately, some US officials say things didn't need to get this bad, that the gap between Iraqis and Americans didn't need to be so vast, that we should have done in Iraq what we've done after other wars. Once victory was declared, Americans needed to be out in the streets in big numbers listening to Iraqis, holding town meetings, letting Iraqis see them and get to know them, building trust. But because of security concerns-- soldiers are still shot at every day in Iraq. Over 40 have died since the war officially ended-- Americans aren't doing that. Curious to see what happens when Americans try to bridge the information gap and meet directly with Iraqis, I sat in as a group of influential Iraqis met with some American representatives. It wasn't very promising. This was a group of tribal sheiks who are more powerful in Iraq then you'd probably think. Though Iraq is a modern country with a lot of educated people and a big middle class, most Iraqis belong to a tribe. And every tribe has a sheik. A sheik can call on his people to do all sorts of things, to boycott something or to march. It's the sheik who decides when a tribe will pick up arms and go to battle. Even Saddam Hussein was scared enough of these guys to meet with them and listen to them. This is the third meeting like this for the sheiks. A few hundred of them representing most of Iraq's tribes sit in a big theater. At a table on the stage is Hume Horan, counsel to the head of the US coalition, Paul Bremer. Horan speaks Arabic quite well. And he's sitting next to five sheiks. The sheiks on stage are among the few who have strongly allied themselves with the Americans. They each give a speech about how much good the Americans have done, how all the sheiks have to stay unified and work with the Americans. No sheik should start any trouble. They're interrupted all the time by sheiks in the audience screaming out questions and complaints. The sheiks on stage tell them not to interrupt, that all their questions will be answered by the speeches that are being given. Everyone will see that all their problems are already being taken care of. In his speech, Horan keeps it general and upbeat. He tells the crowd that he hopes many of them will become his close friends. He says the sheiks' concerns, electricity, security, water, are not a big problem. The Americans have done so much good, he says. Iraq is much safer now. There's plenty of electricity. And anyway, none of it is America's fault. All the problems Iraqis face these days are because of all the bad things Saddam did when he was in power. But the Americans are on the job, and everything's fine now, and we'll get better soon. Nobody interrupts him. But as soon as he's done talking and one of the onstage sheiks starts another speech, congratulating Horan for his words, the audience sheiks are standing up, screaming out that there is no security. Iraq is less safe now than ever. Electricity is completely unreliable. The sheiks onstage are telling them to be quiet. One says "Be polite. We are Arabs. We are a polite people." But the audience sheiks won't stop shouting out their complaints. One of the onstage sheiks finally says to a man in the audience who won't sit down, "Dear sir, go ahead. You're welcome to speak." At this point, the meeting is pretty much over as an organized event. One sheik after another stands up and screams out how badly things are going under the Americans. Horan and the sheiks onstage never respond to these impromptu speeches. They just sit on the stage and watch the audience take over. How did you think the meeting went? Did you feel the Americans were listening to you? Were they responsive to what you were saying? I don't think they are responding to these demands. One of the angriest sheiks in the audience is Faisal [? Rakan ?] [? Nisriz ?] al-Goud, the head of a large family in the Dulaim tribe, the biggest tribe in Iraq with 5 million members. Goud says he came to the meeting completely pro-American. He loves George Bush. But because of meetings like this one, the sheiks are divided off into those who want to declare war on the Americans immediately and moderates like him, who want to give the Americans one more month to see their true intentions before declaring war. By then I think all heads of tribes and members of tribes will start attacking the coalition forces by every means, whether by grenades, clashing [? coast ?], anything to fight the coalition, the US presence in Iraq. No more than one month. Are you ready to fight in a month? We are a united people. And we stand by each other in facing good or bad things. It's hard to tell how serious this threat is. Things seem to get more violent each week in Iraq as people get more frustrated. Either way, it's not good. The sheiks came to a meeting that the Americans hoped would get across our message of hope, that we're in Iraq to rebuild, to help, not to stay. And Goud and the other sheiks came out of it madder than ever, talking about war. In my last week in Baghdad, my translator, Amjad, and I had lunch with a friend of his who was telling funny stories about how, as a little boy, he actually met Saddam Hussein. Saddam used to invite kids to the palace and hand out toys in big photo ops for the newspapers to show what a great guy he was. Amjad laughed. "It's just like Bremer," he said. The head of the US operation, Paul Bremer, had just invited the press to photograph him handing out soccer balls to young people. "You know what we call Bremer?" Amjad's friend asked me. "Bremer Hussein." Which brings me back to that weird rumor about Saddam and why it's so popular, the rumor that he worked with the Americans, arranged for the invasion, and now lives in the White House. For all the important differences between American rule and Saddam's government, Iraqis say they're seeing some of the same things. The country is still run by reclusive men who make decisions in private and issue their orders from behind the guarded walls of the Republican Palace. Adam Davidson is a regular contributor to our show and has recently been Marketplace's correspondent in Baghdad. Well, 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 program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, bestselling books, even the New York Times, all at audible.com. Alex Meyer, the teenager from the beginning of our program, is at alexmeyer.tk. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who has just one request. There's a little gap down by the baseboard. Bend over and close it, will you? 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. I'm Ira Glass. There's this theater company in Chicago that, for years, put out a new show every single week where they performed 30 plays in 60 minutes, called the Neo-Futurists. And when we first broadcast today's program all the way back in 2003, a bunch of us were sitting around talking about that group. And one of us had just seen one of their shows. And we thought, that would be really fun-- 30 stories in 60 minutes? Let's try that. Instead of our usual-- each week we choose a theme, bring you three or four stories, blah, blah, blah, public radio, very reflective, what kinds of stories would we end up with if we did 30 in one hour? Or even 20? What would it sound like? We honestly had no idea. And so, that's what we're going to do today. Today we're going to find out. And I have to say, time is wasting if we're going to fit everything in. How many will it be? How many will we squeeze in? There is but one way to find out, and that is to stick around. And let's begin with this one, Act One-- Don't I Know You? Throughout this hour we're going to be bringing you two-minute documentaries, fantastically short works of fiction, and all kinds of little stories that we ordinarily can't use on the radio show because they are just too short, even though they're really fun stories to listen to and perfect stories for the radio. Our first story is one like that. It's one of those stories-- you know how people you know have their greatest hits stories of things that happened to them? We went on a massive search for stories like that from all over the country, and this is one of the stories like that that we found. It happened to this actor named Tate Donovan. He told it to our producer Starlee Kine. He was out one night going to a Broadway play with a friend, being treated in this way he never gets treated. We're sitting around waiting for it to start. And I'm not a very-- I'm not a sort of a recognizable actor. I'm an actor who works, but I never get recognized. So all of a sudden, the 10 minutes we're sitting there for it to start, three or four people come up to me and recognize me. I mean, they know exactly who I am. And they are quoting lines from a television show I was on. And like, hey, you were Joshua on Friends. And I've always admired stars who were really gracious. So you always think, that's what I want to be like. I want to be really friendly when I'm famous. So I wanted to be friendly and sweet, and go out to the people. They don't have to come to me all the time. [LAUGHS] So for a little window of time, though, you were exactly the kind of celebrity that you wanted to always be. You were gracious and reserved. Yeah, and warm, you know what I mean? I wasn't like one of these distant celebrities. I was like, hey, I was genuine. They all left thinking, that guy's a really great guy. He's so sweet. I was exactly how I wanted to be. I was doing it. I was doing great. And then the kid with the camera came along. This nervous kid-- I don't know, he must have been 16 years old. He's in a rented tuxedo, unbelievably shy and awkward, and he's got acne. And he's got a camera in his hand. And underneath the marquee is his date, who is in literally a prom dress, and she's got a corsage. And she's really nervous and sort of clutching her hands. And he sort of comes up to me and he sort of mumbles something about a picture. And I just feel for him. So I'm like, absolutely, my gosh. Sure, no problem. My God, you poor thing. And I go up to his girlfriend and I wrap my arms around her. And I'm like, hey, where are you from? Fantastic, you going to see the play? That's great. And the guy is sort of not taking the photograph very quickly. He's just sort of staring at me. And he's got his camera in his hands and it's down by his chin. And she's very stiff and awkward. And I don't know what to do, so I just lean across, and I kiss her on the cheek. And I'm like, all right, come on, take the picture. Hurry up. And finally he sort of snaps it. And I'm like, OK, it was really wonderful to meet you. And he just stammered over to me and was like, um, [CLICKS TONGUE] could you take a picture of us? And the whole time, he just wanted me to take a picture of him and his girlfriend underneath the awning of the play. He didn't want a picture of me. He had no idea who I was. [LAUGHS] Oh, God. They were in shock. I don't think they'd ever come across a human being acting this way. I mean, could you imagine-- you ask someone to take a picture, and you just get in it yourself, and kiss them, and hey. Tate Donovan with Starlee Kine. Act Two-- No, Of Course I Know You. One of the things that's been really interesting about putting this show together this week is going to some of our regular contributors and commissioning stories that are just two or three minutes long from people who normally write stories that are 10 times that length. This story is an example of that, from Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City. Who was that woman, that woman I just saw while walking out of the restaurant? She was sitting at a table by the door, glasses, a hat, like Lois Lane. She looked at me like she knew me. And I said hello because I thought I recognized her. But I couldn't remember her name, so I just kept going out the door. Now I can't even remember how I know her. I know I know her, or used to know her. Somehow she was very important to me. She helped me out in a time of trouble. She used to roll her eyes. I'd say something dumb and she'd roll her eyes and get me something I needed, even though she didn't have to. Maybe she works in the library, or the county recorder's office, or at the newspaper. I think I may have been in love with her. No, she's too young. I was never in love with her, not in that way. It's just that I wanted something, needed something. And she was able to give it to me, almost out of the goodness of her heart. And now I can't even remember who she is. I'm sick. I'm old. I should just walk out into traffic and kill myself. At home, at night, I go to sleep, searching for the lost memory. Did I meet her down by the river in a canoe, or was it on a ferry in southeastern Alaska, or at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh along the Mekong? She has something to do with water, with life, with mud. I sleep poorly, turning and maybe even groaning in anguish. I don't care about the woman anymore. I'm worried for myself. I feel as if there's a black hole in my brain, and slowly but surely, it's swallowing all the memories of my life. I get up at 5:30 and drive to work in the dark. I feel terrible. I look like a piece of gum in the gutter. I pull in to Java Joe's to get some chemical help, and there she is behind the drive-up window. I want to tell her I love her, but I don't because it would be too weird. All I can say is, wow. And she rolls her eyes and gets me my cup of coffee. Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City. If you haven't heard his podcast yet, it's called Home of the Brave. Act Three-- It's Commerce That Brings Us Together. In 1997, Susan Drury and her husband moved to rural Tennessee, not too far from the Alabama line. They grew attached to the local radio station. We couldn't really get any other radio stations at the house, but WKSR has a lot going for it-- the way they read the obituaries on the air, the way people call in during the tornado to tell everybody they're OK and where the roads are flooded, the ads from the same downtown stores over and over and over. And then there's the show we like best. Here we go. It's time once again for another edition of Swap and Shop here on WKSR. Swap and Shop is a low-tech, personable sort of Ebay. It's not fancy or particularly well-produced or anything. It's just a show where people call in to say what they want to sell or buy or give away. They give their phone number, and that's it. Swap And Shop, good morning. Good morning, I have a couch for sale I need to advertise. It's a Lane recliner couch. It's six weeks old. It listed for $1,140, and I'll sell it for $600. We've just got one too many. OK, and your phone number? 468-2524. All right, sir, thank you for calling. Thank you. Have a good day. You too. There's a couch for sale at 468-2524. The show is hosted by a guy named Don Estep, and he almost never comments on anything people are trying to buy or sell. He's like a lot of my neighbors, particularly the men. The attitude is, your business is your business. There's no shame in tough times, and nobody turns himself inside out to tell you everything. Yes, I have for sale a table and chairs, a microwave, and a washer and a bedroom suite. And I also want to buy a car, a small car. OK, there's a table and chairs. Mostly you're just left to wonder about the story behind these things. You don't get too many answers. Swap and Shop, good morning. Yes, I'd like to buy a used trampoline. It doesn't matter what shape it's in or if it even has a tarp on it or not. And my telephone number is 629-- Swap and Shop is not unique to this station. Local stations across the country have these radio classifieds type shows. WKSR's version has a regular segment called "The Doggone Show." Folks have found a black, white, and brown young female beagle with a white tip on its tail, and, more than likely, a family pet. If you'll call 565-4505-- is that number. Also four cows have been found. And you think they might belong to you-- That first winter in our house, we had no heat, which we thought was adventurous, but was, in fact, just cold. And when we heard a lady call in with an ugly but functional wood stove for sale for $75, we called her. We got it, and we were toasty. Hey, Don, that little black and brown and white beagle with the tip on her tail that we found? Well, we lost her, so you can quit advertising-- on Barnett Road. On the Barnett Road? Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thank you for calling. Susan Drury, Tennessee. Act Four-- The Sound of One Hand Waving. For this one, let's go to the beach for a one-minute and four-second vacation on Nantucket Island. When we were in the water and we realized we weren't able to get back in, we had some friends that were on the beach. And so we started waving to them. We were kind of doing this double-hand wave thing over our heads. And our friend just kept waving back. She was standing and talking to some other people on the beach. That must have happened two or three times. And we waved like crazy, and she waved back. And then when we got on the surfboard later, when the surfer picked us up and we still couldn't get in, we were waving again. And again she thought-- we asked her afterwards, why did you think we were waving? She said, we thought you were just trying to show us you were on the surfboard with this guy. So I'm like, God, we're waving frantically to tell you what, that we're on a surfboard with some 19-year-old, and we're-- Nobody got it. And we were sufficiently panicked. And nobody saw anything but a bunch of middle-aged women at Fat Ladies Beach, waving to their friends. Patty Martin from Nantucket. She talked to Jim Sulzer. She has since passed away. Act Five-- The Sound of No Hands Clapping. This one came from Vicki Merrick and Eric Kipp and Jay Allison, who's the voice you hear. Listen. Scallops clapping on Martha's Vineyard. Act Six-- Reaching Out With Radio. Blunt Youth Radio is this project where they work with incarcerated teenagers. This story comes from Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland, Maine. And just imagine how this works-- you're a teenager. You're locked up. You're in juvenile detention. And this group comes to you and says they will help you make your own radio story on a subject that concerns you. What do you do that story about? Well, here's Joey. Hi, I'm Joey, and I ate somebody's urine. It all started when I went to dinner at the cafeteria and someone told my friend not to eat the pudding. Then my friend told me, after I ate, that someone had peed in it. I survived that day, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I went to the cooks to see if they had an answer. This is Joey and Jake. We're about to see if we can interview Bill Wyman on-- Our food situation. --people messing with our food. Yeah, we're not too happy. We're not too happy. Excuse me, Mr. Wyman? I was wondering if I could interview you and talk to you about people putting-- if it happened-- glass in our pancakes and peeing in the pudding and stuff? We was wondering what you had to say about that. They don't. Nobody does that. You kids don't handle the food at all. We heard that it was brought up at briefing that somebody put glass in the pancakes. No, that wasn't glass. It was a piece of plastic that came from one of the glasses out there in the dining room that you kids had. Do you know how it got into the pancake batter? It didn't get into the pancake batter. It was put in there afterwards. Well, we heard different from other kids. You hear different? Do you know anything about it? We heard that it was-- Did you two have any idea, whatsoever, what's going on? That's why we came to you, to get an idea. No, that's not why you came to me. You came to me because you thought it was true. Yeah, of course. If-- Then you kept it going. If somebody said that they messed with your food, joking or not, wouldn't you want to know really what happened or not? No, I would totally go with the kitchen, with the kitchen crew, and what you guys have been told. So you'd believe the kitchen crew over the person? No matter how much credibility you can give them, you'd believe the kitchen crew over them? Even if-- Of course, because you don't cook the food. You think it's funny, don't you? You really think it's funny. No, I really don't think it's funny. Then why are you grinning like a Cheshire cat? Because you're going friggin' zero to 10 just because we're asking a bunch of questions. No, it's what you're asking. It's how you're asking the same thing over again. And you're trying to get an answer, which there isn't any answer there. All right, this is obviously not working. I'm going to have to interview somebody else. I heard some kid got jumped because he supposedly peed in the pudding. Supposedly. That's the key word right there-- supposedly. We have an investigator, and he investigated the incident. And we also had the pudding tested. They took it to an independent laboratory and tested it, and it was proven that there was no foreign matter in that pudding at all. Now, perhaps you weren't told that because I don't think you're told everything. But it was sad that, because you thought there was, you incited a riot in the dining room and made a big mess that kids had to clean up that had nothing to do with it. I don't know what to think. If someone did contaminate the food with bodily fluids, I guess I'd rather not know since I'm stuck here and I have to eat the food. Thank you for your time. This is Joey. Joey-- he was 18 when he recorded that story. His friend Jake was 16. If you're just tuning in, this is This American Life. We have tossed out our regular way of doing the show this week-- trashed it, chucked it, spurned it. We laugh at it, we spit on its grave. And instead, we are bringing you as many short stories as we can fit into 60 minutes. It is barely, what, 18 minutes into the show, and already we are at Act Seven, an incredible achievement. Act Seven-- Up Where the Air is Clear. We have this story from Jonathan Goldstein. Before he ever moved to Gotham City, before he grew into the overweight, obsessive sad sack of his later years, the Penguin was a poet and a dandy who lived in London. He wrote complex villainelles and threw lavish dinner parties at which he only became more charming the more he drank. He wore a monocle, a top hat, and carried an umbrella. One evening, at one of his dinner parties, after hours spent sipping absinthe, the Penguin ran up to the roof of his building, opened up his large black umbrella, and leaped off into the air. As he coasted to the ground, he hollered out lines from Blake, stuff about grabbing life by the fat of its stomach and giving it a twist. He was that crazy. He was that bursting with life. From that night on, he made it his habit to jump off roofs ever higher, while clutching an umbrella. After a while, he got pretty good at it, too. He saw that by kicking his legs and twisting his back a certain way, he could actually prolong his flight, coasting all over the place, sometimes only landing after several daring minutes aloft. It came to pass that the Penguin started hearing more and more about a certain nanny named Mary Poppins. She too, he was told, had been floating around London hanging from an umbrella handle. Everywhere he went, the Penguin kept hearing about her, how it was simply insane that they had not met each other yet. So finally, a dinner party was arranged by someone who knew them both. And on the evening of the party, the Penguin walked into the drawing room, saw Mary Poppins on the divan, doffed his top hat, and bowed low, as was his style in those days. He'd planned a few things to say and do when first meeting Mary Poppins. He thought he might lift up his umbrella as though challenging her to a duel. He imagined she would smile and take up her own frilly, perhaps pink, umbrella, and then together, they would dance about the room, leaping over furniture, parrying and thrusting, perhaps even winding things up, breathing heavily nose to nose. Instead what happened was the Penguin became very shy and quiet. As he stood there staring at her, his top hat felt needlessly clumsy, his monocle too small for his face. And the squinting needed to keep it in place was giving him a slight headache. For the first time in his life, the Penguin felt ludicrous. I imagine you two must have an infinite amount of things to speak of, said their host as he sat them together at the dinner table. The Penguin nodded uncertainly. After three or four minutes, it became clear that the Penguin and Mary Poppins had absolutely nothing to say to one another that did not deal exclusively with umbrella travel-- getting stuck in trees, the shoulder aches, anxiety about tipping over in the wind. Everyone at the table just sat there, staring at them expectantly, which made the whole thing even more awkward. Trying to move things along, Mary Poppins asked the Penguin if he liked to sing, to which the Penguin responded, only when I'm drunk. Then she asked if he enjoyed children, to which he replied, yes, in a sweet wine sauce. The Penguin then asked Mary Poppins how she kept people from looking up her skirt when she flew. She smiled politely, then turned to the man on her left and asked him how he was enjoying the lamb. The man on her left was wearing an elegant, aristocratic cape. Mary, a bit drunk on the sherry, noted that if he spread his cape out, he might be able to glide about like a bat. The man on her left chuckled and suggested that, after dinner, they head up to the roof and give it a try, which they did. Jonathan Goldstein-- he's the host of the podcast Heavyweight, which feels exactly like this story except the people in it are not fictional. Act Eight-- the Greatest Dog Name in The World. Yes, we have the true story of its origin. Years ago, an exclusive told by two brothers, one of whom is 12, the other is 13. I wanted to name him Pasta. I used to like pasta a lot. And it was probably the first thing that came to my mind, so out of nowhere, I said Pasta. So he said Batman. I wanted to name him Batman because I saw, in a movie, the dog stuck his head out the window and his ears went straight up. And it looked like-- it reminded me of Batman. And we fought over it for a little bit. I just remember running around and chasing each other. I was jumping on my mom's bed, saying, Batman, Batman, Batman. And then my brother was sitting in the chair, saying, Pasta, Pasta, Pasta. And that must have gone on for an hour. I think it was right around the time we had this big fight about gumballs, which I'm not going to get into because it was pretty embarrassing. But if there was just some little thing that we couldn't agree on, then it would just blew up into this whole big thing. Yeah, I remember being pretty upset about it. And then my mom comes in and says, all right, that's it. It's over. It's Pasta Batman. That's it. And then there was silence. And then from there, he was Pasta Batman Lotze. Pasta. [CLAPS] Come on, Pasta Batman. Pasta, here. Pasta Batman. Hey, good doggie. Their names? Valion and Paris Lotze, age 12 and 13. They spoke with Katia Dunn. Act Nine-- Of Dogs and Men. Elaine Boehm used to work at a pet shop. We've had to help people select items for their animals. And this woman and her husband came in. She was looking for a training collar, the pinch collar type. And, of course, they're pretty hideous looking, but they do do the job. And they don't hurt the animal, they just get the animal's attention. Well, she couldn't make up her mind what size to get. So she looked over to her husband and she said, dear, come over here. And then she looked at me and she said, his neck is about the same size as the dog. Put this on, she says. And the guy stood there and took it as she puts the prong pinch collar around his neck. And she gives him a yank. And he says, yes, sweetheart, this works. This works. Thank you very much. That was the end of that. Elaine Boehm talked with Jim Sulzer. Act 10-- so let's close out this part of our show before the break with a story from the theater group that gave us the idea for today's jam-packed little program in the first place-- that group, again, the Neo-Futurists. Every single week for over two decades, they did these shows where they would perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. Turns out you can get across a surprising amount in a two-minute play. Some of their plays are monologues, some of them are scenes. But a lot of them just take some simple concept, one idea, and then spin that concept out on stage for two minutes. This one's like that. Statement, statement, statement-- question? Agreement. Reassured statement, confident statement, confident statement. Overconfident statement. Question? Elaborate defensive excuse. Half-hearted agreement. Insecure statement, distracted statement, absurd statement. Clarification question? Panicked [BLEEP] explanation! Quick, meaningless comic non-sequitur. [LAUGHING] Laughter. [LAUGHS] Fake laughter, fake laughter. Accidental compliment of physical characteristics. Pleased response. [GASPS] Shocked continuation of meaningless comic non-sequitur. [LAUGHING] Laughter. [LAUGHING] Relieved laughter. Laughter. Relieved laughter. Superficial compliment. Self-assured agreement as denial. Exaggerated statement, exaggerated statement, grossly exaggerated statement. Clarification question? Extremely exaggerated elucidation. Mental compliment with accidental double entendre. [LAUGHING] Confident laughter. Laughter. Embarrassed laughter. Confident suggestive proposition. Violent denial! Aghast repetition as question? Disgusted violent denial. Defensive incriminating implication. Offended retort. Aggressive childish insult. Disbelieving rhetorical question? Aggressive childish insult. Stunned silence. Aggressive childish insult. Defensive childish response! Aggressive childish insult! Defensive childish response! Aggressive childish-- Defensive childish-- Attempted condescending conclusive statement. Brilliant scathing remark with literary allusion and long-term devastating scatological implication. Pathetic self-revelation. Greg Allen and Heather Riordan from Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind: 30 Plays in 60 Minutes, which ran every weekend in Chicago for 28 years until it ended its run in 2016. The Neo-Futurists have a new show, which also features lots of little two-minute plays. It is called The Infinite Wrench. Their website-- neo-futurists.org. Coming up, David Sedaris on an important-- and I have to say-- undiscussed question about cell phone use, and so many, so many other little stories, I don't even want to count them, in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. Well, this is turning out to be an interesting show, isn't it? It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And if you're just tuning in, this week we are throwing out our regular way of doing things-- you know, three or four stories on some theme, blah, blah, blah. To hell with all that. Instead, we are trying to cram as many stories into one hour as we humanly can. We guarantee 20. There may be more. We are at number 11, Etiquette Lesson. Here's writer David Sedaris. In a men's room at LaGuardia Airport, I watched a man take his cell phone from his jacket pocket, step into an empty stall, and proceed to dial. I thought he had come for the relative privacy, but looking through the space beneath the door, I saw that his pants were gathered about his ankles. He was sitting on the toilet. Most airport calls began with geography. I'm in Kansas City, people say. I'm in Houston. I'm at Kennedy. When asked where he was, the man on the phone said simply, I'm at the airport. What do you think? The sounds of a public toilet are not the sounds you would generally associate with an airport, and so his 'what do you think' struck me as unfair. The person he was talking to obviously felt the same way. What do you mean what airport, the man said. I'm at LaGuardia. Now put me through to Marty. A few hours later, I was in Boston relating the story to my sister, Tiffany. I mean, he actually placed a call while sitting on the toilet. Tiffany is big on rules, and so I expected a certain degree of outrage. I wanted disgust, but instead, she said only, I don't believe in cell phones. But you do believe in talking on the phone while sitting on the toilet? Well, it's not a belief, she said, but I mean, sure. When asked how she explains the noise, Tiffany scrunched up her face and held an imaginary receiver to her mouth. I say, (STRAINING) don't mind me, I'm just trying to get the lid off this jar. Her face returned to normal and I thought of all the times I had fallen for that line, all the times I had pictured my sister standing helpless in her kitchen. Try tapping the lid against the countertop, I'd said, or rinse it in hot water, that sometimes works. Eventually, after much struggle, she would let out a breath. There we go, she'd say. I've got it now. And then she would say thank you. And I'd hang up thinking, well, it's a good thing she called me. David Sedaris. His new book Calypso comes out this May. Act 12-- To Tell the Truth. This was recorded by Brent Runyon in the kids' section of the public library. My parents punish me so many times because I lie. Well, I was home one day and I tripped over my brother-- well, OK, don't tell anybody this. I jumped over my brother's chair. I jumped-- You did? Yeah. You lied to me? I told you I jumped. No, you didn't. I told you the first day I got my crutches. No, you did not. Oh. Act 13-- More Lies. This happened to Catherine and her husband John long before they were married, back before they graduated from college. Girls babysit a lot and boys don't. And girls understand that, when you babysit, part of the deal is that you get to eat anything you want. So after we'd put the kids to bed, I said, well, we should go see what they have to eat. And he said, we can't eat their food. And I said, of course we can eat their food. What do you mean? And he said, that's stealing. I said, John, I promise you, it's fine to eat something. They expect us to. They understand that-- they don't expect us to starve while we're babysitting. And finally, he said, well, we can eat something, but only something they won't miss. And they had a huge crate full of grapefruits, and they also had cans and cans of black beans. [LAUGHS] So I had half a grapefruit. And John opened up a can of black beans and had that. And then I wrapped up the other half of the grapefruit. And John cleaned-- well, rinsed out and dried off the empty can of black beans. And we put the wrapped-up half a grapefruit and the cleaned out can of black beans in his bag. [LAUGHING] So that people wouldn't know that you had eaten anything? We had destroyed the evidence. And this-- At his insistence? Yes, it was absurd. And then we watched TV, our hunger satisfied. And then the couple came home, and we made small talk. And then John picked up his bag in the hallway and there was a sort of dull thud, and half the grapefruit fell out on the floor. And I said, oh, that's mine. I'm sorry, I-- uh, we're allowed to take a piece of fruit from the dining hall. And I had taken that grapefruit from the dining hall, and that's why I have it here. And then they sort of said, oh, OK, OK, that's nice. And then I put it back in John's bag. And then John picked up his bag again, and there was-- you guessed it-- a clang. And clanging out onto the floor went this empty can of black beans. And when the can fell out on the floor, John said, oh, that's mine. I keep change in that. Like, I keep change-- [LAUGHS] as if that was less insane. Act 14-- Call in Colonel Mustard For Questioning, Or That's What Happens If You Don't Use a Condiment, Kids. See all the stupid jokes that you end up telling if you have a story that takes place in a hot dog factory about hot dogs? Here we go. My name is Jim Bodman and I'm the chairman of the Vienna Sausage Company in Chicago. And the building that we are currently standing in, which is on the north side of Chicago, on Damen near the corner of Fullerton, was built around 1970. This hot dog plant, Jim Bodman says, replaced the company's original facility. So it was put together in a Rube Goldberg kind of arrangement. So we moved into this building. And this was a brand new, state of the art, stainless steel, refrigeration is perfect, spit clean building. And we started making our natural, old-world hickory smoked, natural-casing hot dogs here. And it wasn't as good. They tasted OK, he says, but they didn't have the right snap when you bit into them. And even worse, the color was wrong. The hot dogs were all pink instead of bright red. So they tried to figure out what was wrong. The ingredients were all the same, the spices were all the same, the process was all the same. Maybe it was the temperature in the smokehouse. Maybe the water on the north side of Chicago wasn't the same as the water on the South side. They searched. They searched for a year and a half. Nothing checked out. Then one night, a bunch of guys from the plant are out having a drink, gabbing about the good old days, back in the old plant on Maxwell Street. They start talking about this guy named Irving, one of those guys who knows everybody in the plant, has nicknames for everybody. And listen to what Irving's job was. Every day, he would weave his way with the uncooked sausages through the maze of passageways in the old plant. He would go through the hanging vents. That's where we hang the pastrami pieces, and it's quite warm. And he would go through the boiler room, where we produced all the energy for the plant. He would go next to the tanks where we cook the corned beef, finally get around the corner, and in some cases, actually go up an elevator. And then he would be at the smokehouse. He would put it in the smokehouse and he would cook it. And as they were telling stories about Irving-- Irving this, Irving that-- a light bulb goes off. In the fancy new modern plant, there was no Irving. Irving didn't want to commute to the north side. There was no maze of hallways. There was no half-hour trip where the sausage would get warm before they would cook it. In the new plant, they just stuffed the sausages in a cold room and cooked them in a smokehouse in the room next door to it. Irving's trip was the secret ingredient that made the dogs red. So secret, even the guys who ran the plant didn't know about it. So we said, oh, my God, that is, of course, the reason. Why didn't we know that? That's the dumbest thing in the world to not realize. It's right there. How do we fix it? And the solution to the problem was the room that we're standing in right now. And this was a new addition put onto the plant about two years after we built the facility. So you had to build this room? This whole room-- the outside bearing wall is that wall right there. We put this whole room on. And in this room, we emulate the old area of the old plant. And so this room, essentially, is to simulate Irving? That's exactly right. We should have called it Irving-- Irving's Corner. It's warm in Irving's corner, and it smells nice, too-- smoky, like hickory smoke and spices. Since I first heard this story years ago on a tour of this very plant, I found myself telling it now and then. I think that what I love about it is the fact that these guys at the factory had done everything right-- finally built their dream factory with the best equipment and expertise that money could buy. But you can't think of everything. Sometimes you have no idea why you were a success in the first place. Act 14-- Mr. Prediction. In the mid-1980s, right out of college, David Rakoff moved to Japan and pretty soon ended up in this office job where he was convinced that he understood a secret about the company and its business that nobody else, not even the big bosses at the company, could see. It was like that from the start. Primarily, the office was an advertising agency. But what they were setting up was this thing for expatriates who were living in Tokyo at the time, or perhaps all of Japan. And it was like a network on a computer. And they would set up a newsletter on the network, and people could quote, "log on" to the computer and talk to one another, or do research. And I was just-- I don't know, I just looked around the room and I saw these computers and could only think, what kind of loser would log on to a computer, talk to someone? Then, in fact, that night in my diary, I had written something like, this is like those comic book enthusiasts who actually read the little instructions at the bottom of the panel that said, for more on the Green Goblin, check out Spidey #137, from the editor. And in almost the only moment of decisiveness in my entire adult life-- I've certainly never equaled this-- I went in the next morning and I quit. And all I could think was, sayonara, suckers. Good luck with your network. And we know exactly what the network was. It was the internet. I have a negative capacity to identify trends. Like, when in college, I went to see Madonna at Danceteria, which was a club downtown, in like 1982 or whatever. And I thought, boy, is she lousy. Are there other examples besides Madonna and the internet? Other than Madonna and the internet, you need another example? When I was an editorial assistant working in publishing, I was handed a manuscript to read. I think I wrote something like, sub-literate, borderline misogyny, an easy pass. And somebody thought, I'm just going to take a look at this anyway. It was Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. These are not like me saying, I don't think Alicia Silverstone is going to be very good in Clueless. I mean, these are like-- Pretty big, iconic ones. Yeah. It was like, have you fellows heard that crazy lunatic in the market place inveighing against the Pharisees? He'll burn off like so much morning fog. We'll never hear about him ever again. It's just like that. David Rakoff-- the final book that he wrote before he died in 2012 is a book I just love. It's a novel in rhymed couplets-- Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel by David Rakoff. You're listening to This American Life, where today, it is all about speed. We are, what, 43 minutes into the program and we have already finished 15 acts? And this brings us to Act 16-- That One Guy at the Office. So if you work at a big office, you know that there's always at least one person whose name you do not know. In Jordana's office, Matt is that guy for, perhaps, as best as anybody can figure, half the people who work there. Jordana will tell you about it. Matt Ostrower sits next to the printer in the busiest hallway at our office. People walk by him dozens of times a week on their way to retrieve printouts. And though he actually works in the New Media department and has nothing to do with the printer, most people don't know this. It's his sad fate that most of his conversations at work are about one thing. Originally a lot of them were printer-based-- why is this printer taking so long? Oh, the paper's out. Oh, this printer jammed. Some of it's never really left that genre of conversation. They don't really spend too much-- so a lot of it's just very superficial. Hey, did you just throw away any printouts here? No, no, I didn't touch anything. I'd been working in the office a few months when, one day, a friend called me and said he was hanging out with one of my coworkers who lives in his building. Who, I asked? Matt, he said. I had no idea who that was and said so. Then I heard a voice in the background say, tell her I sit next to the printer. And that's when his predicament hit me. So I decided to survey my coworkers to see if they knew who he is, what his real job is. Do they even know his name? No, I mean, I know his face very well. I stop, I chat. I say, 'hi, how are you' as I'm grabbing things off the printer. I ask him about his little electronic music devices and all that, and we chitchat. And I'd say I do that probably about three or four times a day at least. But I have no idea what his name is. I wondered if Matt was at all surprised by this. Shocked. I honestly see him between 50 and 75 times a day-- different intervals of time-- at least that, every day. Every single day. I'm wondering if you know the name of the guy that sits right out here in the hallway? Is his name-- I don't know. Works on the web, right? Kind of? And Matt's response? I'm a little surprised because I see her every day as well. I'm wondering if you know the name of the guy that sits in the hallway next to the printer. I don't see anybody sitting in the hallway next to the printer. I didn't think we had anybody sitting next to the printer. I've never had this kind of experience before. The whole situation is just ridiculous-- that I've been here for a year and a half, pretty much every day, and there's still people who don't know my name or what I do. And it's a little bit weird. I could go through a pretty full day without talking to anyone besides the requests from the printer. Sometimes that's it for me. [CHUCKLES] Matt says the printer shows up in his dreams sometimes. In his dreams, he'll be at a party waiting in line for the bathroom, or at a parking lot at the beach, people everywhere. And there will be the printer, off to the side, chugging away, occasionally jamming. Jordana Gustafson in Boston. Act 17-- You Can't Choose Your Gift. I'm Richard Cary, and I have this one little talent. I don't know where it came from, and it fears me to think that it's something that I, myself, possess. But I'm able to make the entire sound of a swamp. And I will attempt to do so now. I'm not sure I'm prepared at this moment, but I'll give you the sound of a swamp. And I don't know why, but it seems to be really important at parties. Richard Cary talked to Jim Sulzer. Act 18-- Party Talk. Here's writer Chuck Klosterman. This was a conversation that happened to me at a party two years ago. At one point in the conversation, I suddenly found it necessary to mention that Journey was rock's version of the TV show Dynasty. This prompted a spirited debate we then dubbed, "Monkees Equals Monkees." The goal of this game is to figure out which television show is the closest philosophical analogy to a specific rock and roll band. And the criteria are mind-blowingly complex. It's a combination of longevity, era, critical acclaim, commercial success, and, most importantly, the aesthetic soul of each artistic entity. For example, the Rolling Stones are Gunsmoke. The Strokes-- Kiefer Sutherland's 24. Jimi Hendrix was The Twilight Zone. Devo was Fernwood 2Night. Lynyrd Skynyrd was The Beverly Hillbillies, which makes Molly Hatchet Petticoat Junction. The Black Crowes are That 70s Show. Hall and Oates were Bosom Buddies. U2 is M.A.S.H. because both kind of got preachy at the end. Dokken was Jason Bateman's short lived sitcom, It's Your Move. The Eurythmics were Mork and Mindy. We even deduced comparisons for solo projects, which can only be made to series that were spawned as spin-offs. The four Beatles, post-1970, are as follows: John equals Maude, Paul equals Frasier, George equals The Jeffersons, and Ringo equals Flow. David Lee Roth's solo period after Van Halen was Knot's Landing. So there's proof-- marijuana makes you smarter. Chuck Klosterman reading from his book called Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. Act 19-- The Hard Life at the Top. Here's a ritual that takes place every summer on the last day of June-- 1,200 new army cadets, mostly teenagers, survivors of one of the most exhausting application processes in the country, arrive at West Point. And then, in the space of one morning, they're separated from their parents. Their clothes are taken away. Their hair is taken away. They're weighed. They're measured. They're issued a bag, an army uniform, and underwear. They take their oath of office. And then, here is the first act they have as non-civilians. All they have to do is say a single sentence. Once they get it said, they can go to their barracks, but not until then. David Lipsky spent four years writing about these guys and describes what happens each year. The drill is simple. The new cadets have to step up to a tape line, drop their bags, and make their report to upperclassman wearing red sashes. You will walk up to the line, the red sashes tell them. And you will say, sir, new cadet Doe reports to the cadet and the red sash for the first time as ordered. The new cadets swallow, nod their heads, and then the screwing up begins. This cadet is so nervous, he doesn't realize he's supposed to swap his own name for Doe. Sir, new cadet Doe reports to the cadet-- Is your last name Doe? No, sir. Then say your name, new cadet. Yes, sir. "Is your last name Doe?" the red sash screams. "No, sir," says the new cadet. "Then say your name, new cadet," says the red sash. Words count, even footwork counts. New cadet Clinker, a jittery 18-year-old female cadet, finds this out when she steps a little too far forward. Sir, new cadet Clinker. New cadet, look where you're standing. I told you to step up to my line. You better learn how to follow orders, new cadet. New cadet-- The red sash asks her to do it again. This time, she stands in the right place, but she's forgotten what to say. Sir, new cadet Clinker reports to the-- I tell you to drop it back, you drop it back-- Are you showing emotion? Did I just see a smile come across your face, new cadet? No, sir. You are like a rock. Maintain your military discipline at all times. You understand, new cadet? Yes, sir. For these specially selected red sashes, breaking in the new cadets is a great honor. The day before, they've even practiced being hard on local civilians in a full rehearsal. Every year, a bunch of teachers, sons, daughters, groundskeepers from around town sign up for a fun day as practice cadets. Every year, a handful leave in tears. Sir, new cadet McLeod reporting to the cadet in the-- in the red sash for the first time as ordered. Drop your salute. New cadet McLeod stutters on his first attempt. He's asked to drop his salute and start over. On this one day, almost 1,200 young men and women will make their report. If everyone did it right the first time, it would take about an hour. I don't see anyone go through the first time. It takes all day. New cadet McLeod tries again, but the words won't come. Sir, n-new cadet McLeod-- new-- Drop your salute. [INTERPOSING VOICES] Drop your salute, the red sash tells him. Are you a n-new cadet or a new cadet? New cadet, he says, forgetting the sir. New cadet. New cadet, are you going to put a 'sir' on that? Yes, sir. Poor new cadet McLeod has already screwed up twice. To get here, he spent 18 years excelling in nearly every way he can-- in schoolwork, in athletics, at student council meetings. He's beaten his way to the top of the 50,000 applicants who fill out requests for information forms. He's been interviewed by senators, congressmen. And now, here he is, in the last place he ever thought he'd find himself, a sudden death play audition. He only has to say one line. He draws a breath, tries one more time. And after letting go of his family, his hair, his clothes, he drops the last vestige of his civilian life-- he forgets his own name. Sir, new cadet-- David Lipsky-- his book following one cadet class at West Point for four years is called Absolutely American. Act 20-- The Greatest Moment I Ever Saw On a Stage. I'll say, first of all, that this moment that I saw caught me completely off guard. I was at a play where I was not expecting anything special. It was put on by an organization that works with teenagers. Storycatchers Theatre is what it's called. And among other things, they get kids who are locked up in Chicago's juvenile detention center, The Audy Home, to write and perform musicals about their lives. This one was performed by teenage girls. OK, so we're in the detention center. Folding chairs have been set up. The girls' parents-- it's mostly mothers and grandmothers, very few men-- are sitting directly in front of the stage. And imagine for a minute what it's like to be one of those parents, OK? Your kid's locked up, possibly on very serious charges, some of these girls were. You're worried about what's going to happen to them next. You're probably still mad that they didn't listen to you in the first place and got into all this trouble and ended up behind bars. What can theater possibly do for you in this situation? It seems like such an old-fashioned idea that it can do anything. So there's this one scene in the play. Where'd you get these clothes from? And it's the story of this girl named Candace. And Candice basically wanted better clothes so the other kids at school wouldn't laugh at her. She steal some clothes from Nike Town. And she gets in trouble, she gets caught. And then she joins a gang to earn some money and be more popular. Her mom finds some drugs in the house, and a gun, and feels completely betrayed because that was not how she raised her daughter. And one thing leads to another, and Candace gets locked up. Then, the girl narrating the story says, and this is how Candace feels about her mom now. And then all the girls in the play come out on the stage and stand in a line, facing their mothers and grandmothers who are right there in front of them. (SINGING) Mama, I'm sorry for what I have done. I was arrested and ended up here in the Audy Home. Oh, I'm sorry for putting you through all of this. I know you are mad about the good times that we missed. I'm ready to come back home. I'm willing to make a change. One of the verses goes, "Mama, I'm sorry for making you come to court, for almost losing your job to give me moral support. Mama, I'm sorry for putting your through all this stress, for making you worry yourself and depressed. I'm ready to come back home. I'm willing to make a change." And, by this time, the girls are all crying, the parents are all crying. And each girl has a cut-out little heart, like on Valentine's Day, like that, made from red construction paper, the size of your palm. And written on each one is the words, "I'm sorry." And each girl goes out into the audience to where her mom is sitting, or her grandma is sitting, and hands her the heart. And the parents are crying, and the kids are crying, and everybody is hugging. It was really something. (SINGING) --make a change. I'll do anything for you, mom. Please forget about yesterday. Mama, I'm sorry. [SNIFFLES] I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Mama, I'm sorry. Here they were-- not just saying this to their mothers, but saying it publicly in front of the world, in front of their friends. Saying this thing that could be so hard to say in any case. Singing it out and hoping that it can heal something that is going to be hard to heal, no matter what you do. (SINGING) Mama, I'm sorry. [SNIFFLES] I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Mama, I'm sorry. And that's our show for today, 20 Acts in 60 Minutes. Thanks today to Atlantic Public Media, WCAI and WNAN, 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. Tony Malatia, who remembers all the way back to when we started the show. I think it was right around the time we had this big fight about gumballs, which I'm not going to get into because it's pretty embarrassing.
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What can 20 years do to you? Well, consider the case of George Ryan, former governor of Illinois, lifelong Republican. Ryan is famous for one of the most dramatic flip-flops any big league politician has made in this country on an issue in the last few decades. In February 2000, Ryan, a death penalty supporter, tough on crime, declared a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, the first state to do that in decades. You may have heard about that. And he's spoken about that decision in public a lot. But we found this recording of a speech that he made at Northwestern University, one of the rare times that he's talked about his decision so personally and emotionally. And among other things, he told the audience how he had actually been one of the lawmakers who put in place the very law that he ended up suspending. This is back when he was a representative to the Illinois General Assembly. In 1977, I voted to reinstate the death penalty in Illinois. I vividly remember an opponent of capital punishment who challenged those of us who voted to put capital punishment back on the book. I was standing on the floor of the House, and I had punched my green button. And somebody on the other side stood up and said, "How many of you that are voting green would be willing to throw the switch in the electric chair?" It was a sobering question and a sobering thought. I don't want to execute anybody, and I don't want to be the executioner. I didn't want to have anything to do with that. But he believed in the system, believed it was fair, and he voted for the death penalty. 20 years passed, more than 20 years. Ryan becomes governor. And around the same time, it was becoming clear that there were problems in the way that Illinois was sending men to death row. One case after another was being overturned. And then, the hypothetical question that that legislator had asked back in the 1970s became a very real question for George Ryan. He was the one who had to decide whether the switch would be thrown in the case of a man named Andrew Korkoraleis. I began a very extensive review in the case file. I wanted to make sure that there were no mistakes. I called in my trusted friends, both prosecutors and defense lawyers, to have them review the case files. I talked to investigators, and I talked to everybody that I could that had some knowledge about the law. And I agonized, frankly. I'm a pharmacist who had the good fortune to be elected governor of this great state. Now, suddenly, I shouldered the burden of making the decisions about life or death. Tuesday, March 17th, the day before the execution, Ryan still did not know what to do. At one point, he had his aides type up a stay of execution. At another, he asked for the prayers of Illinois residents. By 7:00 PM, he declared that he was convinced that Korkoraleis was guilty. Six hours later, Korkoraleis was dead. And what comes through in this particular speech is Ryan's anger at having to be the one to decide after so many people along the way had done such a careless job at figuring out guilt in this and other cases. Within a year, he had declared his moratorium. Get this one. This ought to open everybody's eyes. Nearly half of the 300 capital cases in Illinois have been reversed for a new trial or a re-sentencing. Can you believe that? Almost half out of 300 cases have been rescheduled for re-sentencing or a new trial. It's like flipping a coin, heads or tails, live or die. That's what it's like. Can you believe that? I've faced my share of criticism over the past three years, and especially from people in my own party, about the moratorium and the clemency hearings. But until you've sat in judgment and made that life or death decision, you really can't debate with me about what it's like to pull the switch. I know the burden, and I know what it feels like to be responsible for a man to be executed. It's not pleasant. Time passes. People change. Sometimes they change a lot. Today on our program, we bring you three stories about what the passage of time can do to somebody. When each story begins, the world is aligned one way. Then, years pass. Sometimes just months pass, and everything is different. It gives you hope in a way. It's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our show today, The Hiker And The Cowman Should Be Friends, Scott Carrier tells the story of how the environmentalists, who ranchers hated the most, who they tried to run out of town on a rail, who they actually hung in effigy, came to take the ranchers' side of things. Act Two, Scrapbook, The Verb, a Houston woman is trying to document every day of her four-year-old daughter's life in preparation for a day faraway. Act Three, Slingshot, John Hodgman tells the story of two people, one beach, one space ride, and what a difference one year makes. Stay with us. Act One, The Hiker And The Cowman Should Be Friends. Scott Carrier tells this story from southern Utah of a man named Grant Johnson who goes through a huge change over time. The first time I interviewed Grant Johnson he'd just gotten out of jail. He'd been in for eight days, charged with sabotaging four Caterpillar tractors down on the Bird Trail. The Bird Trail was an old dirt road, 60 miles long, connecting Picaboo and Boulder, Utah. It was the middle of nowhere, used mainly by ranchers to graze their cattle on the public lands. The ranchers and the county government wanted to improve the road, turn it into a highway, but a local environmental group was protesting the whole notion. They thought the land should be designated as a wilderness and left alone. Then, one morning, some of the road workers discovered that someone had poured sand in the gas tanks. And the sheriff arrested Grant Johnson because he was one of the three founding members of the environmental group, which was called SUWA, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. And he lived only a few miles from the scene of the crime. And he'd been such a thorn in their sides, protesting road construction and timber sales, that he'd already been hung in effigy from a lamppost on Main Street in Escalante. When Grant posted bail, the sheriff told him that he couldn't guarantee Grant's safety if he went home. So I drove down there to talk to Grant, 250 miles south from Salt Lake to Boulder, then 7 miles east down the bird trail to Deer Creek where I parked and followed the stream until I saw Grant's 16-foot camper trailer. He was living there with his girlfriend, Sue Fearon. Inside was a bed, a little table that folded down, and a gas stove, but no running water, no bathroom, no electricity, no phone. Outside, it was a wilderness, a place of natural forces: red Navajo Sandstone from the Jurassic, dark blue sky, and just real quiet. Well, my name is Grant Johnson. I live at Deer Creek Ranch. I've been in the area of southern Utah, mainly around the Bird Trail, since '75. I've lived on either end of the Bird Trail or on it. And I first came here when I was 16, and it was just incredibly beautiful. That's the number one thing about this country is it's just so beautiful you drop your jaw, you know? There's nothing like it anywhere. From here, I could get on a horse and ride for 80 miles before I'd hit Lake Powell and not see anyone or any sign of man. There's just one road here to cross, and then there wouldn't be another road. So you feel like you're seeing a lot of it for the first time, the first white man, you know? You have the feeling of the first white man a lot. And it's a real sense of freedom too. There's no people, no law. It just feels real free, wide open. I never asked Grant if he sabotaged the equipment, I think mainly because I didn't want to see him lie. It was like a little war back then, a turf battle between the cowboys and the environmentalists, Heavenly Father versus Mother Earth. Both sides considered the land to be sacred. So maybe it was more like a holy war, a clash of cultures. This is Boulder cattleman Dell LeFevre, also back in '87, a man who works from sunup to sundown, who wouldn't even stop his chores during the interview. Yeah, we're the steward of the land. The Lord give us this land to take of it. And I think if we don't take care of this land, we're going to answer in the hereafter. And the do-gooders, as I call them-- some call them the tree-huggers-- the do-gooders come along and, really, what purpose do they have? What stake have they got in this ground? They've got a job in Salt Lake, a job in Denver, a job in Flagstaff. My thing is I don't think the ranchers has hurt this land in the last 88, 90 years they've been here. I mean, let's say we turn this all over to the environmentalists, you know? Shut her down. They want this road shut down, let's just shut the road down. Let's just let it go back to natural. How many people would see this? How many people'd enjoy it? They backpack on the trails that we've carved out. They backpack on our cow trails, the hikers, you know? If we didn't have them trails there, they wouldn't even get there. And my question, I guess, to everybody, what would Boulder be without a ranch? Do you think Boulder'd be Boulder without boulders? They're losing who really take care of the land. They don't take care of the land. All they want to do is come out and smoke their pot, do their little hiking around, and go home. The holy war was about a number of things: road construction, timber sales, energy development, mining rights. But part of the holy war was simply about cows, cows grazing on the public land. There's a lot of public land in southern Utah, about 90% of it. And even though it's mostly sand, and sandstone, and sagebrush, there's still enough grass and other plants along the river banks and up in the mountains for cows to feed. And when the Mormon pioneers first settled the land, that's how they survived, by running their cattle over huge areas. The problem was that the ranchers sometimes put too many cows out there. And then they sometimes left the cows alone for long periods of time, and the cows overgrazed causing some serious erosion and environmental destruction. So the environmentalists wanted the cows out of there. They were destructive, and they were not native to the desert. And they also left cow pies everywhere they went, cow dung, not the tidy, little berries left by deer, but big, sloppy glops of poop on the trails and in the rivers. And a lot of backpackers felt this detracted from their wilderness experience. So for the environmentalists, the cow pies became a symbol of everything wrong with the management of the public land. But for the ranchers, Grant Johnson was the symbol of everything wrong with the environmentalists. I didn't really realize it. Maybe I'm kind of thick-skinned, but I didn't really realize how clear the divisions were in town, environmentalists or hippie. I didn't realize a lot of things. I didn't realize how under people's skin Grant had gotten. There were people that just absolutely hated him. I mean, he was in their midst, and he didn't appear to be leaving. That's Sue Fearon, Grant's girlfriend. They're married now, but back then, she was still pretty much a young woman from the coast of Connecticut. She met Grant after she got out of college when she had a summer job as a ranger in Zion National Park. Grant told Sue about the land he owned on Deer Creek, and that he had some horses, and was going to get some more, and start an outfitting company taking tourists down into the canyon country to these beautiful places he'd discovered. Sue thought Grant was a man with a plan. And she went with him to Deer Creek one night under a full moon and, basically, never left. That was before Grant got arrested. She didn't really realize she was walking into a war zone. Nine felonies and four misdemeanors, and he was thrown in jail. And they set his bail at $250,000, which was-- I mean, there was a guy in there who had shot somebody through the head, and his bail was $50,000. But, at any rate, nonetheless, we raised $260,000 in property. It was pretty interesting. The county attorney tried to make it a condition of bail that he'd not return to his home until the whole matter was settled, which is absolutely unheard of. He represented the environmental community. And I think there were forces here, elected officials, who thought if he went away, if we could uproot him and get him out of Deer Creek, we would be done with this. Fortunately, we are absolutely blessed by having two very good friends who are lawyers. We don't have a lot of money. And if he had had to go with the public defender, he would have been traded over breakfast at the Flying J in Panguitch. They would have cut a deal, and that would be that. For two years, everyone held their breath. That's how long it took for Grant to go to trial. And then, it turned into kind of a farce. The county just didn't have any evidence, and they dropped the charges. Somebody, a friend of ours, took us aside and said, "You guys should go away for a while. Things are really hot. They're talking it up in Escalante. They want to come and route you out." And I said, "You know, we'll lock the gate, but we're not going anywhere." And the first thing we did was we went to Salt Lake City, and we went to my favorite gun store. And I pointed out all the guns that I needed to buy and all the little clips that I needed to go with them. And I came back with, I guess maybe, defensive weapons. What did you buy? A Mini-14 with a 40-round clip. It's a semi-automatic and-- Pistol or a rifle? That's a rifle. And then a 38. Grant and Sue pretty much kept to themselves, staying out on Deer Creek, working on their land, raising horses, and getting ready to start their outfitting company. It must have been tough living alone in the middle of nowhere, no power, no phone, on the edge of a community of 100 people, some of whom hated their guts. One day, Sue went to pick up Grant's kids from his first marriage. So anyhow, as I was approaching Escalante, a fellow who worked for the county in a county dump truck was coming towards me, and he ran me off the road while flipping me off. What a talent, huh? One hand running me off the road, and I ended up in the ditch. But at any rate, this is, you know-- So anyhow, I go to Cedar City, or Paragonah, and I pick up the kids, and I come back. And when I got back-- now we've got kids around, so we don't want to leave the gun loaded-- I dropped the bullets out of it. It's a revolver, and I dropped the bullets out on the dash and left the gun there. Well, the next morning, Grant and I are sitting and we're having coffee. And the gate's locked down at the bottom of the ranch. And we look out the window, and here come two or three guys riding on horseback with long things laid across their legs in front of their saddle. And I thought holy mother of God, we're going to be killed, and we haven't even had coffee. So I go flying out of the house, ripped the door open, and started stuffing bullets. And I get three in there, and think, good enough, and slam it shut, and turn around. And the guy's right behind me, and he's grinning from ear to ear. And he sees that I have flown out of the house and have grabbed a gun. And I've got a gun right in my hands. It's not pointing at him. It's pointing down on the ground. And he's smiling at me. And I think, well, something's not right. And he goes, "Hi, ma'am. We're with the cougar study. We'd just like permission to come through." And my knees were knocking together under my bathrobe. And Grant comes flying out with his 22. And I say, "Oh honey, they're here for the cougar study." Again, this all happened in the 1980's. When Grant was arrested, Reagan was in the White House. Then Bush came and went. When Clinton was elected, the environmental movement gained a lot of momentum. By 1995, Sue had helped write a proposal to Congress to designate 5.7 million acres of southern Utah as wilderness areas. So I went back to Deer Creek to interview Grant again, but I was stunned at the man who'd been the living embodiment of the environmental movement, a man who'd risked everything for it, was now talking just like the cowboys. Personally, I think the worst threat we have is the threat of a national park happening over here. The national park trend is to develop, build roads, hire as many police as they can, which are rangers, and then bust people for breaking the rules. That was Grant. Sue felt pretty much the same way. She'd had enough of the environmentalists. They're shrill. They're shrill. They're insensitive, and they're shrill. And they have no empathy. And they have, I think, perhaps, a limited understanding of what's going on down here. In the years that had passed, SUWA has evolved from a grassroots organization of three guys around a kitchen table into an established, urban corporation with lawyers and lobbyists in Washington and a long list of donating members from all over the country and even Europe. SUWA had also kicked Grant off its board of directors because they no longer saw eye to eye. Grant had switched sides right in the middle of a heated political battle, something that almost never happens. And he'd done in the rarest of ways, by looking at the evidence and then concluding he'd been dead wrong. It had been a war about cows, and he decided cows weren't that bad. When you first came here, you didn't like cows? No, I hated cows. I still don't like cows. It's just I have honestly seen that cows do not hurt the land here. In 22 years of exploring this country, I've seen where the cows are, where they aren't, where they used to be and aren't anymore, where they didn't used to be and are now. And the places that the cows do get don't look much different than the places that they can't get. And I'm not saying this is true for Great Basin, or Arizona, or Idaho, or anywhere else. But here, in the Escalante, in these canyons, I think the grazing doesn't hurt anything. A canyon bottom, like the gulch, they trail cows through there. And I've seen people, campers, in there. And they see these cows go through, and pound up the ground, and crap everywhere. And then the campers scream about the cows, say how horrible they are. The campers go back to the city. And a month later, I go back down to the same canyon, and you can't tell there was ever a cow in it. It's grown up with grass and clover. And down on the river bottom, there was a place where the gulch hit the river where you couldn't walk through there because the guy hadn't put cows in there in so many years. Well, he finally started putting his cows down there, and now it's much grassier. You can hike through it, and, in my opinion, it's a lot more pleasant. And so I'm not really sure that what's being blamed on cows is really their fault. In Grant's mind, he was still an environmentalist because he continued to be deeply in love with the wilderness around him. In fact, he remained a member of SUWA and sent them checks because he thought they were a necessary force in defending and promoting wilderness areas. But he'd become like a devout Christian who no longer went to church because he just couldn't get along with the other members. When I asked Sue about it, how the change came about, she told me it started when she made friends with an old rancher in Boulder, Kirk Lyman. Kirk was probably almost 40 years my senior, about my dad's age. And one day, I was at the Bird Trail Grill and he said he was getting all these magazines, and did I need something to read. The bookmobile came every once in a while, but, pretty much, we passed magazines around a lot. So he said he had all these magazines. And I thought, huh. I didn't even know he spoke. I'd seen him around town. And I figured that he was opening a door. When Sue told me this, things became instantly more clear. Sue is pretty, and funny, and good with horses. Of course, the cowboys wanted to talk to her. So anyway, I just kind of got in the habit of visiting with him and hanging out with him. And maybe he had a project to do, and I'd help him with it. And then we were raising some horses here, and he'd come down. And I'd make biscuits and coffee for Sunday breakfast. And Kirk was bossy. Kirk once told me how to strike a match. I am not kidding you. I couldn't make that up if I wanted to. He definitely told you how to do it. Kirk took Sue riding with him up on Boulder Mountain packing salt for the Cattlemen's Association. And he told her stories, cowboy stories, like how, when he was a kid, he'd go out to the Circle Cliffs, and rope wild horses, and take them home and break them. One time, he had a wild horse that no one could ride. It wouldn't be broken. And eventually, it ran straight into the corral and broke its neck. And I said, "Well, what'd you do?" And he said, "Well, we went down to the Circle Cliffs and got another one." And that was kind of his attitude. It was a very utilitarian approach, I guess some people would say kind of un-enlightened. You know? What about the rights of that horse? What would PETA say about that? I don't know. They wouldn't like it. So anyway, I guess I always have had this ability to listen to Kirk, his conversation, and to hear it, to live it, to understand what he was doing, to picture running full-bore on a horse in wild country trying to rope another horse. And then the other part of me is saying, what would PETA think? You know? So Sue became friends with Kirk. And since Kirk had lived in Boulder most of his life and was well respected in the community, she automatically became friends with other locals. Grant was right behind her realizing that the cowboys, or at least some of the cowboys, were pretty good guys after all. Like, here's an example. One time I was riding out for a week by myself, and I had a pack horse. And I got to where one canyon joined another. And I looked upstream, and there were these bright, orange tents sitting in the flood plain right in the middle of the trail, and they looked like UFOs. I turned right, went a quarter mile, and I ran into a herd of cows. And behind the herd of cows was this old-timer, Ivan Lyman, and his son. And his son had no shirt on, and had about a 10-foot long willow that he was herding the cows with, and a big grin on his face. And Ivan was smiling and sitting on his horse. And I stopped. And he stopped and said, "How's it going?" And he was just part of the land. I could just see it. His face looked like the cliffs looked. And the cows, and his horse, and his saddle were all the color of the dirt. They were just a part of the land. Given the choice of who he identified with, it definitely wasn't the people in the orange tents. The cowboys had done everything they could to threaten and intimidate Grant and Sue, but they'd stayed because their love of the land was stronger than the fear of the locals. And because they'd stayed, they ended up siding with the cowboys. Both Grant, and Sue, and the cowboys came to realize that they shared the common experience of living and surviving in the wilderness, which was both very difficult and very rewarding. Now, these days, Grant and Sue are busy with their outfitting company, Escalante Canyon Outfitters, taking tourists into remote areas of the desert. Most of their business comes from people returning for a second and third trip. They have seven horses in a big, circular corral. They keep their land irrigated and green with alfalfa. Grant is carving out a new house from a sandstone mound next to their camper trailer. The mound is 60 feet tall and 150 feet wide, a huge dome. And they have a six-year-old daughter, Claire, who reminds me of a little mountain goat, white, translucent hair. She sits up on the side of the dome looking down at you in silence. Their place looks good, even beautiful. They're living their dream. The last time I was down there I drove around Boulder looking for Dell LeFevre, the cattleman I'd interviewed back in '87. He's still there, still running cows. Do you remember the first time you met Sue? First time I ever seen Sue, she just looked like a little hippie chick to me. And see, my war go way back with hippies. So I'm not a hippie lover. And man, I see her around with Grant. And Grant and I've kind of been on opposite sides for years because he was all wilderness and I was multiple use. And Grant's had a struggle around here. You've got to give it to old Grant. Grant, he wasn't very well liked around here because of his beliefs. Hell, I'd have packed up and left a long time ago if people treated me like they was treating old Grant. But Grant stuck it out. Grant stayed right with it. And they don't bother anybody. They do their work. They do their thing. And Grant and Sue, they fit in my class now. They're working people. I love working people. Anybody can start a business and make it. That's my kind of people. I can forgive anybody of anything if they're hard workers. So you've changed too, you think? You have to change. You change. Life can't go on. I mean, look how Boulder's changed. You have to change with the times. You can't put a door up and say hey, if you're not a cowboy, don't come to Boulder. When Grant moved to Boulder in 1975, there were 30 ranchers and 100 people in town. Now there are 5 ranchers and 200 people, only 12 of whom have been there longer than Grant. Over the years, SUWA and other environmental groups succeeded in getting the government agencies to watch and regulate cattle on public land way more aggressively. The cattlemen, of course, would like to be left alone. But, at the same time, they admit that mistakes were made in the past. It's never been easy to graze cows in a desert. And now they've got these regulations and the competition from more efficient corporate ranches in Florida. And on top of all this, for the past five years, there's been a severe drought in southern Utah. So they're going out of business, and the environmentalists are at least a part of the reason why. SUWA's a bad bunch, as far as ranchers are concerned. They want cows off. That's their goal. There was "Cows Free '93," "No Moo." I forget all their little slogans. But they've wanted cows off the public land now for ever since they started, 20, 25 years ago. In fact, Grant was probably one of the fathers of that. That was their goal, and they've done a good job. You try to do something, and they appeal it. I try to put a water tank in, and they'll appeal it. It's a tough thing when they get so much clout. Everything you do, they appeal. They can stop anything. And Boulder has been ruined. These big ranches down in that valley, they're gone. Ranching's done, let's face it. The environmental groups won. Do you want to see this valley in 5-acre lots and little houses? Is that what they wanted? A Sedona? Park City? Well, they got her. You come by here when my bunch is gone, and you'll see nothing but houses here. When I was down there that last time, I went to a party Grant and Sue threw for some friends who were moving to Montana because they have kids and the local school in Boulder is not so good. There were about 100 people, mostly families from Boulder, lots of kids, everybody outside by the dome and trailer under a full moon, a beautiful night. Sue invited a couple of local ranchers, but they didn't show up, maybe because of the beer and alcohol-- they're Mormons-- or maybe because they just wouldn't have felt comfortable around so many newcomers to the area. It's kind of tragic. The ranchers are nearly gone, and people are moving in from the cities, which is pretty much how it's going all over the West. It's possible that the people moving in will come to see and appreciate the land in the way Grant and Sue have, that they'll eventually share the common experience of living in this beautiful place. But there won't be any cowboys around to help them. Scott Carrier. His stories are funded partly by hearingvoices.com and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Well, yeehaw, Jon Langford with John Rauhaus with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Coming up, the slingshot killed Goliath but not John Hodgman. Details in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. Act Two, Scrapbook, The Verb. If you don't know it already, there's a whole scrapbooking thing going on in this country: scrapbook stores, scrapbook seminars, scrapbook conventions, and magazines. They have made scrapbook into a verb, as in, "Not now, I'm scrapbooking." Kim Meyer and Julie Checkoway spent some time living in that world to put together a documentary. And along the way, they met one woman whose scrapbooking was so intense that it took on a special kind of character. In her suburban Houston home, where other people would have the dining room, she has a room that's filled with hundreds of ink stamps, thousands of stickers, countless sheets of pattern papers, scrapbook supplies, all ready for a launch toward a future years from now. Kim Meyer tells the story. Timi Emmons keeps her scrapbooks by the window so in case of fire, she can break the glass from the outside and rescue them. Timi is in her late 30s, blond hair, the sort of woman who doesn't like to answer the door without her makeup on. Pretty much every single scrapbook she's made is of her daughter, Maddie. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and then, not in books, this is probably 12, 13. I think I have 3 more, so I probably have 15 or 16. I have 15 or 16 albums, and I've only, probably, touched the last three years. Her first year of life I haven't even touched yet. You know, she's four years old and already has 17 books. I'm going to have to start my own library. Each scrapbook is several inches thick and bound in leather. They're like some mutant cross between a photo album and a journal. On one page, portraits of Maddie in a flowery, Easter dress and sun hat are matted on yellow and green, acid-free, archival quality papers. Then, cascading down into these abundant piles at the bottom of the page, are purple and yellow pansies, hundreds of them that Timi pressed from her own yard. On another page, eight copies of the same photograph of Maddie at the beach in her little pink swimsuit are cut into triangles. The eight triangles are pasted around a central point, so you get the effect of looking through a kaleidoscope. In another layout, she scrapbooked Maddie on September 11th doing somersaults in front of the TV with pictures of the World Trade Center site flickering in the background. Timi says she was struck by her daughter's innocence on this day when she, herself, thought the world was coming to an end. She matted the photos on red, white, and blue papers. The headline streaming above all this was taken from an Alan Jackson song, "Where were you on that September morn?" On nearly every page, Timi also has brief journal entries mounted on contrasting patterned papers and printed out in fonts appropriate to the subject matter, curlicues for birthdays, calligraphy for more serious events. Timi has got a journal entry for every day since she first found out she was pregnant with Maddie. The day we visited, she had 1,765 in the hole. Here's one of them. "January 26, 2001, you and I ran errands and shopped a big part of the day. You drew all over a card for your Papa Chase's birthday. I learned, today, that you now know how to open certain types of doors that have pull handles." Reading these, one after another, page after page, is a little overwhelming, the sheer accumulation and tenacity. It's too complete, too much like real-life, all those mundane details. "You went to gymnastics and took your kitty with you today." Timi tells us that, when it comes to Maddie, nothing is mundane, that every little bit is important. She wants to capture it all. When my little girl kept going to all her doctor appointments every two months and getting all of her shots, as terrible as this sounds, I took my camera with me to the doctor's office and took pictures. I walk around all the time seeing scrapbook layouts everywhere I go. There are times I've seen Maddie just sitting on the doorstep, and one time in particular, and I saw her just staring intently. And I'm like, "What are you doing?" She goes, "I'm watching the butterfly." And so I went and grabbed my camera, and I wanted to take a picture of her just staring at the butterfly. At every moment, every corner I turn, there's a possible scrapbook layout. After Maddie was born, Timi found it more and more difficult to work full-time, be an attentive wife, raise her daughter, and scrapbook so seriously. So when Maddie was about two, Timi decided to quit her job as a paralegal. It may sound extreme to leave work in order to make expensive and elaborate scrapbooks that only your family will ever see. And the scrapbooking supplies are slowly taking over their house, but Gary, Timi's husband, just kind of shrugs at all that. It's her house. I'm just living in it. I've got my remote control, my TV, and my chair. I have my own little closet, which I didn't have for a while. I only had half of that. I have the closet and one little spot on the dresser. That's me. The rest of the house is hers. Not that the scrapbooking doesn't worry him sometimes. I mean, I don't know if that's good or bad. What do you think? What would be good and what would be bad about it? I think if you're always in the mode of trying to create a moment, sometimes, I think, you let moments pass by without really enjoying them. So her way to hold onto that is to create something that she can physically look at to remember that particular moment, maybe to recapture that feeling again. I always try to tell her, "Would you just relax, and sit down, and try to enjoy it?" You know? I mean, there's got to be some part that you take in, in your soul. In that respect, I feel bad for her because she's so worried about holding onto it that I don't know if she really ever captures it. Timi is so intent sometimes on capturing the moment that even if that moment somehow passes her by, she'll re-stage it in order to get the layout she wants. One Christmas, when her photos came back from the lab too dark, she actually fabricated the whole holiday season again. She dragged out all of her decorations, re-dressed Maddie in her various Christmas outfits, and took a bunch of photos over. Fortunately, the tree was still up. I remember that whole deal just because the fact that I couldn't believe that she was re-dressing Mattie back up in Christmas stuff for pictures because she thought that they didn't come out quite right. And if you would see the number of boxes we have for Christmas decorations, it is two closets full. And everything has to go back into its little box, wrapped up in bubble wrap, and put into the box, and it's like, oh, my God. My husband thinks I'm out of control. I don't think I am out of control. But I think it's all in one's perspective. Most people look at me and go oh, my gosh, you're a bit excessive here. But we're all enjoying it. We're having fun. We're making scrapbooks for our children or our grandchildren. We're doing something creative. It's not like we're out Imelda Marcos and blowing all our money on shoes or something. So long as we get the laundry done, and the house clean, and the cooking done, who cares what we do with our spare time? Do you think is there any negative repercussions on Maddie with the obsessive kind of nature of it? There are times when I'm working on a project, I've got a deadline, and I'm stressed about it. And I'm sitting there grinding at the table trying to get this project done. And Maddie's saying, "But mommy, I want you to read me a book." And I'm saying, "I'll read you a book in a little while when I'm finished. I've got to get this done." And, when I think about it, I'm like, OK, now what's most important here, really? And, honestly, my daughter is most important. But there are times that I put her off when she really needs me or wants me because I'm working on scrapbooking. Now, that is the time that I think that's a negative. We asked Timi what she thinks it's about, her need to document her life so compulsively, and she's not sure at first. She gives different reasons at different times. She talks about how when she was nine, her grandmother died. She'd spent nearly every day of her life with her grandmother. A year later, her family pulled up stakes in West Virginia and moved to Houston where they knew no one. Back east, she'd been surrounded by a large, extended family of great-grandparents, and grandparents, and aunts, and uncles, and cousins, who lived in little towns like Hurricane, and Dunbar, and Tater Creek. But a 1,000 miles from where she began, she was suddenly isolated from everything that had seemed vital and real. Her past seemed erased. Her parents began to fight, and they later divorced. Everything sort of fell apart. She hasn't seen her father in years. And all sorts of people close to her started dying off. And it's all this loss that Timi seems to be trying to fend off through her scrapbooks. It's almost like, if she can arrange life in these beautiful layouts, she can control it. And in visiting her, over the course of a few weeks, my co-producer, Julie, and I suggest that to her. I've thought about that a great deal in the last week, about here I'm this person that has this death issue. I've known that for the longest time, but it never occurred to me that that could be what was the underlying, driving force making me almost feel possessed sometime about I've got to get this done. And I've got to hurry, you know? I want to get this all on paper. I've got it all written down. I've got to make sure I don't miss anything. And it never occurred to me that there was that deep of a link motivating me. So that's been very profound for me. About 10 years ago, Timi's mother presented her with a plaster cast of Timi's hands back when Timi was six, a project she'd made when she was in the first grade. Her mother had saved it all these years. I cried, and cried, and cried because it meant something to me that it was important enough to her to hold onto it, and keep it all those years, and give it back to me, and say, this is a part of your childhood. This was part of your life. I want you to hold on to this. It gives you roots. It gives you history. So I wanted to capture for Maddie who she was, where she came from, and what her life was like. And I assumed that she would be the same way, that it would be just as important for her. But I can't quit. I don't know why. I don't know. It's partially out of guilt. I know this sounds silly, but it's not. It's almost as if I stop, then it says, I don't care enough to write, or I'm too busy in my day that I can't fill up a 1 and 1/2 inch square about your life. And I just feel too guilty to stop. It's like once I got started, I can't quit. So the big news is that Timi is pregnant again. She has a baby boy on the way in just a few months, and this has put her in an untenable position. She's not sure there are enough hours in the day to scrapbook for two children. If you've decided that scrapbooks are how you show your love for your child, what does it say about your love if you stop scrapbooking? Timi has sort of scrapbooked herself into a corner. I have not journaled even a fraction to this baby what I did for Maddie, and that's really been bothering me. And even in my journal, I have written to the baby trying to explain why I have not journaled as much, and please don't take this personally when you get older and read your journal and wonder why your mommy didn't write very much to you. Timi is trying to finish up this scrapbook of Maddie's first year before the new baby is born in October. She says that this scrapbook will be about 100 pages long. So far, she's done 12 pages. Every two-page layout takes her 10 to 12 hours to do. That's nearly 1,000 hours of work, 40 straight days, all scrapbooking, no sleep. The new baby is due in 10 weeks. She's not sure she's going to make it. Kim Meyer and her co-producer, Julie Checkoway, live in Houston. Their website, storyrodeo.org. Act Three, Slingshot. John Hodgman has this letter, which he wrote years ago and which he agreed to read on our program, about the changes that can happen from one summer to the next. Dear Mary, here is all that need be said about my experience gambling in Atlantic City. At the Trump Taj Mahal I played $1 to $3 seven-card stud for four hours, sipping free whisky and making jokes with strangers, and I lost all of $7. Then I played slots and lost seven times that in a quick, mean, and lonely 40 minutes. As they say, easy come, easy go. It's tempting to use gambling as a metaphor when writing about the Jersey Shore. But I would rather discuss the metaphoric power of the Slingshot, which stands at 8th and Boardwalk, a handful of miles south of the Taj, in Ocean City, New Jersey. Like all good metaphors, the Slingshot is versatile and may be seen from many different angles. It is seen first, and from afar, as two enormous towers lit with neon, 100 feet high above the boardwalk and the ocean beyond. As you get closer, you see that between them is suspended a spherical cage that rotates freely around its horizontal axis, where cables stretch from either side to the tips of the two towers. There are two seats inside the sphere that, after a hydraulic mechanism tightens the cables, carry two occupants 200 feet into the air at 100 miles per hour, while spinning. It is the sort of thing that its creators bill as a ride. It is the sort of thing that, when seen from the ground at the very base of the towers, inspires one 14-year-old girl with very large teeth to somberly explain to her girlfriend, "I'm not saying that you're going to die. I'm just saying that, if you do die, it was meant to be." The summer before this one, we were fearless. In 1999, Katherine and I came to Ocean City for an engagement party that my mother and her five sisters threw for us on the deck of my Aunt Susan's summer home. We opened presents until dusk fell. Then Katherine and I hiked down to the main drag of the boardwalk and took on everything the amusement parks had to offer: the Giant Ferris Wheel, The Inverter, The City Jet, The Spanish Galleon, Katherine's favorite. We were thrown, and twisted, and twirled, and Katherine almost got sick but didn't. My grandmother was alive then, and so was my mother. Several weeks after we left, there was an accident on a new roller coaster at Wonderland Pier, The Wild Wonder. One car slammed into another at high speed. And two occupants, a young woman from New York and her very young child, were thrown from their restraints. They flew out of the car through the air and into a steel support beam. They died instantly. As well, as you may recall from my last letter, my grandmother died the following Christmas. And my mother died the following June, six days after my birthday, both quickly, both with little warning. And then, in August, we returned to Ocean City. People asked, will it be hard going back without your mother? And I had no answer. The same non-answer I had and have to any question about how hard it is or it will be now that all these things have happened. Jesus, I don't know. Let's go to the boardwalk. When we got to Wonderland Pier, no one seemed to feel the chill haunt of the roller coaster deaths but us. I watched the children in the little cars fly into the air and I cringed. I watched the teenagers necking on the Giant Ferris Wheel with its rust spots and strange creakings. Just looking at the Double Dip at Playland made my neck hurt. But it was the Slingshot that sent us packing. The Slingshot is not affiliated with either Wonderland or Playland. The Slingshot stands alone. Couple after couple are sent screaming into the black, summer night, becoming a tiny, star-like spark against the sky, cables heaving, towers wobbling, sphere becoming invisible. It was the Slingshot that made us feel too old, too scared, and suddenly vulnerable. Katherine has said that, when she was a child, she loved all amusement park rides because she knew that they were made by grownups, which to her meant endless safety and boundless security. Naturally, we have outgrown that delusion. As we trudged back from the boardwalk in defeat, we saw the moon over the beach. Or, at least, we thought it was the moon. It hovered just above the inky horizon, blood red, engorged, larger than the sun at dawn, too bloated to hoist itself any further in the sky and more likely about to fall. A small crowd had actually gathered by the boardwalk's rail to gawk at it as though it were a fleet of invading space ships. And Katherine and I joined them. "Either that's the moon," someone behind us said, "or something has gone horribly, horribly wrong." So now it's the next night, the night after the moon, and Katherine and I have returned to the Slingshot. The large-toothed girl behind us in line says her piece about death and destiny, and we clutch our non-refundable tickets with panic and regret. We watch that spherical cage ascend and descend for nearly 45 minutes. We watch children no older than 10 be happily loaded into what we come to call the ascending sphere of death. And then we're next. It is difficult to explain what has drawn us here after our cowardly retreat last night. We have every excuse not to be here, from the metaphysical to the financial. It costs $20 a head to fly. This alone should chase off a cheapskate like me. But we are here at Katherine's impulsive suggestion and my impulsive agreement, and neither one of us wants to back down. We want to be able to say we will not be cowed by death. But we also see very clearly the weak links in the Slingshot chain, the points where the cable may break or the tower may buckle. The whole rig is set back from the boardwalk in the semi-dark of 8th Street. Though enormous, it has the look of something that really shouldn't be there, of something that can be broken down and carted away very quickly should the sheriff show up wanting to know, "What's all this about a Slingshot then?" There is a palpable air of unease around us, as though all of us in line can, perhaps too easily, envision something snapping this time, the ball flying up and disappearing into the night, crashing miles away in the ocean, perhaps, or a parking lot. And if not this time, the next time. I did not tell Katherine this and really haven't considered it until now. But we are there too, I think, not just to defy death, but to welcome it. It has been a hard year. It has been an unfair year in which we have been taught to think of the unthinkable, taught that we are not exempt from tragedy, but, in fact, can be its strange attractors. It's not quite a suicide pact, but I think that we share an agreement, unspoken even to ourselves, that if this thing kills us, we could live with that, so to speak. When our turn comes, there's a strange ritual to it. We empty our pockets into a plastic bin: wallets, change, keys, salt water taffy, Katherine's flip-flops. I take my glasses off and give them to the man who will prepare us for the ride. I swear he has a handlebar mustache. He tells us we can take nothing with us. We sit in the cage. The mustachioed man arranges the nylon straps and restraining bars that hold us in place. One of them goes directly across my crotch, but I am not embarrassed to have him help me there. I am beyond such modesties. "Tighter," I say. He closes the cage and gives it a friendly tap. "It'll be over before you know it," he says. The cage tilts back and is locked into a release switch below. We are facing directly upwards now. There are no stars. They are blotted out by the lights of the boardwalk. The towers hum as the cables tighten. I take Katherine's hand. "Pretend we're going into space," I say. "That is not a comfort," she says. The hum grows very loud. The cables grow very tight. Katherine takes her hand back. She wants to hold the restraint. A switch somewhere is thrown, and we go up. As metaphors for life and death on the boardwalk go, gambling in Atlantic City is pretty promising. But the Slingshot is better for two reasons. One, though it is unlikely, it may actually kill you. And two, it reminds you that when you are close to death and intimate with it, when you are spinning fast and high in the dark night with nothing around you, it is difficult to tell what is happening. It is difficult to be afraid, far more difficult than it is on the ground. John Hodgman runs The Little Gray Books Lecture Series in New York. His letter once appeared at openletters.net. You can download audio of our show at audible.com/thisamericanlife where they have Public Radio programs, best selling books, even the New York Times all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who finds himself fascinated, fascinated, by the phrase-- Big, sloppy glops of poop. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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I came to the whole MacGyver thing kind of late. I never saw the TV show. In fact, I heard of MacGyver because he kept showing up in rap lyrics. MacGyver, of course, is the guy who fought bad guys, but never used a gun. He used his scientific knowledge. He used sheer inventiveness to get himself out of scrapes. The show's been off the air for years, but he still shows up in dozens of songs. MacGyver would turn a hot water bottle into a tear gas dispenser, or roll up a map to turn it into an impromptu dart gun, or mix an antidote to poison from common ingredients found at his local shopping mall, or escape from evildoers using only a bobby pin or piece of gum, notoriously, or the wrapper from the gum, in some diabolically clever way. In real life, most of us never get to be that clever. In real life, even when there's a situation like, for instance, the largest power outage in US history, it's the professionals who have to jury rig new wiring routes, to figure out how to keep hospitals and emergency services going. It's the professionals who have to be brilliantly ingenious. Let's see, ingenuity. I am chewing gum right now just in case I might need to use it on something. When I reached our contributing editor, Sarah Vowell, in blacked-out New York this Thursday night, she was reading by candlelight. She'd managed to boil water on a gas stove. But that was about all the MacGyver-like ingenuity her situation seemed to call for. Yeah. I mean, I have the gum, and I have the situation. And so far, everything's fine. Well, no, let's just think for a second. There must be something you can do with that gum. Um-- well, I guess if there was some kind of windstorm, I could latch one of the candles down with it, you know? I'm trying to wrench any little ounce of drama out of this for you that I can, but-- But there is no drama. I wish I could tell you something, and then you could put that Mission: Impossible music underneath me, and it would sound really super exciting, but-- No, look. Hold on. I'll put that music under you right now. I am going to take a bath, and light a candle! Yeah, and then I might go to bed early. I bet that line sounds really good with the Mission: Impossible music underneath. I might even take a Benadryl! Ingenious problem solving adventures. We almost never get them in our daily lives. And so today on our radio program we have searched, and we have found not one, not two, not three, but four real-life situations, real-life MacGyver solutions. Cases cracked by ordinary people like you and me. You know, this is completely the wrong music. Just hold on for a second. There we go. The MacGyver theme. One story takes place in prison. One involves a very low-budget movie. One solves a problem that most of us have had at one time or another in love. And one, our first act, is the true story of a potential personal crisis averted in an instant. It is This American Life from Public Radio International and WBEZ Chicago. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Somehow I was not aware that adults gave presents at Valentine's Day. Like, I only thought children did that, they gave cards to each other, you know? Right. At elementary school, there's swapping cards. Yeah. It didn't seem possible to me that adult people gave presents at Valentine's Day. I'm not sure how I managed to get to be 20 and be unaware of this, but that was sort of the situation. And we went to the movie Groundhog Day on Valentine's Day. And I was still living in a dormitory. So we went back to my dorm room, OK? And we're hanging out there, and all of a sudden, she gives me all these presents. She gives me, like, a Soul Asylum album, and a copy of the book Go, Dog. Go!, which I must have mentioned was my favorite book when I was five or something. There were all these sort of really kind of thoughtful gifts, and a whole bunch of them. And she'd obviously put a great deal of effort into the thought behind giving me these things. And is your feeling of the noose sort of slowly tightening around your neck rising with each present? Yeah. I'm sort of kind of paralyzed by fear now, because I realize that she has an expectation that I am going to reciprocate this somehow. And I guess I just didn't feel comfortable saying I didn't know that you were supposed to do this. So I tried to remain as cool as possible, and I started walking toward my closet. OK? And as I was walking toward my closet, I kept kind of stalling for time, saying things like, you know, I really didn't know what to get. I didn't want to buy a gift that everybody would buy. I wanted to get you something very creative. I want it to be a reflection of our relationship. I'm just sort of coming up with all these different ways to sort of describe how not only do I have, like, a really wonderful gift-- something really cool-- but it's going to be metaphorical for basically our entire relationship. But there's nothing in the closet. I have nothing in there. It's just my clothes. I don't know what I'd like-- and I don't really know what I'm doing now. Because I'm walking toward it, and I'm kind of slowly playing with the handle of the closet, and I'm just giving every indication that something is in there. But there's nothing in there. So I thought, maybe something will evolve in my closet. My shoes will become like a microwave or something, you know? But I begin opening this closet, and I look inside it. Of course to see nothing. Remember, nothing is in here. But I just see all my clothes lined up. And what I see is my high school football jacket. OK? And this is not like a letterman's jacket. This is just like a windbreaker-- you know, my name, Chuck, over the heart would be, like where the heart of the jacket is, with my number 18 underneath it. You know? I see this, right? And this thought just suddenly dawned on me, really quickly. So I turn to this woman and I say, well, here's the deal. You know, I never had a girlfriend all through high school, and I used to be very envious of all my friends who would give their football jackets to their girlfriends. And I kind of created this whole sort of narrative about how this had been a huge struggle through high school of not being able to give my football jackets to anyone. Which in truth, I never struggled with. I always thought those guys were idiots. So then I said, I think it would be really awesome if you would accept this high school football jacket of mine. And she started crying. And she just loved this jacket. I mean, she seemed to think it was really nice, and really sweet, and generally very much unlike me. Afterwards, what would you feel when you would see her in the jacket? Would you feel good, or would you feel-- No, no. I felt-- not really. Every single time she wore it. Yeah. And she wore it all the time. And I always thought to myself, she really, really likes this jacket. She must really, really like the experience of getting it, and therefore, she must really, really like me. And yet, I couldn't really look at that jacket without being reminded that this is based on a complete fabrication. Because I really view this as the most diabolical thing I've ever done, mostly because the end result was somebody being happy about it. Like, I would almost have less guilt over something terrible I did that caused someone to feel terrible. I'm mostly bothered by the fact that I did this terrible thing, and it made someone happy. In my mind, it would be so much better if this relationship had ended with her cheating on me or something. I would feel so much better about it if she had, at any point in our relationship, did anything negative to me. But she never did. Well, you don't know. Maybe she's got a story like this too. Maybe she's-- [? when you told ?] her-- she could be, oh yeah, well, really? Well, there's this is one thing I've ever told you. Oh, man, I hope so. Man, I hope that she cheated on me with 10 guys. I would feel so much better about this. Like, while wearing the jacket, you know? Chuck Klosterman is the amazing writer behind Fargo Rock City and, more recently, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. Act Two. Files in Cakes, Ha! OK. Here's a situation where resources are scarce and people have to be inventive with what they have-- prison. There's this incredible book of prisoners' inventions called, straightforwardly enough, Prisoners' Inventions, by a California inmate who goes by the pseudonym Angelo. In the book, there are descriptions of the inventions that he and his cellmates, or cellies, have made, and these intricate, schematic drawings of devices to make cottage cheese and yogurt, tattoo guns, wake-up alarms, dice-- all of these items considered contraband, subject to confiscation by authorities. An actor, Felix Solis, reads some excerpts. Modesty curtain. Because of the close quarters, modesty is one of the first casualties of prison life. My cellie, R, however, created this modesty curtain for when we use the toilet. It's just a simple amenity, a reminder, if you will, that some privacy and dignity is still possible. The curtain is a half sheet suspended from a tightly strung, triple-woven line. The sliding hangers are strings of paperclips attached to the sheet through small holes. The wall mounts are made from wooden dominoes and paperclips, and fastened to the wall with contact cement. Although the cops are notorious for confiscating inmate creations and many saw this curtain, none ever touched it, though a few ordered it taken down over the years. We never did take it down, and they never pursued the issue. Ironically, it was a wimpy cellie that I eventually had who finally took it down, supposedly because of cops' warnings to do so. I think the truth of the matter was that he wanted all the paperclips for his own knick knack project. Wall socket cigarette lighter. I would estimate that a good 60% of inmates smoke. Because of national anti-smoking campaigns, a major problem for smokers in prison has been the elimination of matches and cigarette lighters to discourage in-cell smoking. Variations of materials and methods are possible, but usually, a paperclip and a piece of pencil lead are inserted into the slits in one of the cell's wall sockets. To achieve a light, a second piece of pencil graphite is used to make a quick bridge between the two terminals, forming a short circuit. At the same time, a piece of combustible material, like a toilet paper wick with fluffed up ends, is also brought close, and hopefully will catch fire from the momentary explosion of fire and heat. And there you have a light for your cigarette. Caution. When inserting the paperclip or pencil lead into the wall socket, don't accidentally ground yourself by brushing against the cell's stainless steel toilet or sink. Toilet paper mache cup. We usually get a small packet of state Kool-Aid in our lunches each day. I like to save up the packets so that I can occasionally indulge in a large cup instead of just a small one every day. This led to a problem the first time I found myself in administrative segregation, since for security reasons, only small paper coffee cups were issued for use there. Besides being too small, these cups tended to start leaking at the seams by about the fourth day of use. And with prison being the way it is, new cups could be obtained only once a week on a one-for-one basis. To get another, you have to turn in the old one. Well, after stewing on this problem for a while, I came up with what I perceived as a crackpot solution, which after long hesitation, I decided to try out. To my surprise, it worked well, though it was a bitch to make, plus it used up a lot of toilet paper. Using wet toilet paper, I formed a large paper mache cup around the fist of one hand. A really awkward piece of work, and very thick. Then I took the largest piece of Saran wrap that our lunch bread came in and inserted it inside the cup, leaving the excess sticking over the edge. Note that to prevent leakage, the plastic inside must be an unbroken sheet, so the result is a mess to look at, with lots of folds and wrinkles. And after allowing the whole thing to dry and harden for a few hours, it was ready for use. To thwart possible confiscation, I put a large black dot on the bottom of the cup the size of the toilet paper roll core, and took to keeping the disguised cup in the new recessed toilet paper holder on the sink. A deception that worked so well that for all I know, the cup could still be in that cell, as I accidentally left it behind when I moved on. Excerpts from the book Prisoners' Inventions by a prisoner who goes by the name Angelo. It was read for us by Felix Solis, produced with the help of Jonathan Menjivar. Copies available at the whitewalls.org. Act Three. This is one of those schemes that falls into the category, sure, it sounds crazy, but it might just be crazy enough to work. It all begins simply enough. A man dreams of making a movie. He comes to Boston to film it. It's 1988. His name-- David Rudder. We couldn't get him to come on the radio, but we did get Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote about what happened in GQ magazine. David Rudder is a first-time filmmaker. He's a producer from a place called Rudder Productions, David Rudder Movie Productions. And he's doing a very low-budget, a $1.3 million movie called The Knockdown, which is a romantic comedy about a historic preservationist trying to save an endangered building with the help of a buxom young architect. So he is going to be shooting this movie in Boston, and he needs somebody to produce it. Before long, Rudder is interviewing a guy named George Moffly for the job. Moffly is 27. He's made some low-budget commercials for a weight loss clinic and a dog racing track. He's worked on the crew of exactly one Hollywood film called Vampire's Kiss with Nicholas Cage. And from the very start, Moffly says, the whole thing seemed a little odd. They've sent me the script. It's the worst thing I've ever read in my life. I just can't believe it. I can't believe anything could be that bad. But I didn't care. I wanted to do the movie. I'd set my mind to it. I wanted to produce a film. So whatever it takes. What kind of impression did this David Rudder make on you when you first met him? We were in a tiny little hotel room with a double bed and just enough room for two chairs, and I was sitting on a chair, practically touching knees with this guy who just, quite honestly, seemed improbable. David Rudder makes a kind of shocking impression on George. He's an intimidating guy. He's about six-four, blond, kind of Aryan, square-jawed, very serious. He was in a suit. He just didn't seem to know anything about film. And I had wondered, I said, well, this is really great. So you're doing a film called The Knockdown. And he was extremely evasive about any concrete details. Any country details, you mean like-- Who wrote it? A guy. OK. Well, who's the DP? Hmm. And literally, hmm. Not even anything after that. Just hmm. They sit down to the interview, and it immediately takes a peculiar turn. What happens is that David Rudder starts saying to George, have you ever dealt with the Teamsters? You know, in all the movies and commercials that you've worked on, have you ever had to deal with the Teamsters? And the phrase "dealing with the Teamsters" is kind of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge code for, have you ever had to bribe the Teamsters? Which is something that generally you did have to do at that time if you were making a movie in Boston. And they ask me, have I ever bribed up the Teamsters? And I answer truthfully, yes, I have. And then they ask me, have you ever bribed the Boston teamsters? And I answered truthfully, yeah, uh huh. Then Rudder asked me, have you ever bribed Jimmy Moar or Billy Winn? Now, I knew both of those guys, but the answer was no, I had not. And I thought, you know what? I want a job. I want this job. I want to be a producer. So I said, sure, all the time. You know? And with that, he's given the job. As you've probably figured out by now, this is no ordinary movie. In fact, the movie is just a front for a scheme that is either ingeniously smart or really, really dumb, depending on your point of view. David Rudder, in fact, is not David Rudder. He is FBI Special Agent Garland Schweickhardt. Schweickhardt, for years, has been a pencil-pusher at the FBI, a bureaucrat. But he's come up with this idea for a sting operation. Catch the Teamsters, and prove that they're in bed with the mob. Back when this is happening, back in the late '80s, the Teamsters and the Patriarca crime family seem to be working hand in glove on a lot of things. And they'd been shaking down every movie and film production that had come to Boston and demanding that more teamsters are hired than necessary, threatening the Feds, dumping peoples' trucks in the river, giving money to the mob, and the FBI wanted to catch them at this. David Rudder, or Special Agent Schweickhardt, had he done undercover work before? He had never done any undercover work before. And this was what he saw as his big career opportunity to be an FBI guy like you see in the movies. He went to the FBI's big crime undercover bureau and managed to convince them to give him $20, $25, $30,000 to start this project. And then he went to film school for a semester at UCLA. Studied in one film class. Learned a lot about the business from that. Went to Paramount Pictures, asked them if they had a dud script that they were never going to use. They handed him this turkey of a script called The Knockdown. And he was selling himself as a guy who was doing an investment for some friends. And this is a kind of lark. It's an investment project for a small group of dentists in the Alexandria, Virginia, area. How early on does Rudder send George to go and talk to the Teamsters? It's the first thing he has George do in his job as his producer. He says to George, go to Jimmy Moar. See what you can do in terms of cutting a deal. So I was given marching orders to go meet with Jimmy Moar. And the Teamster hall is this red brick, generic, '50s, early '60s building underneath three overpasses. I'm led into the hall through a series of buzzers. Go to a really dim, fake-paneled office where Jimmy Moar is, and he says, so what can I do for you, George? He introduces himself. He says, I'm here representing David Rudder. We're making a small film. We only have $1.3 million. The budget is laid out like this. We can only afford to hire seven teamsters. And Jimmy Moar, who is this tough, tough scary guy, says, no. You're going to hire 19. And he wouldn't even come down to like 18. He said, well, you know what? 19 is our offer. That's what we're going to do it for. 19 is ridiculous. It would be half the crew of this entire movie. There would be no reason in the world they would need this many people. And George, who's a tough guy in his own right, he got sort of angry about this. And the first thing he did was offer him a deal. He said, look. Can we work out something? Basically said, can I buy you off? Jimmy Moar said he wasn't interested in that. He said, you hire 19 of my guys or you can forget about it, and you can take your [BLEEP] movie to Toronto. And I said, you know what? [BLEEP] you. Tell you what. We're just not going to use any Teamsters. Why don't we do this? Why don't I not hire any Teamsters, I take the money that I saved, I hire a bunch of Pinkerton guards with guns, and I order them around the set to shoot to kill any union disruption that might happen while we're doing this movie. Which was when he offered to break my legs. I'm told to get out of his [BLEEP] office, or he's going to, you know, tear me from limb to limb and throw me in the river. So that was the end of that negotiation. It didn't go very well. And from the FBI point of view, that is not what they wanted to happen. They wanted the bribe to go down. From the FBI point of view, it was a total wash. I mean, Jimmy Moar wouldn't even talk about taking a bribe. So I have to call David Rudder, and I tell him, look I'm a failure. I haven't been able to do it. So Rudder, aka Special Agent Garland Schweickhardt, goes back to his bosses at the Los Angeles bureau and says we can't get anywhere with this. It's not working. Maybe this wasn't such a great idea. And the sting operation is canceled. And shortly thereafter, I get a phone call saying that the dentists have pulled out. Months go by. Everybody goes back to their regular lives. And then the dentists get a lucky break. A small-time mafia-related thug named Robert Franchi strolls into the FBI office one day and announces that he wants to turn state's evidence and help them nab members of the Patriarca crime family. His motives aren't altruistic, mind you. He doesn't want to rid the world of organized crime. He simply owes some gambling debts to a guy, and that guy has gone out and threatened Franchi's mother. His mother. And this comes to the attention of Garland Schweickhardt, who still has this dream of this sting operation. And he realizes, this is somebody he could actually use. And he's going to have Robert Franchi approach the Patriarca crime family and say, I've got this friend, he's making a low budget movie in Boston, he doesn't have enough money to deal with the Teamsters. He'd be willing to pay off anybody he has to pay off to save some money on the other end, can you pull some strings with the Teamsters and see if you can help them out. And now that this is happening, they need to make the movie again. I actually had moved to New York. I'd left Boston. And I was the location manager on a film called The Ambulance with Eric Roberts. And one day, I'm in the production office and the phone rings, and David Rudder is on the phone, and asks me if I'd be interested in working for him again. And it wasn't until after I hung up the phone, I thought, how did he get this number? That's weird. Which was something that, over the course of the next year and a half, would happen a lot. So he flies you to California, right? I'm delighted. I mean, I'm flying to LA. Had you ever been flown anywhere on business? No. Does he meet you at the airport? Yeah. David pulls up in a gold Rolls Royce. I'm just like, I can't believe it. I mean, this guy's for real. It's just this real Hollywood moment. Of course he doesn't know, or have any way of knowing, that the bronze Rolls Royce actually used to belong to a major drug kingpin, that it's seized federal property, and that David is borrowing it just for the day to impress George and make it look like he's a real Hollywood guy. So they continue driving through Hollywood, and they get to this very nondescript office building, and there's a parking space there that says, Reserved for David Rudder Productions. They go up into the elevator, and George starts to feel this sinking feeling that maybe this guy isn't such a big shot, because the office building is filled with nothing but medical practices and biopsy labs. And it's just not the kind of place you would think that a Hollywood guy would have an office. And once he opens the door to his office, this skanky orange-carpeted weird place, it's got posters all over the walls of movies that David Rudder clearly did not produce. You know, like Biloxi Blues and Clan of the Cave Bear. And then he brings me into his office, which is nothing. There are no papers. There was no sign. There are no pictures of his wife. There was no anything. No computer? No computer, nothing personal. Just an empty desk and a filing cabinet. Still, it's not like anybody else is offering George a producing job and a producing credit in a movie, so he says yes-- on one condition. He insists that they get a better script. So first they tried to get somebody to rewrite The Knockdown for $5,000, and then, when that fails-- He says to David Rudder, look. You know, if you want to make a movie that's going to work, it's not going to be this movie. And why don't you give me $20,000 and send me out there to find a script that's actually decent so that we can get good actors in it, so that we can get good people to work on it, and so that we can make some money on it later. And he convinces him to cough up another $20,000 of US taxpayer money to go buy a new movie script for this scam movie that the FBI's making. It's amazing. Because from the FBI's point of view, this movie is still never going to be made. Right. But at this moment, this is where the story turns. Because at this moment, David Rudder starts to have an ulterior motive, which is that he really wants to make a movie. You know, he's been hanging around this business for about a year now. He's interested. He thinks it's exciting. It's glamorous. And in the back of his mind, he's thinking, you know, we might actually film this thing. And he seals the deal by shaking George's hand and saying, "Let's make a movie we can be proud of." And you know what? He meant it. He really wanted to at that point. Why? What was his vision of how this could go? Like, what was going to happen if they made this into a movie? Well, the vision that he had was bigger than what he had admitted to the FBI. What he had started thinking, as he was understanding more about the movie-making business was, you know, we could continue doing this in other states. And what he thought was, you take the initial seed money that the FBI gave him, you actually make the film, you sell the film, you sell it to HBO, you sell it to the airlines, you put it in some festivals, you make some money off it, it goes to video. With those profits, you go to another state like Nevada, where they also have this same problem with the Teamsters and the mob, and you make another fake movie. And then you take the profits from that and you go to California to do it again. And he had this vision that he was going to become, like, a studio executive in the studio system. He was going to use profits from one film to make another film, and each time he was doing it, he was going to bring down the mob in another state. He's excited about casting. He starts fantasizing about the kind of people that we can get in the part. Academy Awards. He mentions that a few times. Wow. He's really-- I'll tell you something. He is excited about being a producer. When George is talking to him about the movie, does he ask him, like, well, do you have any name actors attached to this? Does he ask him the basic questions? He does. One of the reasons that George is so excited about doing the movie is that he's told that Brian Dennehy is really interested in being in it, and so is Rebecca De Mornay. As it turns out later, of course, that's a complete fiction. Although I would love to know how they come up with those two names out of-- I know. They seem so random. --everybody, they're so specific. But no, Dennehy is perfect in a way. Because you've heard of him, but you just don't think he'd be that hard to get. And Rebecca De Mornay, by 1989, wasn't doing a lot of work. You know, she might have considered it. Really, you think actually, we could get her on the phone. In a way, it's brilliant. It's perfect. That part of it is actually like perfectly well thought through. So while all of this is happening, meanwhile, Rudder is working the mob connection, and he's meeting more mobsters. And just talk about how the monsters are reacting to the idea of this movie coming to town. Well, you know, this is the sparkle of show business. The mobsters get really into the idea of being part of this movie. Franchi starts bringing David Rudder around. He has some dinners on Raymond Patriarca's yacht. He meets some people. As the production moves forward, a host of bizarre people start coming in to account. One of them in particular is this kid who's real handsome in an early days Travolta kind of way, Italian Stallion sort of thing going on, named Frankie Salemme Jr. He's a tough guy, he's a little mob runner, but he's also really into show business, and he's taken a few acting classes in this life. And so Raymond Patriarca says to David Rudder, you know what, I want to help out with this movie as much as I can. Maybe you can use my speedboat. We could put my speedboat in the movie. It would be really cool to see my speedboat in a real movie. And I think you should hire Frankie here to be the speedboat driver for the movie role. So suddenly the movie's got a speedboat and a speedboat driver in it. But all these guys just want to be part of the picture. While all this is going on, George finds another script-- using $20,000 of your and my tax money-- and they start to hire a crew, build sets, scout locations, to film the movie in Providence. But weird things keep happening. I get a call from Rudder. I've got a crew, and I have to pay them every week. And I say, I need a check. I've set up a bank account, or we need to set up a bank account. So he flies in. And rather than pay with a check, he has a suitcase, which we take to the bank. And then he asks the bank guy, what's the maximum I can deposit without reporting to the Feds? The guy says-- I think it was $10,000. So Rutter opens the suitcase and there is-- I don't how many tens of thousands of dollars in that suitcase. Which he then counts out, whatever, $9,000, and hands to the bank guy, who is as dumbfounded as I am. Schweickhardt works for the federal government. Like, what kind of undercover man is he that he doesn't know, well, if you deposit more than $10,000, it shows up in reporting? Like, I know that just from watching TV. So much of this is so sloppy. When I interviewed Schweickhardt years later, when I was working on the story, I said to him, you know, what was the deal with not wanting the IRS to know about it? He said, you know what? It's just so much paperwork once you get the IRS involved. And I thought, he's just like the rest of us. David Rudder is convincing enough to the mob guys, though. The movie looks real to them. And pretty soon, the sting goes down, just as planned. The FBI records Rudder paying $25,000 in cash to the mobsters as a fee for making their movie, without 19 Teamsters working on it. And at that point, the FBI has what it needs to make its case in court. In theory, they should shut the film production down the next day, because there's no purpose now. But they don't shut it down, because Rudder really wants to make his movie. How serious does it get? Do they start auditioning actors? Like, are there name actors who are showing up for this? Apparently there are. Apparently Bebe Neuwirth comes in for a reading, and there was somebody else-- oh, John Lithgow comes in for a reading. They're auditioning people for extras. They're bringing in this whole parade of actors, day after day. At this point Robert the Neck-- Robert Franchi, who is the key to this whole operation, who is the mob informant-- starts to be the only person in this whole story who has a crisis of conscience. Because he's watching, as he would describe it later, these really idealistic young kids come in and audition for what they think is a real movie. And he feels like there's something really wrong about that, you know? He knows that it's not a real movie. He knows that the FBI is behind it. He knows it's probably never going to get made. And he's a standup guy. He just feels like-- he's the same guy who was going to kill somebody for threatening his mother, you know? He just, he's got values. The other thing that happens around this time is that George starts to get in some run-ins. George is a really scrappy little guy. He starts to get in some run-ins with these mob guys who are hanging around the movie set. And he had hired his little sister to work as a production assistant on this film, and Frankie Salemme Jr. keeps hitting on her, and she's scared of him, because he's a really scary, thuggish guy, and he won't leave her alone. So George goes to his sister's defense, as both an older brother and a movie producer, and takes Salemme aside and says-- If you look at my sister again, if you touch my sister again, if you touch anybody on the set, look at anybody on the set, I'm going to slap you with a sexual harassment suit that's going to make your head spin around. Which is when he told me, you know, you don't know who I [BLEEP] am. You don't know who my [BLEEP] father is. You know, I'm going to [BLEEP] kill you. For this family, that's not just a colorful expression. That's actually like a way of life. You know? That's actually a statement of intent. That's a contract, right there. They will find you-- fresh kills. You know? And so he sort of almost tries to make good on it one night. George doesn't find this out until years later, when the whole story comes out. George is doing some work in his hotel room, drawing up budgets, and Frankie Salemme comes upstairs with the intention-- he would admit later-- of throwing him out a window and killing him. And he is stopped in the hallway by our hero, Robert the Neck. Robert Franchi, the mob informant, tackles him in the hallway and talks him out of it and says, why don't you cool down, it's not that big a deal, he's just a punk, you don't want anything to do with it, and sends him on his way. So Robert the Neck is turning out to be the sort of moral center of this whole event. So at what point do they finally pull the plug? They pull the plug two weeks before they're supposed to go into production. And what happens is that somebody at the Justice Department is reviewing case files for undercover work for the FBI and discovers that the FBI is about to make a film in New England starring real actors in order to entrap the mob. And they pull the plug on it within an hour. You know, they've made a series of frantic phone calls saying, whose idea is this? This is an incredibly bad idea. We could all get sued, at the very least. And some people could get killed. Some of these innocent people who've been put in between the teamsters, the FBI, and the mob. This is a very dangerous thing to involve citizens with. And Schweickhardt fights for it with his life. And one of the things that he's told by the FBI is that the Justice Department feels that it could be an embarrassment to the federal government to find out that taxpayer money had been used to make a crappy low-budget movie. At which point Schweickhardt says, but it's going to be a really good movie. Aww. You know? Like he's so hurt that they would think that he wasn't going to make a really good movie. He's like, it's not anything that anybody would be embarrassed about. It's going to be a really, really good movie script. It's a great script. This argument does not carry the day with the United States Justice Department. Rudder has to call George and tell him that the dentists have pulled out again. George is crushed. Rudder is crushed. Everybody on the film gets fired. A year and a half passes before George Moffly finally gets told what it was all about, when the Justice Department contacts him and asks him to testify to a secret grand jury about the movie. He declines that invitation. Being lied to for two years, working on a fake movie, and nearly getting thrown out of a window made him feel like he'd served the country enough already. The Justice Department does OK in court. Not great. Only one guy goes to prison. But the whole case scares the Teamsters and the mob in New England enough that in the end, despite everything that was wrong-headed and ill-conceived about Garland Schweickhardt's original plan, it actually achieves what it set out to do. The mob and the Teamsters stopped shaking down film crews in New England. So maybe the plan wasn't so crazy, though it might have been smart to change a few of the details. Coming up. Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl concocts far-fetched but weirdly possibly effective MacGyver-like scheme concerning boy. In a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. The summer I graduated from high school, I had a boyfriend who now, years later, I think of as a creep. Since he had my husband's name, I won't call him that. Instead I'll call him what I called him later, which is Shane. Shane was my friend Lisa's older brother. I was 17, and he was 23. Shane was the only person I'd ever been friends with who had been alive in the 1960s. Of course, he'd only been a toddler, but that wasn't the way I thought about it. Shane was so old that he'd been alive in history. Shane was also the first person I knew who'd been engaged. The girl he'd been engaged to was named Kathy. They lived together during college, but then she ran off with the manager of Wild Oats, the local health food store. It sounded to me like Kathy was a hippie. I worked at a health food store too, but my health food store was called Alfalfa's, and it was the type of place where there was less hummus and more pate. There were a lot of Colorado moms in Volvos. I would watch them as they wrote checks. They had big diamond engagement rings from earlier that they now had to figure out how to coordinate with the turquoise jewelry they'd discovered when they moved to the West later in life. One lady, every time she came in, bought lobster salad and leaned in to tell me, "Dear, you wear turquoise very well." I would smile. I loved everything about Alfalfa's. I loved imagining the lives of the people in my line. I would talk to them about their groceries. "What do you think of that soy cheese pizza?" I would say. Or, "I really like those Rice Dream moon pies." One morning that summer I looked up and Shane was in my line. It was the first time we'd been together, by ourselves, without his sister. He was holding a single can of all-natural dog food. "I ran out of food for the dogs," he said. Instead of putting the can on the counter, like most people did, he put it right into my hand. And then it started. Shane was the best boyfriend I'd ever had. I felt so grown up, walking across the lawn to his two-story condo, wearing lipstick and cowboy boots. He would be there inside, reading a book on the couch with his two dogs. He'd jump up and kiss me and open me a beer, which he could buy at Liquor Mart himself. We'd sit and talk, and every so often, he'd go to the bookshelf, and soon I'd have a whole stack in front of me. There were so many books he wanted me to read, and movies he wanted me to see. It was like a project to cram it all in. I'd ride my bike home from Alfalfa's at night and he'd surprise me. Be there outside my house in his car, the windows down, playing, very softly, one of my favorite songs. I'd get in the car and we'd start driving, and he'd look over at me in the passenger seat and tell me the thing I was doing with my thumbs was a known sign of genius. He thought I would be the one in of my class to become famous first. Soon it was time for me to go to college and for Shane to go back to his job teaching at a junior high. Before I left, Shane wrote me a poem and give me a silver barrette from one of the Native American jewelry stores. Flying across the plains in August, fingering the barrette in my hair, I decided I would miss Shane, but not in a terminal, serious, sad girl way. It had been a perfect summer. Then I was at school. It was the last year before email really took off, and everyone still wrote letters. I had good letters. Once Shane drew a cartoon of his dogs over the flap. "The boys say hi!" Another time he wrote, "As soon as I sealed this, I felt like writing more." And one time he wrote, "I love you very much." I thought about this a lot. We'd never said it to each other in real life, but now I didn't know. I wondered. I thought that maybe I had underestimated my feelings for Shane. Instead of thinking of him less, I was thinking of him more. Unfortunately, his letters decreased in direct proportion to my thoughts. Worst, in his last notes, he'd begun to mention a first-grade teacher named Tina. One night I brought the cordless phone up to my top bunk and I called him. He said, "Well, I have some good news. I'm getting married, to Tina, the first-grade teacher." And that was when I knew-- I loved Shane. Back home in Boulder for the summer, I couldn't get Shane out of my head. Wearing a skirt, I would ride my muddy mountain bike fast up Arapahoe Road, which I knew he had to drive on a lot, hoping he would see me. I thought the skirt plus the mud made me look wild and pretty at the same time. At night, I'd tilt my halogen bike light upward so that it would cast a mysterious glow upon my face. I'd lean forward, peddling furiously. Drive by, Shane, I'd think. Drive by and see me. Sometimes in this fantasy, it was Tina who would notice. "Look at that girl on her bike," she'd say. "Look at how fast she's going. And she's so pretty." And Shane would glance away from the road, and it would be me. There would be a silence as he turned back to the wheel, him deciding. They'd slow down at the light. He'd get in the left lane, turn on his blinker. "That's Susan," he'd finally say. "That's Susan?" Tina would say, whipping around just in time to catch me flying over a hill, my hair the lightest thing in the dark night. And then they would drive back to his parents' house, Shane filled with regret, Tina feeling inadequate. And the next day, while Tina was out, he'd be overcome. He would come to buy a can of dog food at Alfalfa's. This summer, not even Alfalfa's was fun. The new darling of the front end was a high school sophomore whose father kissed her goodbye outside the automatic doors each morning. The woman who had been so impressed with my ability to wear turquoise seemed not to recognize me when I rang up her lobster salad. I'd stand there in my apron, frowning over products that had once delighted me, like Frookies, and dreaming of the day Shane would stop by. But it never, ever happened. He never even came in for just one look. I'd become a completely different girl. Less shiny, less charming, less likely to become famous. One day I resolved to get over Shane before the wedding. It seemed important not to think about him once he was married. Pathetic, but wrong too, in a way that was possibly actionable. The problem was I had no idea how to go about it. The one bright spot in my summer was my fiction writing workshop. I'd signed up for a class at the University of Colorado that met two evenings a week. One evening I rode home thinking about my story, "Sunday Morning." "Sunday Morning" was told in the voice of a 12-year-old girl whose parents were on the verge of divorce. Like every story I'd ever written, it was based on a real-life experience. In one part of the story, I said that the house was always cold, because the father didn't like to waste money on the heating bill. In another part, I mentioned a photograph of girls in matching dresses at the country club. These were just regular old details from my childhood, but the class had seized on them. They thought the country club symbolized an earlier, golden era, and the cold house meant that now the money was gone, and soon the family would be too. Now, swooping down the bike path, I considered whether, in addition to not getting along, my parents had been losing money. It wasn't a point I had intended to make, but it was right there in the details for the class to discover. They could see things about your life that you couldn't. They could tell you things about your own world that you haven't realized. And that's when I got the idea. I would write the exact story of my relationship with Shane, the lost, magic summer, him set to marry Tina, the way I couldn't get over him now. I would introduce the class to me, the static protagonist, and they would tell me how to act. They would not only tell me how to get over Shane. They would tell me why it had all happened, what it all meant. I would tell them my own story, and they would explain it to me. The next morning, during my shift at Alfalfa's, I sipped from a giant glass of hot tea with soy milk and planned out the story. The action would take place on the day of the wedding. It would be a race against the clock scenario. The protagonist would have 24 hours to get over her ex-boyfriend. This struck me as an elegant conceit, and also an efficient one. If I woke up on the day of the wedding and wasn't yet over Shane, I wouldn't have to sweat. Thanks to the class, I'd have a 24-hour cure. That evening, I sat at the computer. "On the day of the wedding, I worked a double shift," I wrote. "I punched in prices off cans of tuna and pints of Ben and Jerry's, weighed bags of peaches and by-the-pound salads from the salad bar, scooped change out of my drawer and counted it into customers' hands." I sat back and considered my opening. This was the right idea, but I wanted to change it slightly. I didn't want all the details to be exactly, exactly like my life. I copied the old version into a new document and began again. "On the day of the wedding, I worked a double shift. In 14 hours, I made 39 goat cheese and bagel sandwiches, wrapped 106 lunch boats in tight Saran wrap, and sliced through 16 different 10-inch cakes on the course of waiting on at least 357 customers. I was counting to keep my mind off of some other things." I sat back. There, I thought, satisfied. As long as I switch myself from the front end to the deli department, nobody will know this is me. I called the story "Waiting." Like the girl behind the deli counter, I would be stationed in the classroom, waiting to be delivered a satisfying end. That evening I pedaled to class at race-day speed, full of anticipation. The class was a mix of undergrads and people a few years out of school, like a guy who rode the free trolley from coffeehouse to coffeehouse all day and an aerobics instructor with tan, very shiny legs. Then there was our teacher, George. "Let's start with 'Waiting,'" George said, as we sat down in class. This was it. I readied myself for the wise and luminous insights of my classmates. "OK. Just starting with the first paragraph," said the aerobics instructor, "I highly doubt someone would count everything like that." "Yeah, but the girl. What's her name?" a red-headed Southerner jumped in. "Katie?" He looked around the room for confirmation. "She says in the very next sentence, 'I was counting to keep my mind off of some other things.' It's not like she does it every day." "I guess I just don't think it's very realistic that somebody could remember all that in their head," the aerobics instructor said. "Maybe she was writing it down as she went along," somebody suggested. There were nods. I returned the nod. I leaned over the paper and made my first note. "Counting," I wrote, followed by a question mark. Small potatoes, small potatoes, I thought. Bring it on. What else? "I was wondering where she went off to college," someone said. "I mean, it's back East, but where?" Murmurs of agreement. "Where she went off to college," I dutifully wrote. This was not going according to plan. Come on. How should she should get over him? "Wait, wait, wait," said the aerobics instructor. "About the bride. Or actually the wife. I thought it was weird how Katie never even thought about the wife, you know? She never even wondered what she was like." I had to hand it to the aerobics instructor. Sometimes she would come out with something really sharp. "Why didn't she think about the wife?" I wrote, with a big, filled-in arrow next to the note. Why didn't I ever think about Tina, I wondered. "I guess also I didn't really have a sense of Shane," someone added. "I mean, it says he's a teacher and stuff like that, but I mean more about why he got married so quick." "Why Shane got married so quick," I noted. I was starting to see that there might be a problem. The class had some of the same questions about the characters that I did. "Let's talk about Katie's feelings for Shane," the teacher said. OK. Now we're getting somewhere, I thought. "There was this one part that I thought was pretty telling," said one of the older students, "where she says-- on page three, midway down the page." There was the sound of people flipping. "I don't think I loved Shane until he told me he was getting married." "Exactly," George nodded. "But I think it's getting buried in there. You might want to make it bigger," he said, addressing me directly, "or earlier. "But you wouldn't want to make that too much the point," someone said, "because obviously she was having a really hard time getting over him. I mean, she did feel something for him." "Well, I think that's an interesting question," George said, tipping back in his chair. "What are Katie's true feelings? Is this is a story about social status, or is this a story about true love?" I didn't like the way the question was framed. "Social," the aerobics instructor said. "Definitely social. It seemed like she liked having an older boyfriend." Where was this in my story? But everyone was nodding. Encouraged, the aerobics instructor added, "I mean, if they'd been in love, it would have clicked when they were still together." No! I felt everything slump inside me. As everyone bobbed their heads in agreement, that Shane and I hadn't been in love, I looked very intently at my paper. "Why didn't anything click?" I wrote. Then I couldn't write the rest of it, so I just made a long dash. "Maybe she's going through something more than just Shane," somebody suggested. I perked up a little. This was definitely possible. "But there's not enough in here to give us a sense of what that other thing she's going through might be," said George. "We don't know much about Katie. She went off to college. She enjoys mountain biking. But aside from that, who is she?" She's me, I thought. Look over here! Blonde hair, green skirt, far corner. The class was silent. Then George turned his entire body and looked me straight in the eye. Oh God, I thought. They know. "Susan, you might need to do a little pre-writing about Katie. Get a sense of who she is. Figure her out a little more." Yes. I nodded vigorously, as if I, too, was hoping to unlock the mysteries of this girl I'd created. "OK. Well, we should really move on to the next one," said George. "Susan, I guess my final comment would be that the story needs an end. But it develops well. Nice job," he said. I sat there blankly. The story needs an end? I thought. No duh, it needs an end. We are gathered together today to figure out the end. The story needing an end is the whole reason we are here. And now we just started talking about some other person's work. I sat very still and looked around the bright room, all of us at the desks in a big circle. Nothing had happened. I was still the same. Except for now I'd tried this, and it seemed like I had no more chances. I rode my bike home slowly. It made me feel lonely, thinking of the way they'd talked about my life. It was so in general. None of them knew that they were talking about a real girl in the world. Then, as the days went by, I felt better. The class had acted like my story wasn't so unusual. Just some old thing with an ex-boyfriend. It made the whole thing feel smaller, like less of an emergency. Dozens of girls now riding their mountain bikes through these very foothills had dated boys and been hurt. It was something that people had heard of, something that happened all the time. It was a known thing that made people sad. Now I rode my bike along Arapahoe Road at the speed of a regular girl, wearing regular clothes, like shorts, and pointing my bike light in the regular direction, straight ahead. For a while I still thought about Shane, and then suddenly, I didn't think about him at all. Except on every birthday, when I would think, I'm still not as old as he was. And then I was 23, and that was it. I didn't think about him anymore. Susan Burton from New York. Well 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 by Torey Malatia. I only agreed to host This American Life because he promised me years ago-- Brian Dennehy is really interested in being in it, and so is Rebecca De Mornay. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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In a way, the story is always the same. There was this kid. She was mean, she was popular. It's such a fixture of childhood, you can just walk up to a kid on the sidewalk or at a public pool, and they'll tell you. The popularist is this girl. She's in my grade. She really mean, and she has a lot of friends. I wanted to play with her and then she had no friends, so she said yeah. The other day, I wanted to play with her again, and her friends were there, and she said, get lost. Sometimes she'll be being mean to my sister. And I don't like that. She's always telling somebody what they can and can't do. She acts like she's the boss of people. She's real bossy. She thinks she's got the rhythm and the gear. I'm mostly the popular one in my class, but I have a lot of other popular friends. This boy in my class, he liked me, and every time he would come by me, I would tell him to get out of my way. Everybody says that he's the nerdiest boy in our class. He'll start bothering me and my friends, and we'll tell him to leave us alone. My friends will even tell him, don't even look at her. We talked to a high school sophomore about all this, Lillie Allison, 15, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And she said, in high school anyway, it's kind of like the laws of nature. Someone will always wind up on top. Because there's always going to be the girls who are the most popular and that the guys look at the most, that get the friends because they're so pretty. There's always going to be those girls. And I think once people get the idea that they have that power, they're going to use it. And they know that they can be mean to people and still be loved by everyone. You have nothing to lose, so why don't you go ahead and be mean to everybody that's not as good as you? In Lillie's class, the girls like that-- the popular ones-- had been her best friends. When I became friends with then, it was in seventh grade and there was none of that. It was before the superlatives, and before there was a most attractive. And I'll admit, I was one of those girls until the first time they kicked me out of their little group. And then I saw how it really is. That's what we were, we were the Four Blondes. And what was it like, being one of those girls? It was fun, you know? The attention is kind of fun. Look at them looking at us. It's fun. It makes you feel powerful. Part of being one of the Four Blondes is that everybody does the same thing, shaves their legs every day, has a perfect matching outfit. You know what I mean? Yeah. Makeup always has to be perfect. Not too much, not too little. Suck up to the teachers. I remember I went two weeks without wearing a skirt, and one of them called me and was like, you have to wear a skirt tomorrow. You've worn pants too many days in a row. And if you don't fit that, then you get kicked out for a little while. Lillie got kicked out at the beginning of this summer. She made a mistake. She didn't do what the other girls wanted at some party. So they called up to kick her out. One of them is like-- she's the mean one. It's kind of like the Spice Girls. We all have our own little identity. You know what I mean? There's was the tough one, the cute one, the smart one. You know I mean? And the mean one. Yeah. And so when we all got in this fight, they called me up and they put the mean one on the phone. They'd tell her what to say. She'd say it to me then put me on hold, figure out what else they wanted her to say, and then say it. Wait, they just put you put on hold? So you just sit there on hold waiting for them to come up with the next mean thing? That's right. And they didn't even realize how mean it was. Of course it doesn't always end in high school. And this isn't just about teenage girls. There are popular bullies in business and politics-- very successful ones in politics. Our movies and TV shows are full of them. There's an entire industry of gangster rap. Today on our show, the allure of the mean friend, and what is so alluring about them in the first place, explained. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today in four acts. Act One, Return to the Scene of the Crime. In that act, Jonathan Goldstein interrogates the girls, now grown up, who terrorized him and his classmates years ago in school, and finds that they can be just as scary as ever. Act Two, Does Niceness Pay? In that act, we conduct a little scientific experiment on tape with hidden microphones about whether niceness can triumph and be rewarded in a normal business setting, a setting that will surely be familiar to you. Act Three, And What's Going On with You? A case study in every word out of a friend's mouth meaning its exact opposite. Act Four, Keeping It In the Family. In that act, Bernard Cooper's amazing story about the bill that he got from his own father for, well, the entire cost of his childhood. Stay with us. Sometimes when I'm talking with my friend Jackie Cohen, I will suddenly stop and just look at her. I look at her as though I've only just then realized who it is I am sitting there talking with. "Jackie Cohen," I will say, shaking my head in disbelief. "Jackie Cohen." For you see, Jackie Cohen was the meanest, most popular girl in our junior high, a shepherd among sheep. Nowadays, Jackie Cohen and I are friends, good friends. In fact, for two years we were roommates, during which time she was a very nurturing figure in my life, cooking for me, taking care of the bills, and doing most if not all of the cleaning. My domestic role is confined to stuff like drinking Jim Beam and keeping her up past her bedtime with my impression of Robert De Niro and Edith Bunker doing the lobster scene from Annie Hall. "Alvy, a lobster crawled into my purse." Just the same, sometimes when I feel like it, I can see her through the eyes of my grade seven self. And when I do that and say the words, "Jackie Cohen," it is as though it is no longer just the name of the woman before me, but a name for something famous like a soft drink or a rock band. If I could go back in time and tell the young Jonathan Goldstein that one day he would be friends with the most popular girl at Western Laval Junior High, that young Jonathan Goldstein, taking in the utter absurdity of such a proposition, would laugh convulsively until his nose produced mucus and his eyeglasses needed adjusting. Let me explain to you the power that was Jackie Cohen's. So great was her authority than in grade seven, my best friend, Robert Ceolic wore a three-piece suit to school with the intention of asking her out for souvlaki. I'll never forget the exhilarated look on his face as he ran back to our locker bank to tell me that, while Jackie Cohen had turned him down, she did say that they could be "hi, bye" friends. This meant that when they saw each other in the halls, they could nod to each other, hi and bye. Robert loosened his necktie like a middle-aged ad exec who had just closed an important account. Another thing was that Jackie Cohen didn't like bad smells. She liked nice smells, like perfumed fancy erasers or freshly mimeographed sheets of paper. So if someone's smell was not to her taste, she would leave a note on their desk. The note would read, "You smell. Use deodorant." Jackie Cohen would call it being honest. Jackie Cohen was also the only 13-year-old girl in school who could actually pull off a successful withering look. There was a month where I sat behind her, and one time during a French dictation, I was seized with an uncontrollable attack of coughing. It would later be diagnosed as a whooping cough that would leave me in bed for a week with a fever of 103, but at that moment, it was nothing more, nothing less, than a nuisance to Jackie. She let me know this by whipping her head around, her straight brown hair lashing about like a thousand throwing stars, and witheringly looking me straight in the eye. Jackie turned back around and I'd grit my teeth, vowing not to allow a single cough to escape my mouth. My eyes tearing, I clenched my fists and I trembled. I knew, objectively speaking, that Jackie Cohen's dictation was more important than my own health. I knew that. The teacher, finally seeing my condition, send me out to get some water. At the fountain, just as I was about to drink, my knees buckled and I began to throw up. I wasn't the kind of kid who vomited much, and the experience felt very personal, sort of like crying in your underwear. The Special Ed teacher in the room next to the bathroom came out and walked me back to my class. Jackie, who sat beside the door, as was the wanton responsibility of the most popular, let me in. Seeing me, she gave me this look-- not the withering look I'd grown accustomed to, but another look, a look then until then I'd only seen on the face of adults. It was a look of profound pity. I saw in that look a sorrow for everything she had ever put me through, and for years I held that look close to my heart. Jackie had really good hair. This is Mary Clode. She was Jackie's best friend all through school, and they're still best friends now. Very good hair. Nicely layered, kind of feathered. And she had a special technique. Well, first of all, she always walked around with a comb in her back pocket that stuck out for all to see. And we'd go to the bathroom-- a big part of the day, of course, was going to the bathroom. And she had a special technique. She'd bend her head over. She'd count one, two, three, and then take her two index fingers and say, "Flip" and flip her hair back. And then it would fall. The feathers would all fall beautifully in place. What was Jackie Cohen's allure? Did people like her despite the fact that she was mean? Or did they like her because she was so mean? I think it was a bit of both. Because when you were with her, you felt really alive. And she was so fun and she was so full of life. So it was great being with her. But them before you knew it, you were on the outs. She was looking for a certain quality, and if you didn't have it, you got kicked out. So it was also, maybe, the fun excitement of never knowing when your turn was going to come to be on the outs. And you were always trying to do your best to stay on the inside. So it was pretty exciting. Did my name ever come up in junior high? Did she ever mention my name? Oh, yeah. I remember a time. You were new to school. You were the new kid, and I wanted to go over to talk to you. And Jackie said, no, don't go talk to him. Don't talk to him. He looks dirty. She thought I looked dirty? Yeah. She did. That was how my name came up? Yeah, that you looked dirty. You were the dirty-looking new kid. OK, first of all-- the new kid. The party Mary Clode is referring to was in grade six. I had been going to that school since grade three. I was in the same school as them, evidently completely unnoticed, for three years. And second of all-- dirty. Although my boyhood toilette was second to none, and although I was facially hairless, for some strange reason I gave off the distinct impression of having a 5 o'clock shadow all over my body. So I decided to confront these slanderous accusations at their source. Ladies and gentlemen, Jackie Cohen. Jackie Cohen. Jon, please don't tell me the whole interview's going to be like this. I asked Jackie Cohen if she remembered calling me dirty and new to Mary Clode. And she said she did. I then asked her to repeat the very line to me, right to my face. You know what I said. Come on. Why don't you say it? All right. I will. All right, fine. You said, don't talk to him because he's dirty. Well, maybe I was dirty. You were. And you still are. Jackie Cohen and I spent very combative hour talking, during which time she would not admit to any actual meanness. The furthest she would go in making any kind of concession was in acknowledging that back then, she, quote, "took care of business." A whole lot of business. Listen, no one is on trial. OK? We're here, just two friends chatting. No, Jackie Cohen did not think she was mean in school. Take the whole story of Robert Ceolic asking her out in junior high. You know, Mr. "Hi, Bye." And she stood firmly behind her actions. Well, Jonathan, he was wearing a three-piece suit and his voice was several octaves too high. What am I going to say to the guy? Yes? And. And, not only did I tell him no, but I left him with his dignity. I actually had him thinking that we had a good thing going. We were going to be "hi, bye" friends. So what you're saying is that you're defending it. You're saying it was actually a nice thing that you did. It was very nice. Wasn't he very happy when he came into the room? He was happy, but I mean, he didn't know any better. Exactly. You want me to go on a date with that guy? Feel the way that laugh shivers you down to your toes? The way it taunts as it entices? That is the effect of a popular mean girl's laughter. The truth is that Jackie Cohen is no longer a popular mean girl at all. She's actually a doctor who works with the homeless. She's a really good person. But I still can't help relating to her as though the old Jackie Cohen is still somewhere buried inside of her. Let me ask you this. What happens to mean girl? Is the mean always there? Jon, these questions are boring, man. Oh, you don't like that one. That's OK. OK, let's do a little bit of role-playing, shall we? OK? You're going to be the grade eight Jackie Cohen, and I'm going to be the grade eight Jonathan Goldstein, OK? And I'm in the Western Laval Junior High radio club, and I'm sitting there to interview you. All right? OK. Here we go. OK. Yeah. Um, Jackie? Yeah? Can I have a bit of your time to interview you? No. Why? I'm busy. But you're just-- But thank you. But you're just leaning against the locker. You're not-- But thank you, Jonathan. I'm really not interested. No, you see, you wouldn't have even been that polite. You're right? Honestly, I would have laughed and walked away. You see, this was the Jackie Cohen that I never got to talk to anymore. She's never like this. I mean, sure, she's always eager to let me know when someone in the room smells better than me, and she's quick to point out that my pasty white gut jingles when I play air guitar. But it always feels like a mere taste of the greatness that once was. So we continued to parry and thrust our way along. Is this over yet? And eventually the subject came around to Jackie's older sister, Maureen. Now let me just explain to you Maureen. As mean and popular as Jackie Cohen was, Maureen Cohen was more mean and more popular. Well, my sister definitely taught me some of the tricks of the trade by being very, very, very cruel with me, very bossy, very demanding. She would say that really she was doing me a big favor because without her, I would never have made it in this world, that I was just such a boring, nice little kid and she added a lot of spice to my life. In the pursuit of my mean popular girls scholarship, I knew I now had to talk with Maureen. I was not in the same city as her, so I asked my friend Joshua Carpatty if he would be good enough to go to her house and hold a mic to her while we talked on the phone. Josh has been scared of Maureen for years, and here he was sitting with her in her living room while her seven-year-old played on the floor at their feet. As Maureen provided a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of her thoughts and actions, Josh sat just a few inches from her, a microphone gripped in his sweaty nervous hands. And as I talked with her, Maureen acknowledged that she'd been mean in high school. She made no bones about it, and to her, there was nothing to regret. It was high school and that's just how people acted. So what, you have this image of me, of being really mean all the time? But in an alluring way. You know what I mean? People crave it somehow. Obviously it works. Well, some people like to be abused. And you just sort of tap into it, you know? Right. And then you satisfy that craving that they're not even entirely aware of. That's right. Well, how do you detect that? I don't know. You talk to someone and you just feel whether or not you can play with them or not. Like, I think Josh loves the fact that I pay that kind of attention to him. Josh, the young man who's holding the microphone for you right now. Yeah, who's so scared he won't even look at me. At this point I started to get worried for Joshua. He had been reluctant even to go to Maureen's house, so I knew that at that point, as Maureen spoke his name, he was a shaky disoriented mess. Can you ask Josh if he's nervous with you right now? John, are you nervous around me right now? He doesn't want to answer because I'm here. Can you just put him on the phone for one second, so I can ask him? Yeah. Here, hold on. He wants to ask you a question. Hello? Are you afraid to talk in front of her? You know. You're afraid. Just say yes if you're afraid. Yes. OK. Has she got you on your guard? Yeah, sure. Yeah. When I was finished speaking with Maureen, I called Josh up on his cell phone and he talked with me from his car. It's so [BEEP] hot in this car. I'm telling you, man, you should be paying me extra. So what was it like in there? I've got to tell you, it was a little intimidating. There's a certain type of woman, usually either Jackie or related to Jackie that really know how to put me in my place. So when she says that there are some people who crave to be abused, you would be one of those people. She was looking directly at me when she said that. She was looking directly at me and she was pointing at me with her index finger. Not a lot of mystery there. But why this allure? Why are we so drawn to these mean girls. Because they know. They look at you and they know. Other women who are nice or who are too timid, they try to pretend that they know who you are, which is garbage. But someone like Maureen or Jackie, they look right at you and say, I know you're garbage. You know you're garbage. Why pretend? I'm never going with you. I'm marrying the dentist. I'm not even going to look at you. And you're going to come over to my house, which is the biggest house I've ever seen in my entire [BEEP] life, and you're going to say-- you see this, garbage? This is what a real man provides for me. You know, you come here and you tape me for your stupid friend's radio show. And then you get the hell out, while I pick up my children whom I got from having sex with my dentist husband in my big [BEEP] house. Now get the [BEEP] out, garbage. Out. I mean, with you-- she thinks of you as a harmless eccentric, you know, like a 90-year-old English guy puttering about in his garden. Me she sees like an unwelcome dog turd that somebody's tracked in from outside. And it hurts me. It really hurts me. I mean I think it would be too strong to say that I love Maureen, but I love Maureen. You know, I-- yeah. Want equals fear. But wait, is it the fear that-- Look, Jon, I'm not a sociologist. I don't know what's going on. I'm a piece of garbage to her, and it makes me want to just crawl up next to her like a flea on a tick on a tick on a dog. You know? I just want some of that good, good blood, even if it's my own blood. What about when Jackie said that saying that you can be "hi, bye" friends is actually a nice thing? What'd you think of that? To that guy who asked her out. "Hi, bye" friends? You know what "hi, bye" friends really means? It means that when that guy went home later that night and hanged himself, that's the sound the rope made. [CREAKING] Hi, bye, hi, bye, hi, bye, hi, bye. Jackie Cohen. Jackie Cohen. Do you miss that person that was able to do those kinds of things? No, but I think you do. I think you miss the mean Jackie Cohen. I think you really do. You inquire about her a lot. I think you do. Is the sky that unleashes a bolt of lightning into the forehead of a friendly woodsman mean? Is it mean of the ravenous lion to devour the frightened zebra? As the first terrible bites sink into his legs and stomach, does the zebra look into the lion's eyes as though to say, why are you doing this to me, friend? And why, by my very nature, have I demanded it? When I bring all this up with Jackie, I realize that only the zebra would do a story like this. The lion could care less. Jonathan Goldstein's a contributing editor to our program and host of Wiretap on CBC Radio One, and also available now on some public radio stations in this country. Act Two, Does Niceness Pay? OK, sure, niceness might not get you the most friends in high school. Niceness might not help your career in the NFL, or on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, or in any super-competitive line of work. But you'd think that there might be a place for somewhere, like, for instance, waitressing. The whole point of the job is to help somebody else. Well, consider this story. A waitress in Chicago named Troy Morris was working a Friday night shift with another waitress, Amy Rigali. Here's Troy. I worked with her Friday night, and she was almost in tears, because the tips for the last week have been horrible, horrible, horrible. Like, she's getting less than 15%. And so she couldn't stop thinking about it, and just, every check, she'd look at it, and just be like, I can't believe it. And she's just like, I can't do this anymore. Look at it. People hate me. This is Amy. I feel like I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'm trying so hard to do everything perfect. And all of these people are tipping me below. It made no sense. She'd been there four years, longer than anybody, knew the menu better, gave very quick service, and on the niceness scale, here's the word Troy uses to describe Amy. Super helpful. She's the sweetest person and smiles and is just patient and caring. On Sunday, Amy worked again. And this time, Amy says, her attitude was different. I definitely went into it with this attitude of giving up, just like, I wash my hands of this. I'm just going to serve them and walk away. Because I was so frustrated. And what happened to your tips? They were great. They were, a lot of them, over 20%. It was wild. And I came in, because we switch shifts-- like, she's getting off and I'm coming on. And she's just totally beaming, really happy. "I made great tips. I can't believe it. Now I know what to do." "Now I know what to do." Not be as nice? Yeah. Just not care. We can actually quantify exactly how much niceness was costing Amy. The difference between 15% tips and 20% tips works out to around $50 per shift. Is it possible that any waitress could make more money by being less nice? We decided to do a little experiment to find out. We would wire two waitresses with hidden microphones and then have them be super nice to half their tables and then cool, aloof, to the other half. They'd give equally good service to both tables. We did our experiment in the restaurant where Troy and Amy work, Lula Cafe in Chicago's Logan Square. It's the kind of place that everybody always wants to have in their neighborhood. Small, wonderful food that is also very cheap. Half the entrees cost $6 or so. There's Moroccan couscous, there's vegetarian sushi, there are lots of carefully made sandwiches, and then there's this whole menu of higher-end specials every day, so it's possible to drop $20 on a grilled sea bass or organically raised lamb. Amy had no interest in being wired for sound, but Troy was game. Like most of the staff, she's young-looking. She wore a neon zebra skirt and calf-high boots to work. Her arms were bare so you could see her tattoos. OK. That is really good. it's a little bit of a lighter, brighter flavor. Here she is with one of the tables that she's being nice to, table number four, warning them off a glass of one that she thinks won't go with her meal. So just so you know, it's a little bit on the sweet side. You want something fuller? Is that what you're thinking? In two minutes, Troy has their whole story. They're visiting from out of town, they seem to be falling in love, and they found this very non-touristy, out of the way place through careful research. She praises them on their homework. Good job, you guys. Nice is her usual style as a waitress. She recommends specials. She chats. She's a sweetheart. Being aloof is a little more effort for her. So table two that just sat down-- normally, I would already have talked to them, but I'm making them wait a little while. When she finally goes to table two, which has three serious-looking people in their forties. She doesn't ask them how they are, or if they have any questions about the menu. She doesn't recommend the sturgeon, which is her favorite, or anything else. These are her first and practically only words to table two. Hello. Have you guys decided? When they ask her to recommend a wine, she swallows and tells them: You know what? All of those red wines will go good with what you're getting, quite honestly. And then there was the guy sitting at the bar alone, noticeably good-looking, reading the New York Times. Troy gave me the rundown. He's a regular guy that always sits there. He orders a lot and he never tips great. He always tips just exactly 15%. Perfect for the experiment. Usually, Troy liked talking with him. If she played it aloof, would her tip go up? She walked over and he asked her what she was up to these days. Oh, you know. Working. Did you change your hair, he said. Is it different? Maybe I washed it. And so hours pass. People finish their meals, and when Troy starts collecting their money, the early results all seem to point in one direction. Take table two, the table she barely spoke with. Troy handed me their check. How does it look? OK, doing a little math here. Table two, 17.6% is what they tipped. Oh, really? And I wasn't nice to them at all. And yet-- They tipped over 15%. Oh, I can't wait to see what table five tipped. Let me look. Table five was her hardest table by far, very demanding. And she was very attentive. Check this out. OK, table five you were sucking up to like I've never seen. I was so nice to them. I got them to-go food. I picked out their wine. I helped them figure out what food they wanted. And look. It was $84 and I got a $13 tip. And I was so nice to them. So that's just a little over 15%. Wow. And they were the most demanding and I spent the most time with them than anybody. But the biggest revelation of the night came when Troy retrieved the check from that guy who was sitting at the bar. I can't believe this. Look at this. OK, remember the guy who I said, I'm always nice to him but he always tips the minimal. He tipped 20%. I was mean to him for the first time. Look at-- can you believe that? Wow. He tips $5-- Over 20%. Never. That's never happened. And it totally-- I can't believe it. That's hilarious. But that's really disturbing. I have to be mean to him now, more. By the end of the first night, it seemed pretty clear. Aloofness pays. But then when I came back a second night and hooked up a second waitress with a hidden wireless microphone, I got very different results. The second waitress, Callie Roach, was 23 with super-short hair. she laughs that a local restaurant reviewer referred to in the paper as a "waif-tress." And on her night, everyone tipped 20% or even a touch more. That was true of the regulars who she was aloof to. It was true of the man who Callie doted on who was taking his grown daughter out to dinner. It was true of the couple who Kelly joked around with about their difficult-to-open bottle of wine. After the struggle-- Yeah. I've got little hand-hickies. I'm like, geez, this-- Even the other waitress working on Wednesday, Natalie, who does not have an aloof bone in her body, was getting 20% and more from every table. And the more I talked to Callie and Troy and Amy and the rest of the staff, the more everyone agreed. The majority of their customers are just set in their ways. They'll give whatever they always give in any restaurant like this to any server. Sure, you get a handful of customers like the guy Troy waited on at the bar, who you can nudge this way or that through force of personality, but it's just a few tables every shift. And that's all Troy and I were seeing that first night. This is Natalie. 50% of the people will tip exactly the same, whether they get great service or-- they might tip a little less for lousy service, but most people, they tip what they're going to tip. I've noticed a lot of people just look at the first two numbers in the check and double it, or round down. There's a pattern. People tip the same. I think generally if you're not chatty and overly nice, you'll still get the same tip. Here's Callie. You can just tell that people are going to tip you at 18% because they got their food when they wanted it. And it doesn't matter how much you're giggling and inquisitive. Except Sundays. Sundays, I usually get tipped $4 or $5, every table. Doesn't matter what I do. Because of this, she says, she has a policy-- and she's only half-joking as she says this-- that she tries to limit the number of times that she smiles at customers or shows her approval to exactly two times. Two times. First time, when they place their order, she always tells them what a very fine choice they made, and then she smiles. And then at the end of the meal, she drops off the check and she smiles a second time, as if to say, you see? I do like you. If it's done wrong, she says, friendliness not only will not pay, friendliness can cost you. Because if you're nice and enjoying yourself, they don't need to make you feel any better. They already think you're having a good time. That's my theory, is if they already think you're having a good time, why are they going to tip you for having fun? You know? If you're doing it just to get through it, they know that you're working. Troy and Amy have also decided that niceness has its limits. For the first time in their years of waitressing, because of these discussions in the last two weeks, they have both stopped knocking themselves out running around for their most demanding tables. They're efficient. They're pleasant, but that's it. This is what they've learned. It's not that aloofness pays, it's that niceness doesn't pay. Thanks to the owners of the Lula Cafe. That first waitress, Troy Morris, and one of the owners of the cafe, Lea Tshields, were in the band Tallulah. This song is from the band's album, Step Into the Stars. [MUSIC] Coming up, if you seem so nice, why do I feel so bad? And more. 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 bring choose some theme, and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, the allure of the mean friend. What is it about? We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, And What's Going On With You? We have this from Mike Albo. You're here early. Oh my God, do you have my scarf? Did you bring it? No, that's OK. No, it's just that I got it in India when I was there, and it's just this really beautiful thing, and I really treasure it. It's just really important to me. It's not like the cheaply-made Barneys CO-OP stuff that you buy. I don't mean "you buy," I mean "you buy." Oh, I wish you would have remembered. No, that's OK. You're so flaky. Are you sick? You look sort of tired. Is there something wrong? Oh, you went out drinking last night? It's so great how you can still do that. You're so crazy. Did you throw up? Oh, no, I just mouth-threw-up for a second. OK, so I didn't want you to hear this from someone else, but I just made $2 million. Yeah. So I'm pretty happy about it. My agent's pretty happy about it. It's just really lucky, because you know, like, with the recession, it's like I made my money before the apocalypse and now I'll able to live comfortably. It's just sort of locked in. And I can't tell you about the details of the deal, but if you could just do me a huge, huge favor and just don't mention it to anyone? I know you have sort of a problem being discreet. Oh, order something? Oh, no. No. No, I'm not drinking anymore. Oh, no, go ahead. Have fun. I'm just not drinking anymore. I just realized there's a little bit more to life. But go ahead, have fun. You're so crazy. So what's up with you? Oh, my God, when was the last time I saw you? I am totally hanging out with Tobey Maguire and Reese and Ryan and David Blaine. We jokingly call it the "Millionaire's Club." Oh, you know that children's book I wrote really fast for no reason? It's a Funny Sunny Day? Well, I just found out it's selling like crazy and can barely stay on the shelves. And I got another voiceover gig. It's weird, they just like my voice. I don't even have to leave home. I just call it in. Oh, no, it's-- I just sort of fell into it. You should try it. But it's really hard to get into. But you should try it. You're looking for a place? Good luck. God, it's so hard to find a good place right now. This guy called me and begged me to take his beautiful 4,000-square-foot loft space. It's $300, but he's actually paying me to live there forever. So what's going on with you? I think your body looks good. It's normal. It's a normal body. Really? Well, that's too bad. Well, I just feel like you need a little more confidence in yourself, you know? Like, I feel like I'm a direct person. I say what I feel. You're more-- you're more-- I don't know what you are. But I have to say I don't know how you do it. I'm so glad I'm not single. It looks so hard. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I just ran into Carl. No, he looks good. He's good. He's good. Yeah, he says he hasn't talked to you. No. He seems like he's moving forward and you guys broke up and he's just sort of moving on with his life. He's in this really good relationship right now, and they just bought this huge beautiful place upstate and they're fixing it up together. We just had a really good time talking. And you know what? He's been working out. His body looks amazing. You know, when you and Carl were going out, I never really understood why you liked him. But now I totally do. So nothing's going on with you? [LAUGHTER] No, I'm sorry. I'm just remembering a funny joke that Carl told me. No, I'm listening. An example from Mike Albo's short story, "The Underminer." Mike Albo also has a longer work, a book called The Underminer that he co-wrote with Virginia Heffernan. Act Four, Keeping It In the Family. Of course you can evade a mean friend. A mean relative, however, is forever. This next story is an excerpt from a much longer work by Bernard Cooper. This story follows Cooper's father as he eventually goes to a psychiatric hospital. But what happens in this part of the story takes place well before that. The actor Josh Hamilton read it for us. When I was 28 years old, my father sent me a bill for his paternal services. Typed on his law firm's onion-skin stationery, the bill itemized the money he'd spent on me over my lifetime. Since he hadn't kept tabs on the exact amounts he'd doled out over the years, expenditures were rounded off to the nearest dollar and labeled "Food," "Clothing," "Tuition," and "Incidentals." Beneath the tally, in the firm but detached language common to his profession, he demanded that I pay him back. The total was somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million, an especially hefty sum in 1978. I remember being impressed by the amount. What an expensive life I'd lived. I was shocked and insulted too, of course, not only because my father had made such a calculation but because my life could be added up or reduced to a single figure. To see your existence in the form of a bill gives all your loves and fears and struggles, the cumulative tumult of being human, about as much poignancy as a check for a cup of coffee. It read, "Your obligations to your father, the party of the first part, are considerable. And the only way to impress upon you, the party of the second part, the necessity of compensating him for the fiscal burdens he bore in your behalf is to make his sacrifices evident in the form of the following, recorded herein as a legal and binding document. Should you fail to make payment in full, this matter will result in actions for which I advise you to hire counsel." I double-checked his signature. It was his, all right. The letters rich with loops and convolutions. Go ahead, I thought. Let him dun me. See if I pay. No parent in his right mind asks his child to reimburse him for that child's life. I didn't ask to be born, I thought melodramatically. Besides, had I known I'd be charged for my boyhood, I might have eaten fewer snacks, been easier on my shoes, more frugal with my allowance. I couldn't help but dream up a doozy of a counterclaim, its itemizations even more preposterous than my father's. Chronic insecurity-- $90,000. Narcissistic wound-- $75,000. Oedipal complex-- $7,000. Since, of course, these damages were psychological in nature, it was both difficult and whimsical to assign them a monetary value. But the punitive spirit of this counterclaim was gratifying, for awhile at least. Then the whole petty endeavor depressed me, and I thought, is this what we are to each other? A flurry of demands that can't be met? Hurts for which there's no restitution? During the restless days and nights that followed, I couldn't settle on a convincing or comprehensible reason to explain why my father had sent me the bill, though I suspected the catalyst might have had something to do with his offer, a few months earlier, to buy me a new car. He'd made the offer on a day I'd come to visit him at his Spanish house in Hollywood, the house in which I'd grown up. As I pulled into the driveway, he was busy watering birds of paradise in his front yard, sturdy orange flowers that he'd cultivated, to his constant astonishment, from a bed of drab gravel. Back then, I drove a Fiat whose paint had oxidized to the overall color and texture of rust. The car sputtered as I shifted into park and the sagging tailpipe, which I'd had to bind to the cars undercarriage with electrical tape, coughed a cloud of noxious exhaust. Just a year I'd purchased the car with money from a small inheritance left me by my mother, it fell apart with an almost vengeful rapidity. The vinyl upholstery of the bucket seats began to rub off on passengers' hands and thighs in sticky black patches. Soon the seats were nothing but lumps of raw foam, and even those were crumbling like sponge cake. One of the rear windows no longer rolled up, the pane trapped within the door. On cold nights, a stray dog made the back seat its home, leaving behind a legion of fleas to feast on my ankles as I drove around town. It was humiliating to be seen inside the car, especially in Los Angeles. When idling at a stop light beside a purring sports car with rear stabilizers, anodized hubcaps, and a leather interior, I had to force myself to remember that an automobile does not a man make, and that I was a writer who placed a higher value on words than on material possessions, which is to say that I cultivated a hollow sense of superiority around new cars. My father sauntered toward the Fiat as I got out, peeking through the perpetually open window despite my attempt to block his view. Stocky and balding, in a state of continual agitation, my father was also capable of a tenderness that seem to light him from within and that stirred me like daybreak stirs a bird. "Hey," he said. "Look like you could use a new set of wheels." "I can't afford a new car," I told him. I distinctly recall facing my father, his gardening clothes stained with grass and darkened by perspiration, and shaping my tone so that I sounded neither pitiful-- "I'm too poor"-- or petulant-- "I'll never be able to buy a new car." Before I knew it, my father and I were ensconced in his white El Dorado, gliding with the frictionless speed of a dream toward a Toyota dealership in West Covina, whose ads he'd seen on TV. He pointed a stubby finger at his chest. "Let me handle this," he said. "I've bought plenty of cars in my life and I know how to deal with these bastards. You watch. I'll beat them at their own game. They won't know what hit them." On one hand, Dad's braggadocio made me feel invincible, as though I were in the company of a seasoned pro. On the other hand, it relegated me to the role of admiring onlooker, and suggested that I was too incompetent and naive to buy my own car, which was entirely true. I floundered when it came to the treacherous etiquette of negotiating a major sale, a feat which required-- it seemed to me-- a keen mistrust of one's fellow men, coupled with a barely sublimated bloodlust. As far as I was concerned, getting gypped out of a few bucks was simply a built-in fee for avoiding confrontations with strangers. I'd watched my father often enough to know that such transactions excited him into what can only be described as a rapture of antagonism. He didn't mind yelling threats and pounding desks and generally hurling himself bodily into the arena of commerce. Still, if a new car required me to be embarrassed by his aggression, bring on the blushing. And so I let myself relax into the plush bucket seat, cradled and safe as the Caddy whizzed past slower traffic, huge and unassailable, as regal as a motorized mansion. As we walked across the asphalt lot of the Toyota dealership, triangular plastic pendants rippled and snapped in the breeze. I thanked Dad in advance and told him that I didn't need whitewalls, an air conditioner, or a radio. Basic transportation would be just fine. He nodded and forged ahead, his stride martial, his shoulders squared. Secretly, I hoped my modest expectations might endear me to him even more. Maybe he'd close the deal that very day before his mood changed, before I said something that would inadvertently set him off. Before he said "crap" or "bastard" to the dealer. My excitement was indistinguishable from panic. I wanted a beautiful new Toyota more desperately with every step. I wanted an end to the self-consciousness I felt on the road, an end to the shameful sense that the thunderous rumbling and rank exhaust were coming from my person rather than my car. The showroom felt bracingly cool after the heat of West Covina. Highlights glittered in the flawless paint jobs of the display models. In the center of the room, a sleek new convertible turned around and around on an enormous platform, as if swooning to the muzak. The second we entered, salespeople sensing prey rose from their desks and converged. It occurred to me that we would be the prize for the fastest walker, the one whose handshake or hail greeting reached us first. The victory was a skinny man whose snug black suit lent him an eel-like iridescence. Or perhaps I was just seeing him as my father might-- slippery, unctuous, not to be trusted. Dad shifted his weight to meet the man's gaze, his posture erect. He kicked a tire as if to gauge, through his knowing toes, the vehicle's overall quality. He squinted at the sticker price. "John," said my father, reading the salesman's name tag. "Firstly, I'm an attorney. Secondly, when it comes to cars, I'm not some idiot off the street. A cousin of mine is fleet manager of a Cadillac dealership in San Bernardino." A complete fabrication, as far as I knew. "If we cut through the crap, you just might make yourself a sale. My son here-- I'm buying the boy a car-- doesn't need any bells or whistles." "I'm Bernard," I said to the salesman. He shook my hand without taking his eyes off my father. "Well, Mr--?" "Cooper. Edward. Attorney at law." "I've got to hand it to you, Mr. Cooper. It's nice to meet a customer who knows what he wants and comes prepared to do business. Makes my job a whole lot easier." My father shot me a sidelong glance, as if to say, watch and learn. "I'm going to make this painless," said the salesman. He spun on his heel and walked toward the glass door that led to the lot. We followed him outside to a veritable poppy fields of new Corollas, till we reached a red two-door that John claimed was the least expensive automobile on the lot. "This is the cheapest?" asked my father. Though it pains me to do so, I must add that my father's gold Star of David had loosed itself from the mid-interior of his shirt to glint conspicuously in the afternoon light, the sight of which, given my father's unabashed haggling, caused a chord of shame to vibrate inside me. I felt compelled to explain to the salesman how my father had worked hard for everything he owned. He was a hoarder, a scrimper, a seeker of bargains who could never take his solvency for granted. And in this respect he was like thousands of people who'd grown up poor and endured the Depression, Jewish or not. But that was a lot to explain to a salesman, especially on the cusp of a deal that would change my life. And to put it bluntly, if my father was conforming to the cliche of the cheap Jew, I was that cliche's beneficiary. I peered at the car, feigning disinterest, quite a performance considering how I coveted that little red Corolla. "Mr. Cooper," said the salesman. "I know a shrewd man when I see one. And I'm going to do something that could put my job on the line. But before I tell you what it is, Mr. Cooper, I want you to promise that you won't say a word to my boss." I'd once heard that repeating a person's name was a way to make them feel important, to win them over, and John it seemed had heard the same. "Mr. Cooper, I'm going to let you drive out of here for a mere $200 over the factory price. I'm going to scratch my commission on this. Frankly, I need the sales points more than I need the money, and if we can lock up this deal pronto, it'll be worth my while, and of course worth yours." Here, metabolism obscures memory. My heart was running on all cylinders. My mouth went dry. "You've got to be [BEEP] me, John," said my father. "I know you can give it to me under factory. I'm not paying a penny more than factory. Period." "As I said, Mr. Cooper, I don't mind giving up my commission, but I can't lose money on the deal. I'm giving you the best price you're going to find in LA county, in the state of California." Other customers were milling uncomfortably close to my Corolla, trying out driver's seats, adjusting rearview mirrors. I wanted to turn to my father and blurt, "Why would he lie?" "I'm not buying it," my father said sternly. It took me a second to realize he met the dealer's story, not the car itself. "I know how this game is played, and I'll play along up to a point, but we've reached that point. So let's see what kind of deal you can give me." "Shop around if you don't believe me, Mr. Cooper. Then come on back. The offer still stands. Better act quickly, though, because this baby isn't going to stay on the lot much longer." "I guess you didn't hear me," said my father. "Look at me, Mr. Cooper. I have no reason to lead you on." My father gave John the once-over, then turned to me. "Let's go," he said. "We're taking our business elsewhere." Before we took a step, the salesman curtly thanked my father and walked away. The two of us waited a moment with the tacit understanding that his retreat might have been a strategy to provoke my father into giving chase. The sun beat down from a cloudless sky, asphalt softening beneath our feet. "I think he's basically an honest man," I mumbled. "Honest my ass." My father looked at me with something like pity. I'd never catch on. I would forever remain a sucker, a rube. Muzak faintly wafted from the showroom as the salesman swung the door open and walked inside. "Well," Dad announced. "Show's over." And we trudged across the lot toward his Caddy. The drive back to Los Angeles took a good 40 minutes. My father still fumed from the encounter with the salesman, his ears and neck flushed with blood. Dad insisted that the deal was far from over. "The guy's playing hardball, but you watch. The phone will be ringing when we get back to the house. It'll be him, and he'll say--" My father launched into an imitation of John cooing, "Mr. Cooper this and Mr. Cooper that." My father promised that when the call finally came, John would apologize for being too hasty and lower the price. I'd have my car before I knew it. One day passed. Two. Three. Each day, I called my father on various transparent pretexts and attempted to find out whether he'd heard anything from the salesman. On the fourth day, I steeled myself and asked him outright. "Keep your pants on," grumbled my father. "I said he'd call, didn't I?" By the end of the week, however, my pants were sagging. The car had probably been sold. In the meantime, I'd researched the prices at other Toyota dealerships around town and discovered that John's offer was the best of the bunch. And so I called my father in a last-ditch effort to own the car. "Dad," I said. "I've done some comparative pricing." "So?" "I think we should go for the Corolla before it's sold. And if it's a matter of not wanting to pay more than the factory price-- and who can blame you?-- I'd be happy to contribute the extra $200 myself." The proposal had about it the pleasing hue of teamwork, and I wished I'd thought of it days ago. "It's not about the $200," shouted my father. "It's a waiting game. He's holding out so I'll come running back and throw my money at him. If you can't sit tight for a while, if you have to have everything you want right when you want it, you might as well forget the whole damn thing." Before he hung up, he said, "And don't pester me anymore. I'll call you when the car is ready." The bill arrived after a month of silence. By then I had given up on the car, resigned to drive the Fiat until it broke down completely, or until I could afford to make payments on a new car, whichever came first. I suspected my father might brood about our day at the dealership, but I wasn't prepared for the extremity of his reaction, if in fact the bill was a reaction. Whenever I tried to make a connection, the machinery of cause and effect began to break down. Perhaps in the intervening month, my father had become more offended by my offer to supplement the cost of the car, thinking I'd implied he couldn't afford it, couldn't pull off the deal on his own. Who was I, he must have wondered, to have offered him money? And yet, even taking into account the full force of my father's volatility, it seemed unlikely that my offer of $200 would result in him suing me for $2 million. As the days wore on, my longing for the car grew dimmer, while my father's, no doubt, deepened-- my plan should have worked, that car should be ours-- thrusting him back to the deprivation he knew as a boy. The salesman's refusal to call must have undermined his notion of how the world worked, how bargains were struck by men like himself, men possessed of wile and nerve. What had happened, or failed to happen, defined his every paternal assurance, his promise that the phone would ring, the salesman buckle, the car become mine. How humiliated he must've been to know that I awaited his call. That he'd asked me to wait must have made it worse. My father's refusal to be in the wrong meant that I'd have to wait forever. 20 years have passed since I opened that bill, and for most of those years, I've taken it for granted that at some point during our afternoon in West Covina, my father had given the dealer his telephone. But I've sifted through that trip a dozen times, squinting against the glare of new cars, breathing the icy air of the showroom, and I can't recall my father handing over one of his business cards or filling out a form of any sort. Even if my father had been right after all, the salesman wouldn't have known where to reach him, what number to call. Josh Hamilton, reading an excerpt from a story by Bernard Cooper, which first appeared in the LA Weekly and is now part of the book The Bill From My Father. [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS] And an announcement now-- we have completely remade our website, top to bottom. All kinds of goodies, all kinds of free stuff, free audio, the first episode of our new television show-- the whole thing, absolutely free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. [FUNDING CREDITS] WBEZ management oversight provided by Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, whenever I send anybody over to record him, he says, You know, you come here and you tape me for your stupid friend's radio show and then you get the hell out. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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This story takes place so long ago here in America that the stuff that we normally think of as long ago is in the far, far distant future. It's 100 years before Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are even born-- the year 1635. That year, this guy named Roger Williams, who was this charismatic young preacher, gets banished by the brand new state of Massachusetts, because he goes around questioning a lot of things, including the central premise of what the settlers were trying to do. In particular, he was questioning the teachings of a guy named John Winthrop. Winthrop was the elected leader of the colonists, and he was very clear about what they were doing there in the new world. They were creating God's kingdom on earth. It was going to be a religious community. They would obey God's laws. That was the point of it. This young guy, Roger Williams, had the radical idea that maybe there should be a separation of church and state on this new continent. So the powers that be, including John Winthrop, who, at this point, was the governor of Massachusetts, got together and agreed that this could not stand. This radical, anti-Christian agenda had no place on this new continent. And they voted to expel Roger Williams, send him back to England. In this dark hour, one person steps in, secretly, to help Williams. That person was the governor of Massachusetts, William's main adversary, John Winthrop. There are all these fascinating hints that Winthrop really liked Roger Williams. This is Ted Widmer, historian, director of the Kluge Center for Research at the Library of Congress and, by the way, a former speechwriter for President Clinton. In fact, at the crucial moment when Roger Williams is about to be arrested and put on a ship and sent back to England, Winthrop sends word privately-- we don't quite know how-- that Williams really ought to go down to Narragansett Bay. And Winthrop helps him to escape, even as he's publicly voting for his banishment. Williams does go to Narragansett Bay, where he founds the state of Rhode Island. And then he and the guy whose administration just kicked him out had this kind of amazing correspondence, which lasted for years. The governor, Winthrop, wanted to hear how Williams was surviving, and Williams, all of a sudden, is the leader of his own colony. And among other things, he needs advice. Williams is adjusting from having been this dissenting figure, this person who was very quick to point out what was wrong in the way Massachusetts was governed, to suddenly having to organize a government and get the people even crazier than him to tow the line. And he's complaining to Winthrop about how hard it is to organize a government. So this is a letter from the person who's been banished to the person who, more or less, banished him, and yet it's very friendly. It says, "Much honored sir, the frequent experience of your loving ear, ready and open toward me, emboldened me to request a word of private advice with the soonest convenience it may be by this messenger." It's a little hard to get through the 17th century tone, but there's an enormous affection always underlying what he's saying to him, pouring his heart out to the person who is kind of a surrogate father. Does he ever actually say, how could you do this to me? You kicked me out? The tone comes out, but he never says it explicitly. Actually, in the next line after that, he says, "The condition of myself and those few families here planting with me you know full well," which is a pretty interesting sentence. It's sort of like, you know why I'm here, and you know how I got here. But they don't. No, they don't really dwell on it. If you think about it, the only place their relationship could exist at all was through these letters. The letters were this paper-thin space where these people, who could not have had any other way to be friends, had this exchange that seemed very important to both of them. And it's funny, you know, how letters really do not work that way for many of us anymore. If anything, we have so many different ways to stay in touch with each other that we do not even notice that we're staying in touch over long distances. I think it's so easy to communicate that there's almost no reason to communicate anything of interest, you know? It's become like breathing. And if you listen to cell phone conversations on the train, it's always just monosyllables like, "hi, I'm here," or, "I'll be there at 5:19 instead of 5:18." And it's the most boring verbiage you'll ever hear, listening to someone else talking into their cell phone. And back then, it was extremely difficult to write a letter. You weren't sure if it was going to be delivered. And because letters took more work, people made sure they said something. And there were real things to say. I mean, every week brought a new challenge. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Every now and then, you still do get this kind of correspondence, where people write letters because that is the only way they could have any interaction. And today on our radio program, we are devoting most of the hour to a story like that-- of an unusual relationship that mostly happened in letters, this one between a 10-year-old girl and an enemy of the United States of America, a man accused of being a dictator, a drug runner, a murderer, a man accused of double-crossing the United States. And we have a little story at the end of the hour about what it is like to get a letter every single day for eight years from your own husband. Stay with us. Act One, Who Put the Pistol in Epistolary? Andrea Morningstar has the story of two pen pals. One of them a young girl in the Midwest. The other, somebody who was considered, at the time, an international, or at least hemispheric, menace. We first aired this story back in 2003. When you're driving to Palmer from the west, the first thing you'll notice are these strange orange cliffs up ahead of you, rising above the pine-covered hills. They would make sense in Utah or the Mojave Desert, but here in the lush green hills of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, they stick out and look almost scary. This is the site of the Palmer Mines. The air in Palmer is sooty and metallic, and a black dust settles down on the homes of the miners. A few miles down the road from here, Sarah York grew up in a house that her parents built. Her dad, Mitchell, worked for the mine for years until he got a job as a corrections officer at the nearby prison. Pauline, Sarah's mom, worked as a dental hygienist. One night in February in 1988, they were all at home watching 60 Minutes. That night, Mike Wallace was interviewing General Manuel Noriega. He was the big news at the time. Here's Sarah. I'm pretty sure that the 60 Minutes program was about charges that were being brought up against him, or just accusations that he was a drug trafficker and a bunch of other stuff. I asked my husband. I said, well, what do you think about this? This is Sarah's mom, Pauline. Then he says, oh, I don't-- he was kind of giving his opinion about it. And I said, well, I don't really know what to think. But the discussion ended with, he had a pretty nice hat on, though. And Sarah's dad has always had some kind of interesting hat from somewhere or another. Oh, yeah, I had a Mao hat-- Sarah's dad, Mitchell. --from China, oh, and different cowboy hats. And I made the comment that, well, I suppose that you could write to him and ask for a hat. Everyone has one down there, or several. But I said, I don't think you're going to have much luck. Maybe if a kid did it, then it would happen. And there's Sarah, saying, well, I'll write to him. You know, maybe he'll send us a hat. We made sure to put in the letter that we I really liked his hat. We had this stationery that I wrote it on that had a partridge on it. We thought it would be a nice touch. I should mention that Sarah had her 18-month-old baby on her lap when we talked. And I think I drafted out something on notebook paper, and we worked on it a little bit. I guess I can say I coached her a little bit. I said, you don't want to just come out right and ask him for a hat, you know? You gotta say something nice. So she did, and just mentioned about how she had been seeing him on TV, and hoped that our countries could still remain friends. It was clear and direct, and she complimented him on the hat. [CHUCKLES] It was simple. Well, I read the first letter and I don't remember writing that. And it's kind of like, I feel like it's a joke coming back to haunt me that my dad played on me in a way. Like, I don't know. He probably was like, oh wouldn't it be cute if she said this? "Dear General Noriega, congratulations on the patriotic support of your people. I hope this letter finds you and your countrymen well. I am a 10-year-old American schoolgirl. I study Central America. It is a special interest to me. I have seen you on television often here in the United States. Your hat was greatly admired here. Sadly, we can get nothing like it. I hope friendship will remain-- Yeah, I said that, you know, I really liked your hat, and "sadly, we can get nothing like it here." Come on. Jeez, he's got to send me a hat. Well, we just put, "General Manuel Noriega, Panama City, Panama." I mean, there's probably only one General Manuel Noriega there. And it got there. And it was totally amazing, because it was probably about a month later that I went out to get the mail and there was this letter addressed to Sarah, and it had this Panamanian-- some type of a military flag type thing on it. And it was like, whoa. I knew she'd get a return. I had a feeling. She was so cute at the time. She was in braces and just got her glasses. I thought she would get an answer. And she did, pretty quickly. She was in fifth grade. And I couldn't stand it. I had to go to the school right away and show her this, because it was pretty amazing. Yeah, it was probably one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me. I get this letter. Everyone loves getting mail, anyway, but from a foreign leader? Wow. "Dear Sarah, I feel honored by your letter. I appreciate your message of faith and friendship. I hope you continue sending your message and tell me about yourself and your city. With friendship and appreciation, General Manuel Antonio Noriega." It was just like two sentences. That was all it was. But he did ask her to write again, and to tell him about herself and where she lived. And I told him about where I was from. I'm from Northern Michigan, which I still think is a pretty special place. It's kind of out there, as far as away from cities. And we get a lot of snow, and it gets really cold in the winter. They kept on writing back and forth. It was usually about once a month. At the time these letters were being written, Noriega was as notorious as Saddam Hussein is now. He had just been indicted on US racketeering and drug charges, and images of him were all over the news. Ted Koppel said that Noriega belonged to that special fraternity of international villains-- men like Qaddafi, Idi Amin, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Americans just love to hate. Dan Rather placed him, quote, "at the top of the list of the world's drug thieves and scums." Things had gone so far that he even had a nickname that sounded like a cartoon criminal-- Pineapple Face. Despite the bad press, Noriega and Sarah continued their correspondence, Sarah telling Noriega about herself, and Noriega telling Sarah about his country. Everything was really formal, and he never gave me personal details, I don't think, about his life. It was almost more like he was this spokesperson for Panama. And I think that's what he wanted to do. It's not so much make me know him but know his country. In this next letter, he says, "I'm very honored with the letter you sent about yourself, your family, and your city. In addition, your interest to the problems in Panama and Central America, and so I'm sending you some books about my country. I hope that you read them and tell me your opinion about them." He says, "The US and Panama signed a treaty in 1977 about the Panama Canal, in which the US controls it until December 31, 1999. The only thing that we want is that they comply with this agreement and respect the sovereignty of our small country, Panama." "And greetings to your parents and brothers, and keep being so studious as you are--" because I told him that I get good grades-- "because it's people like you who are going to make this a different world and a future full of peace." Noriega, it has to be said, was a very good pen pal. He was prompt, thorough, polite. He used pretty stationery and sent presents. He even sent a hat like the one Sarah and her dad liked so much. She sent back a picture of her wearing the hat. But the letter that came next was the biggest surprise. It arrived in the mail while Sarah was at school. A manila envelope with an 8 by 10 glossy photograph of Noriega wearing a Panamanian hat, and an invitation for Sarah and her mom to visit him, all expenses paid, in Panama City. I called the school and I asked her. I said, Sarah there's this envelope here. I told her, I'm coming up to the school. And we went into the office and we showed it to the principal. And the principal said, oh, this is fantastic! You're going, aren't you? But I did go home and I called my mother and I told her about it. I said, well, what do you think? And she said, well, let me think about it. And she said, I'll call you back. And she happened to be over at one of my brothers' houses. And my one brother was a little bit upset with us for carrying on this correspondence with Noriega, because he was reading Time and Newsweek and those kind of things, and he was going with whatever they had to say. And he said, he's a bad guy, and you should have nothing to do with him. Anyway, I was a little bit worried that he was going to try to influence my mother by what he had to say. But nevertheless, she did go home and she called me back and she said, you know, I really don't think that there should be any kind of problem with Sarah going. I think it will be a great experience for her. And I mean, I have my mother's blessing, [CHUCKLES] and I just thought, that's all I need. It seemed important. It seemed very important that we got invited and that we're going to do this. How something happens in your life is always different after that. It had that kind of feeling to it. At the time, Noriega wasn't just arguing with the US. He faced dissent at home from Panamanians who didn't want the United States to pull out of Panama, which was scheduled to happen by January of 2000 under the Panama Canal Treaty signed by Jimmy Carter and Omar Torrijos. It wasn't clear then if the United States was going to comply with the treaty. The Reagan and Bush administrations both declared that they would not turn the canal over to Panama as long as Noriega was in power. At a rally where Noriega was addressing the issue, he held up one of Sarah's letters and told the crowd that even American children offer their support. Afterwards, one of his secretaries came up to him and said, why are you showing them the letter? Why not just get the girl? And so that's what he did. He invited Sarah and her mother. Sarah's dad stayed at home. In the years since all this happened, there's no longer much doubt about the way Noriega ran Panama. Human rights groups have documented how the Panamanian defense forces, under his direction, beat, jailed, and deported opposition leaders. An official Panamanian Truth Commission was able to prove that 110 people were killed or disappeared. Back then, it's not like Sarah's parents thought Noriega was an angel, but they weren't ready to believe the hype in the press, and they encouraged their kids to think for themselves. I knew that I was going to get plenty of the bad guy story, so why not get a story from the bad guy? But I don't know that I ever said, I'm going to be the judge of this. I think it was more just, let's see what happens, or, let's see what we can find out. I remember just getting all our clothes together, because my mom wanted me to look really nice. And I think she might have made me a new dress. And I remember we had to buy me some new socks because my socks were too ratty, and we went to this children's clothing store, which I couldn't believe because, in my mind, I was not a child anymore. And we got the white socks with the turned-down cuff with the ruffle on the bottom, which was pretty borderline too young for me. I was really into making friendship bracelets at the time out of knotted embroidery floss. You guys probably remember. And I remember making Noriega a bracelet in camouflage colors. [LAUGHS] The night before we were going to leave, I was busy, busy packing, and we got a phone call from our congressman's office in Washington. And this guy says, well, I know it's a little bit late for this. He says, but I was asked to call you and tell you not to go on this trip. And he says, but I don't suppose I could talk you out of it, could I? And I don't know he didn't really want me to say yeah, I won't go. He didn't really care. I could tell. But, he said, so I just thought I'd give it a try. It was an all-day trip. We left at 6:00 in the morning and we got down there to Miami, and our plane was delayed for three hours. So we got down there at like 9 or 10 o'clock at night. When we landed, it was dark, and the city looked so enormous. And I don't think, when we were planning the trip, we knew much about what was actually going to take place when we went there. The stewardess came over to us and said, we just got a message out of Panama City that you are going to be the first ones off the plane, so we want you to come up and sit in the front. So we went up to the front. And they asked us to give them our baggage tickets and things. Somebody was going to take care of all that business. And as soon as this door is opened on the plane-- We were whisked away by these people. This was really overwhelming to me, because I had been on an airplane all day. I just remember feeling really hazy about all this and kind of just letting myself get dragged along. And I just knew that I had to keep smiling because flashbulbs were going off everywhere and everyone was saying my name. Throughout her entire trip, Sarah was appointed a personal videographer who documented her every move. The video starts as Sarah and her mother are hurried from the plane to a press conference, where Sarah meets the mayor of the city and is given a scroll proclaiming her a "Meritorious Daughter of Panama." I declare Sarah York-- --a great friend of-- She's also given the key to the city, the second one ever presented to an American. The first one was given to Jimmy Carter. Panamanian and American reporters call out questions over the sound of cameras clicking. On the airplane, we asked the stewardess, how do you say "good evening"? Because I said, you gotta be able to-- you might have to make a statement, Sarah. And she's like, well, what am I going to say? And I said, well, we can maybe figure something out. And so this stewardess or flight attendant, told us that "buenas tardes" is "good evening," and so that's what Sarah managed to get out. Buenas tardes. Oh, she says buenas tardes. In the video, Sarah can barely speak through the huge grin on her face. When she does talk, she takes deep breaths and speaks carefully. As the flashbulbs glint off her big, round glasses, she looks dazed and fragile. Aren't you going to tell him that you're happy that he invited you here? Yeah. You can tell him that I'm happy that he invited me here, and I'm really excited to be here. Tell them you're speechless. I'm just speechless. I just felt like such a celebrity. Everyone seemed like they knew me already. [LAUGHS] I was just-- I don't know. I was just really amazed, and felt really loved. What do you expect to see in Panama? Oh, they told me that I was going to see the Canal and that I was going to go to the fair, and go to see a couple of cities and meet a lot of people here. Since they arrived late in the evening, they wouldn't meet the general until the next day. Their celebrity entry into Panama ended in a good night's sleep at a nice hotel. In the morning, they were led by an entourage to the Defense Forces headquarters. The steps to the building were lined with soldiers in their uniforms at attention. When they reached the top of the steps, Noriega himself was there to greet them. He was right there, and he put his hand right out and said, welcome. And he gave us each the traditional, you grab the hand and then you do the kiss on each cheek type thing. And he did that. He looked just like he did on TV or in pictures. I knew who he was right away. First of all, we exchanged gifts. We brought him down a few things from Michigan. And that's when he gave Sarah a little Teddy bear in fatigues. I think we brought him a snow globe that you shake. Just things that were different-- that we thought would be different to them. I thought he was this big guy. I mean, just from what you saw, I thought he was this hefty guy, and he wasn't. He was about my size. I'm not kidding. He's petite. But anyway, I made him this shirt. It was a khaki-colored thing. I made it like extra large, and I was sitting there going, man alive. I was really kind of embarrassed when I gave it to him. I said, well, maybe you can find somebody that this is going to fit. He held it up to him, and it was like a mile too big. But he said, it's very, very nice. Oh, you made this. After we exchanged gifts, I said to him, we have a few questions. I said, would you mind answering a few questions for us? And he said, sure, ask me anything. And I said, if you don't want to answer anything, you just tell us, if we ask a question that you don't want to answer. We just started out with basic stuff, like when is your birthday? When were you born? And where were you born? And do you have brothers and sisters? Three older brothers. You're the baby? Yes. He was just really friendly and really smiley and almost just as much as his letters-- very formal and kind, but not super personal. If you could vote in the upcoming US presidential election, who would you vote for? Oh! Yeah, right. If he was going to vote, he would vote for you. But then finally, we got into some things about the Panama Canal. I don't think we ever asked him any questions about drugs and drug trafficking. We just didn't. We had read enough of that kind of thing. But I didn't really say, are you guilty or not? The next days would be spent touring the city and then the country, meeting Noriega's family and other Panamanians-- people that had been appointed to show Sarah around, but also people from all over the countryside, even hours away, who had come just to meet her and bring her gifts. Sarah and her mom saw the tourists sites, but they also went a little off the beaten path to a poor neighborhood where Noriega grew up and to a village outside of Panama City. In every place that Sarah went, she was given gifts, and introduced to children her age. She traded friendship bracelets-- also a craze among the youth of Panama at that time-- and took in words of Spanish. And she even learned to dance. She saw Noriega here and there when he had time, but mostly she was sent off to see as much of the country as she could. And wherever she went, the press followed her. While on American news every night, there was talk of Noriega and his oppressive regime, on the Panamanian news, there was a full report of where Sarah had gone, and what she had done that day. I tried to be really polite, but I definitely tried to give the cold shoulder to people who I felt were being impolite to me. It was hard sometimes just to be in the spotlight all the time, too. There was photographers following us around constantly. There's a series of photographs that Sarah's mom showed me that I keep thinking about because, in them, Sarah seems so small and literally tossed around in a very strange setting. They were taken at Noriega's beach house. Sarah's mom is inside with the adults. Sarah is swimming with Noriega's young daughter and her friend. But the water's pretty rough. There are big waves. And then here, she got knocked down. And once you're down in that kind of water, it's hard to get your bearings and get back up again before another wave hits you. And she was kind of getting flipped around by this wave. She's got one leg up in the air, and she looks like she's punching herself in the face there. It looks like just a lot of water flying around. The next photo shows a wave crashing down on Sarah's head and, at the edge of the frame, the arm and leg of someone on shore running to help her. In the last picture, General Noriega is wrapping a towel around Sarah, his shirt soaked with water, a worried look on his face, ushering her towards drier ground. He doesn't look like a ruthless dictator or a drug kingpin. He just looks like someone's dad. What was it like to go back home? It was almost as much of a shock as going there. When I came home, it was freezing, and of course I had felt like, oh, I've accustomed to this tropical climate now. [CHUCKLES] And there was kids from my class waiting for me at the airport. I felt like a total celebrity. Sarah York finished up the research for her two-page report on Panama this week. That followed a nearly week-long visit to the Central American country as a guest of General Manuel Noriega. If grades were given by the enthusiasm of teachers, school officials, and nearly 450 students, then Sarah could easily get an A-triple-plus. She created a bond of friendship between the people of Panama and the students of this school district. The school board has proclaimed tomorrow, October 14, as Sarah York Day in the Negaunee Public Schools. Right away when I got back, we started putting together a slideshow of pictures that we had taken. And I went to a lot of classes in different schools, and I went and talked to the ladies' club at some church. [CHUCKLES] I felt pretty important. But it wasn't long before we started hearing more negative stuff, too. Coming up, the negative stuff arrives, permanently and irrevocably, as negative stuff can do sometimes. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. As you may have heard, Manuel Noriega died last week at 83. And when we heard the news around here at our program, it made a bunch of us remember this old show that we did back in 2003. Andrea Morningstar's story about Sarah York from the town of Negaunee, Michigan, who, at the age of 10, befriended and then visited this man who was considered an enemy of the United States. At this point in our story, Sarah has just returned from her trip, and the American public, the American government, and American media are not too pleased with her. I guess it was pretty controversial that I accepted the invitation. And a lot of people said, you know, it was fine that she was writing to him, but why would she have to accept this invitation? Or, I wouldn't let my daughter go. I think they thought that my family was foolish for having this friendship, and that we were just getting ourselves into a bad situation. I think they just felt like it was unpatriotic. There was a lot of nastiness out there. They got phone calls and letters from strangers. There were articles in newspapers all over the country and all over the world. Everyone had an opinion. The Guardian in London ridiculed Sarah and called her "the bespectacled infant" and "the white-socked, short-frocked Pollyanna." This is interesting. I wonder if you could read this. Yeah. OK. What's this one here? Oh. Every Sunday in our local newspaper, they have what they call Voices of Superiorland. Someone goes out into the community and asks a key question of what's happening currently in the world. In this particular Voices of Superiorland, it says, "do you think Sarah York should have gone to Panama to visit with General Noriega?" This guy says-- he's from the Air Force. There used to be an Air Force base here. And he says, "I think it's a risky move." And then there was another woman. She was from Negaunee. "I'm suspicious of Noriega's motives to invite her there." Here's another one. "No, it's just too much military activity." Another one here. "No, I think it's too dangerous for her. It's a scary part of the world." "No, it's obvious that she's being used." And another one. "No, Noriega still is under drug investigation." And then here's one other guy. This guy says, "Sure, why not? It's a free country. She should be able to go there if she wants." So two out of the 10 said yeah, this is all right, and the rest of them were like, no, no, no. Sarah's friendship with a man who has been described as a drug runner and is under indictment here in the United States has drawn some criticism, including that of Northern Michigan's congressman. I think what happens is it kind of gives Noriega the opportunity to be able to take advantage of that situation and use it as a propaganda tool. But Sarah's father says if she has been used at all, it has not been for propaganda purposes. I wouldn't call it propaganda. What would you call it? A symbol. She's been used as a symbol of friendship between the two countries. I remember being in middle school and getting a phone call from a radio station. I think it was set up beforehand that I was going to do this interview, like a live radio show. And I took the call in the principal's office. And they left me alone in his office so I could use the phone and have some privacy. I think usually when I'd talk on the phone to a reporter, my mom or dad would be maybe just in the other room or listening, just to make sure things were going good and everything, but I was totally on my own this time. It started out like a normal interview, and then the guy got totally nasty and started saying all this stuff that brought me to tears, and I was just crying and I couldn't respond. He was saying things like, "Do you know that Noriega rapes girls your age?" and things like that. And I was just like-- I couldn't believe that he would have the gall to say that to like an 11- or 12-year-old girl, and that his listeners would think that was OK. I really wish I would have been able to tell him off on the air. It was a live show. If he was doing that to me, I really wish I could have come back with something, or just hung up on him. And instead, I was too polite. I didn't even hang up. I stayed on the stupid line and I was crying on the radio. Among the things that Sarah was given was a letter from Noriega that he had written while she was visiting and intended for her to read when she got back home. In the letter, he gives her a kind of kid-sized diplomatic mission. "Dear Sarah, when I invited you to visit my country, Panama, I did it only for the intelligence and curiosity that you had about Panama, never with the intention of political or propaganda overtones. The United States and Panama have had common interests since 1903, and never in our territory has there existed any hate or aggression toward the North American people. The American people have an interest in knowing our children and our ethnic groups. I was interested that you should see our poor and not just the pretty, coquettish things. I was also interested that you should be free to move around, question, and walk our streets. I was interested that you should see our children and play with them, and see that they have need of help and protection of the government and its leaders. The government and leaders of Panama have not yet done everything in order that there would be fewer hungry children, without schools, shelter, and food, but I continue fighting for the children that are the future of all the countries of the world. Your visit to Panama demonstrates that the children and peoples separate from the government and their advisers speak the same language, which is that of love, friendship, and peace. I ask that, when you return to Negaunee, that you say that you met men, women, children, old people, government officials, and soldiers who want to live in peace. That they don't want war. God protect you. And from today on, I solemnly invite you so that, in the year 1999, at 12:00 noon, December 31, you will be at the bridge of the Americas to cut the ribbon of Panama." This is huge. The ceremony he's talking about is the day when the canal would finally be handed over to the Panamanians. "May you have a good trip. I send greetings to your father, Mitchell; to your brother, Carl; to your brother, Caleb; to your neighbors; to your teachers; to your friends; and to the man who runs the only gas station in town, Francis. Greetings to the principal, Mr. Robert Trevilcock. The next time, you will also be invited to Panama. Sarah, I have come to know much about your people and friends. Therefore, I congratulate you for being so brave in talking with such emotion about them. Sarah, I'm not going to say goodbye, just see you later. Peace is from God, and therefore, it is welcome to whichever part of the world that will have it. Today, October 10, happy birthday, and on the 14th, when you celebrate it in Michigan. Your friend, General Manuel Antonio Noriega. P.S. My wife, Felicidad, joins me with my words and wishes to give you a mother's kiss that would tie you to the tears, laughter, struggle, and work for the children of Panama." Wow. He was a much better letter-writer than me. I think this is a great letter. [CHUCKLES] Yeah. And I really took that to heart when I got it, too. Once I went, I couldn't really back down anymore. I think that Noriega and the people in Panama felt like, OK, now you've come here. We brought you here. You just took on a job. You have to be our spokesperson, and you have to learn as much as you can about this and kind of educate Americans, because our country's at stake. So I guess, in a way, after I got back, it was like I had a job. And that sounds kind of naive and simple-minded, maybe, now, but I just met a whole bunch of people in this country and I didn't want to see our country attack them. I didn't want to see us go in and kill or whatever this new friend I had, either. To me, he just seemed like a reasonable guy. In retrospect, I look at the newspaper articles and the quotes, and people were just interested in what a demon Noriega was, and how could I be friends with him? And I would defend him, and it sounds really naive now when I read these articles. "Oh, he's a really nice guy." [CHUCKLES] I'd say things like that. But people would just take my story or my words and twist them around, turn it into something sensationalist. I wish I could have been more articulate then, because I think my message came across as really unrealistic and brainwashed. I feel like there must have been a way for me to get my message out without sounding so stupid, but what do you expect from an 11-year-old? [CHUCKLES] I don't know if there's any way I could have done a better job. The closer the US came to an invasion, the clearer it became that Sarah and her family couldn't do anything to stop it. It was December 20, 1989, late at night, when the first US troops were parachuted into combat, and took over the Torrijos International Airport. The Yorks were in bed when they started getting calls. Pauline's brother called first to tell her the news, and then reporters started calling. A friend at a local news station helped them issue a message to the media to leave them alone. They watched live news feeds from a neighbor's house who had a satellite dish. Around 4:00 AM, they went home to try and get some sleep. It was the first full day of the invasion. In the early hours of the morning, they got a call from Thais, one of Noriega's secretaries that they had become close to while they were there. She called me and she says, "Pauline!" She says, "you have to do something." She said, "we've got people that are shot and they need to get to the hospital, and they won't let us through the streets. They won't let the ambulances go through the streets." And I'm helpless. What could I do for her? But she was in a desperate situation. I don't think she knew who else to call in the United States that was their friend. I mean, who was she going to call, the president? Is she going to call a congressman? She didn't have those kind of connections. I just felt so helpless. They watched in horror as the US continued to invade Panama. Buildings were being bombed that Sarah and her mother recognized and had even been to. The neighborhood where Noriega grew up was bombed, too, and Sarah wondered about the safety of the kids she had met there. Conservative estimates say around 200 Panamanian civilians died in the invasion with thousands wounded. 26 Americans died. A US Psychological Operations battalion surrounded the Vatican embassy, where Noriega was taking refuge, and blared rock music all day and night. Finally, after days of this, Noriega surrendered and was taken to a federal prison in Miami, and convicted of drug trafficking and money laundering. Although it was one of the most expensive drug cases ever prosecuted, and although the US searched for proof of Noriega's wrongdoing after they invaded, they found very little and had a hard time proving their case. The US ended up relying on circumstantial evidence and testimony from convicted drug traffickers. Afterwards, Noriega's lawyer, Frank Rubino, said he was alarmed at the way the first Bush administration invaded Panama and went after Noriega. He declared, quote, "The United States will not trample across the entire world, imposing its will upon so-called independent, sovereign nations. Unless leaders of foreign governments are willing to kneel once a day and face Washington and give grace to George Bush, they, too, may be in the same posture as General Noriega." During this time, Sarah continued her correspondence with him. She even visited him and his family during his trial in Florida. But it became more and more difficult to sit down and write the letters. She was a teenager, getting into teenager things, and she had never had a friend in prison before. She became less interested in the correspondence, and her folks kind of took over, sometimes dictating what it was she said in the letters. I think it got just too confusing for me, and I think it was just easier for me to kind of ignore a lot of what was going on. I don't know. You don't know what to say. It's like, can you imagine a young teenager writing to you in prison? What would they say? Or how would they try to make you-- how would they be able to make you feel better? So what was your concern? You wanted to make him feel better? I guess so. And just to let him know that we were standing behind him and supporting him, and that we were still friends. But I just didn't really know how to do that. When we talk about the story, Sarah says that she isn't sure how that experience fits in with the rest of her life. The life she's living now seems really far away from that, and she rarely speaks about Noriega anymore. She and her husband and baby are living completely off the grid in the woods of Northern Wisconsin. No electricity or running water. You take a county road to another county road and then a dirt road with no name, and eventually, you'll find their canvas tent. There's a lot to do here. They make everything they can from scratch. Haul their own water, clean their own diapers. And they're building their own house, which they want to get done before Sarah delivers their second child and the winter sets in. I asked Sarah if she thinks that the whole experience with Noriega has anything to do with her choice to live this way, and she kind of shrugs. She doesn't make that connection. When Sarah was 11, when she was thrust into the international spotlight and her world got so much bigger, it also spun a little out of control. Suddenly, she had things she felt she needed to say but didn't know how to, and everything seemed to get twisted around. Something you can say about her life now is that there's not much chance of that. She's in control of everything, from the food she feeds her family to the electricity she doesn't use. She lives as responsibly as she knows how. There's no room for misinterpretation. Andrea Morningstar. She's a filmmaker currently making a documentary about a school in Detroit. Since we first ran this story in 2003, Sarah has moved from her home off the grid to the Twin Cities, where she works as a Spanish teacher and plays in the bands The Wild Goose Chase Cloggers and Hello, Heartache. As for General Manuel Noriega, after serving his sentence in the United States, he was extradited to France and then back to Panama in 2011. He died last week after complications after brain surgery. In March, right before his surgery, Sarah's mom, Pauline, went to visit him. She brought him a letter from Sarah. Act Two, Pen Pal Husband. Janice met and married Nate Powell in 1972. He was a romantic and gentle man, except when he drank. He was kind of a mean drunk. He'd get angry, full of rage. A few years into their marriage, Nate was arrested for robbing a utility company, and he was sent to prison for eight years. Janice holds dear the memory of those years, including the letters that she got from Nate when he was in prison. The relationship just enriched so much. It just blossomed. I received a letter every day. Every day. He was a nonstop talker. I called him Mr. Et Cetera because he talked on and on and on and on. Initially, when he first went to jail, I read all his letters over and over. But then they started coming so frequent and every day, and four and five pages and all on legal paper, I just didn't read them over. "If I had money when we met, I would have brought you the best of everything and taken you around the world. Even though I was a sinner, I had the desire to give you every pleasure that you had ever dreamed about having." That's-- that's another X-rated bit. Our phone bill at one point went up to like $800. We would talk on the phone, because the inmates, they had a certain time that they could call, and they were limited to so many minutes. But if there was no one else in line to make phone calls, then you could talk as long as you want to. And Nate had such a charm and a charisma about him that sometimes the guards would come and get him. They said, Mr. Powell, there's no one in line to use the phone if you want to call your wife. Every now and then, he would have an opportunity to call me at work. "Hey, baby." And I said, oh god, this is great. You have made my day. "Thinking of you and the joy I feel in having you as my woman is a delight on a day-to-day basis in itself--" I had the craving. I had to see him. When he was sent to the road camps, I was not supposed to meet him, but this was something that we did. He was able to know where he would be. And sometimes, after he would get to that location, because he was outside, there may be a restaurant or a phone there on the corner, and he would have some change or something, and he'd call me. He'd say, baby, I'm down the street from your job. Can you run down here for a minute? Or, I'm going to be at-- tomorrow. You think you'll be able to come out there? I would always bring whatever I could, and I would leave stuff in the woods. Whatever it was he wanted me to leave for him-- if it was beer, bring a sandwich, a shirt, or whatever. It's over there by that tree. Did you see me when I passed by that tree? Well, it's right there. Or either I'd just stand there and talk to him like just somebody walking down the highway. I'd talk to him. "Hey, baby, you sure do look good, man. I'm telling you." Things like that, yeah. Whenever he was working with the Bureau of Sanitation, he was the maintenance man. So the crew would go out, but they would leave him at the office. Well, they had a fence. It was like 8, 10 feet. I didn't know how to climb a fence. And he'd talk about, you mean to tell me you don't how to climb a fence? That don't make sense! So he would give me some gloves, and he would show me how to climb a fence. And I would have a picnic basket with a blanket in there, and I would have drinks and glasses. And we would go up in the woods and we'd lay down in the woods. It was just like we were at home. I had bought him a cassette player and I brought tapes. And plus, he would make tapes and he would bring them out to the picnic area whenever we would have our lunch, and we would play them. Sometimes we would dance. He liked blues. And there's a different dance that you do when you're dancing to blues. It's sort of like a dirty dancing. Or we would listen to Nancy Wilson. That's one of those two-step things, and I really liked that, because his arms was always all around me and everything like we were the only ones there. Those eight years that Nate was in prison, those were precious to me. [LAUGHS] And I have six boxes of letters because he wrote me every day. Every day. I mean, big boxes. In some of the letters, he would tell me-- he'd say, oh, I had a dream about you last night and oh god, it was just great and things like that. It was a positiveness that came out of the eight years because my husband had not graduated from high school, so he got his GED. And he's president of Alcohol Anonymous. And it enhanced him. After the eight years-- this was in the back of my mind. I said, Nate. I said, do you think that you're going to revert back to how you were before you came here. He said, oh no! There's just no way. And when he got out of prison, he started drinking again. It was just the same Nate. When he was drinking, it was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He was on that binge. It was like, I hated to come home, because this other person was there. He would get violent. And I'd have to go in my bedroom and board up the door, push the dresser in front of it and anything else, and sit on it. If there was a lock on the bedroom door, he took a hammer and he would break it off. And he'd come in there and he'd say, you are my wife. I've paid for you. And maybe that's why the eight years were probably my most precious years with him. Because I didn't have to hear the arguments in the evening if he was drinking. But if he wasn't drinking, he was just a perfect guy. He was just perfect. Our relationship blossomed while he was in prison. While he was in prison. Janice Powell. A version of this story was originally produced for the Chicago Public Radio series Speaking of Sex. The story was co-produced by Alex Kotlowitz and Amy Drozdowska. Amy did the editing. Thanks, Julia MacAvoy. Well, this episode of our program was produced by Diane Cook and me, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and Starlee Kine. Senior producer for this episode with Julie Snyder. Music help for this show from consigliere Sarah Vowell. Matt Tierney's our technical director. Production help from Diane Wu. 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. Sure, when people meet him, they do walk away with some regrets. I don't think we ever asked him any questions about drugs and drug trafficking. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. [SINGING] What is this thing called love? This funny thing called love? Just who can solve its mystery? Why should it make a fool of me? If you listen to the lyrics to this song, I have to say, it couldn't really be stated more simply. I had you. It was happy. You left. What was that about? More than any other pop song, it just kind of throws its hands in the air and says, what the hell? Not even at the person who left, but at the very idea of love. Here's Keely Smith. [SINGING] I saw you there one wonderful day. You took my heart and threw it away. That's why I ask the Lord in heaven above-- what is this thing called love? Here's a story for you. Back during World War II, an infantryman named Joe Garland fell in love-- completely, breath-stoppingly in love-- with this college student named Helen Bryan. They wrote back and forth, and when the war ended, he was eager to get married. But her parents thought that she was too young. They wanted her to finish school. They did not see what all the hurry was. He wouldn't have it. So he went off and made very hasty decisions, and was married within, what? To someone else. Within about six months. A great surprise, to say the least, to me. I was terribly impatient. I wanted to get married. I wanted to have children. A little house in the suburbs. Do everything that we'd been deprived of, that we'd given up of, that we didn't know whether we were ever going to come back to. We've got to get in there. We've got to do it now. Everything you've got to do now. You've got to do everything now. Because you don't know whether you're going to be alive in another hour, or another day, or another year. Joe gets the family he wants, has two kids. Helen marries later, has four kids. Everybody's doing great. 30 years pass. And he's doing some research on the war years and needs to ask Helen some things. So they see each other. Sit down and talk for the first time, really since they broke up. They have lunch. And I must say that I felt a remarkable sort of a glow, kind of a glow. And when I went on home, I didn't know what I was happening. I had to pull over into a rest area, and I moved up in there, and I stopped the car. And I turned off the engine. And I put my head down and I just wept. I just sobbed. I just sobbed. I wept. I was so overcome with just-- here was this person again, here was this woman again. They both conclude that it's something they can't ignore. They divorce their spouses, they surprise their kids, and they marry each other. And now, over 20 years later, they still talk like a young couple in love. They moon over each other. It's an amazing gift to have found. And I think I could have gone through my life not knowing this was possible. I was out doing errands today, and I came back, and I heard the piano playing. And I came in. She didn't hear me come in. And I stood in the doorway-- the piano is in there-- I just stood in the doorway listening. And I was absolutely transported. I just stood there and I watched her, playing the piano. And I thought, this is so wonderful. But if you ask them, what is this thing? What is different about the love that they're feeling now compared with the love that they each felt in the decades they spent married to other people? It gets hard to describe. The marriages, I think, were workable. But it's just the interrelatedness on so many different levels. If you can share many, many levels of interest in common, it's very, very rewarding. Our reporter Sean Cole went around and around with them on this. And although these are the most articulate people in the world-- she works with the UN, he's written 22 books-- they kept talking about very prosaic things, very sensible things. Like sharing. Until finally Sean asked, isn't there anything more primal at work also? And they both said, well, of course. Joe and I have never questioned that part of our relationship. That there's been a natural magnetism all along. You know? Good grief! I don't I've ever heard you put it quite that way. That's very nice. I love that. Absolutely. Which, I suppose, just brings us back to our original question. [SINGING] What is this thing called love? This funny thing called love? Today on our program, people trying to answer this very straightforward question. Our show in three acts. Act One, Inside the Romance Industry. Act Two, The View From the Other Half. In that act, four people who've had to reconsider all their ideas about dating and love. Act Three, a real-life love story. That one from writer Sarah Vowell. Stay with us. Act One. Because we live in an industrial democracy, there is a business to cater to pretty much every human need that we have. And that includes our need for romance. There are businesses in flowers and cards and diamonds and getaway spots. And there are romance novels, where an entire industry is answering the question "what is this thing called love?" for a living. Reporter Robin Epstein attended the annual convention of the Romance Writers of America at the New York Hilton. Four days, 2400 attendees. Romance writers know what you think of them, and they don't give a rat's ass. One of the first conversations I had at the Romance Writers of America conference is with Jennifer Crusie and Patricia Gaffney, two of the most prominent and bestselling writers on the market today. And they wearily list the most annoying questions that are repeatedly asked by people like-- well, like people like me. Aren't you ashamed? When are you going to write a real book? Well, what does your mother think? Why do you have those stupid covers? The knee-jerk thing is now, we'll read a sex scene on the air and everybody will laugh about it, and then will ask you how you research your sex scenes, and it's this big joke, and of course, you will laugh too. And then if you try to defend it, you're one of those feminists without a sense of humor. In my defense, I will say I was expecting to find an entirely different breed of humorless woman here-- humorless-delusionals. But instead, I immediately find myself encountering smart, funny women who are part of a business empire, one with rules and behaviors all its own. Welcome to RWA. I'm very excited that you all came, and I hope that today we can talk about your manuscripts, and what you have to pitch to me, and we can talk about that. OK? So-- Liz. I am working on my tenth book. I'm going to be pitching to you my ninth book. And I've done fairly well in the contest circuit this year. I've finaled in the Dixie-- final number one-- the Dixie, the Laurie, the Molly, and-- This smartly-dressed woman, Liz Bemis, is a web designer from Ohio, and like almost all the other conference attendees, an aspiring novelist. She's stammering through one of the most nerve-wracking parts of the convention-- the editor pitch meeting. These early morning pitchfests in the basement of the New York Hilton are what draws most of the 2400 conference attendees. This is their chance to describe what they've written to book editors in hopes of becoming a published author. At folding tables set up in conference rooms, editors from all the major publishing houses-- Avon, Kensington, Berkeley, and of course, Harlequin-- sit with their notebooks and bottles of water. The would-be authors parade in four at a time and are given 20 minutes to make their pitch before the next group enters. My next book is called Falcon's Folly. It's a-- Tell us what you're trying [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. OK. Single title, 100,000 words. It's the story of Jack Falcon, who's an ultra alpha DEA agent who has to abandon his testosterone-pickled ways in order to go undercover as a gay hairdresser to infiltrate a mob-led drug ring. Fun! Romantic suspense, with a little humor in it? Yes. It's easy I understand why Liz and her fellow aspirants are here. What's less obvious is why May Chen, the sleek, young, New York editor, has gotten up early on a Saturday morning to listen to her. The answer-- money. Over half the paperback fiction sold in the United States last year was romance. Over half. It's a $1.52 billion a year industry. And how about this? Romance writer Nora Roberts routinely outsells and outproduces Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and John Grisham. If basketball coaches scout public courts for future stars, this year, the basement of the New York Hilton is the romance editors' [? Roscoe ?] Park. When Marissa finds out that Jack is indeed straight as an arrow and intent on bringing down her beloved and innocent Uncle Mario, she devises a deviously distracting plan that will have the tough guy agent begging for mercy and eventually winning her heart. Ooh, that sounds like a really fun idea. Sounds different. Love the gay spin. Very clever. Thank you. This pitch perfectly incorporates all the elements of the typical romance novel, which is outlined by the Romance Writers of America on all its literature, and on its website, and by every representative I talked to. At the beginning of the book, there's a conflict keeping our lovers apart, and by the last page, there's a happy ending. This is what the RWA guidelines call "emotional justice." Good is rewarded. Evil is punished. Everyone gets what they deserve. The problem, as every editor and writer knows, is that if there's always going to be a happy ending, why would you keep reading? The difference between a good romance novel and a bad one has to do with sheer writing skill-- how well the characters are developed, the author's voice, and the complexity of the obstacles standing between the lovers and their ultimate happiness. Outside this room, women mill around nervously awaiting their turns. Some practice their pitches, reading from index cards. Some take out pictures of their children. The RWA stations volunteers down here to make sure things keep running on time, but it's no secret that the volunteers are also here to keep anxious writers from going over the edge. This is volunteer Victoria Malvey. She's a tall, maternal-looking woman with a lot of blonde hair. I can tell you that I had one woman that I had to sit down and put her head in between her legs, because seriously, I thought that she was going to faint. She got very pale, very shaky-- Victoria, it turns out, isn't just some volunteer. In fact, she doesn't need to be at this conference at all. She's already achieved what most of these 2400 writers are dreaming of. You know, I've published eight books. And my first editor, I met here. One of the scary ones. And she was very businesslike. And when I was waiting to see this scary editor, there was this author, Arnette Lamb, who is a wonderful author. She has since died of brain cancer, and so it was a very sad loss for the romance community. But she was from Texas, and she was big-hearted, and she was like, honey child, there's nothing to it! She's just wonderful. You'll have a great time. And it really settled something inside of me. And I can honestly tell you that I do this volunteer, two hours, in honor of Arnette, because she did this for me. Did that scary editor ever appear as a villain in your stories? Oh. How does one answer this and still remain politically correct? I think you just did, and I think you just didn't! A lot of the publishing pros here turn out to be surprisingly helpful, even the ones who claim at first that they're not. I was put on the planet to reject books. I know that. Kate Duffy is the editorial director at Kensington Books. She's leading one of the 168 workshops being offered at the conference. Her workshop is called Query Letter Practicum, and it's packed to overflowing with more than 200 people. A stack of query letters she's recently received on her left, she starts reading them, and mocks each as she goes. "Dear Ms. Duffy, Lizzie Hampton, the heroine of my light contemporary romance, work in progress, having recently lost half her body weight, heads to her childhood home, a rural corner of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She's in town to work out the sexual kinks in her new body with old flame Phil Robbins. Phil Robbins wanted to be the proprietor of Lizzie's virginity 18 years ago." The actual proprietor would be her parents, but um. There's another word you're thinking of-- recipient, probably. [LAUGHTER] Just a guess! The cover letter goes on for several paragraphs. The bizarre plot turns continue. And Kate Duffy is not finished. "Trust and honesty become major hurdles for the couple. Add to that a hormone-raging 14-year-old boy, two best friends who obviously know best, and the Stanley Cup, and--" And then something remarkable happens. I think I probably-- because I'm a nice person-- would ask to see this. I would be curious to see if you could pull it off. This happens over and over again. A medieval historical with a nonsensical plot involving a dark duke with visions of the future and a glass-blowing heroine with a debt-ridden daddy? Send in the first three chapters. A letter full of grammatical errors telling of a paranormal romance between a demon earl and a spunky woman bent on thwarting his plan, described in several paragraphs of impenetrable plot? Send it! And then this contemporary suspense, involving an ace reporter who falls in with the Camden Thieves, a notorious gang of ne'er-do-wells. "Cold, naked, and lying flat on her back on the center of a lumpy mattress, Cathy thought her current situation couldn't get much worse. But she was wrong." [LAUGHTER] OK. "'So you're finally awake,' a slightly masculine voice murmured beside her. 'I was beginning to think they'd handcuffed me to a corpse.' The man laughed. His voice then dropped seductively." Yeah, I laugh in situations like this all the time. "'Albeit a very attractive corpse.'" OK. This is silly, and I'm not a silly woman. I don't know who the Camden Thieves are. But I think the query letter is at fault. I don't think that the author is at fault. I can't tell from this. You're giving me so many reasons to turn it down, I want to see what the hell you're up to! Kate asks for the first three chapters of the manuscript. What the hell is going on here? The famous authors are nice. The editors are nice. Everyone is nice. And this is the publishing business. I make my living as a writer. I've written for magazines. I've been on the staff of network sitcoms. And I think I speak for all professional writers when I say that this is the twilight zone. Writers are actually receiving courtesy and encouragement from industry professionals, and almost more shockingly, from one another. Where's the back-biting? The not getting your phone calls returned? The people who send you form rejection letters and don't even take the time to sign them? Where's the humiliation? Why is everybody being so kind? Well, it seems the answer to this question is twofold. Part of what's going on here has to do with the numbers. Publishing is a business that usually sees a lot of people fighting over a very small piece of pie. There can only be so many books published because, sadly, there are only so many readers, and only so much interest. But in the romance genre, because demand is so huge, they've got a very, very big pie. A big mainstream publisher like Simon and Schuster or W.W. Norton will almost never publish an unsolicited manuscript from an unknown writer. Not so for Kate Duffy. We do four historicals every month, three contemporaries, four Regencies, and then we do other projects. Like, I personally am responsible for a line called Bravo, which is erotic romance. I would say every month we probably buy two or three new books from people we don't know. And that's a huge number. But demand is just one answer to the niceness puzzle. The second becomes obvious when I enter an awards luncheon being held in one of the Hilton ballrooms. As soon as I walk in, it's stark. I'm immersed in a sea of 2000 female heads. It's like the world's largest bachelorette party. The fact that this industry has been structured and run almost entirely by women makes a difference. Support networks abound. Virtually every town in the country has a romance writers' group, where wannabes can come to get encouragement and gentle critical feedback. And those who have succeeded make it a point to make time for others coming up. They become fans of one another. Even the one man I ran into bought into the biological explanation for all this goodness. Literary agent Steven Axelrod. You know, women are just different. If you had a bunch of men and this much money on the table, it would be a free-for-all. Testosterone would be just dripping off the walls. And I think there would be vendettas, there would be-- but it would be just big and nasty. And human nature is at work here. So it's not, because it is women, all laws of human nature are suspended. But it just happens to be a very nice group of people. Over half the annoying questions reporters always ask romance writers were ones I had scribbled in my notebook before I arrived here. And I managed to invent one of my own. I thought it would be funny if I'd ask people at the conference if there was a difference between the romance in their lives and the romance in their books. Appropriately, I got a blank stares. Like, honey, if you don't already know the answer to that ignorant question, I can't help you. Romance fans are aware that the romance in the book is made up, thank you very much. Romance fans read for fun, and they're just as capable of laughing at their own genre as you are. Here, Julia Madden and Victoria Dahl, two aspiring romance writers, talking about one of the classics in the genre with me and producer Alex Blumberg. To me, Savage Love is the one that I remember. And then there's The Rose and the-- The Flame and the Flower. Those are the ones where the woman was taken by force. And then she falls in love with her rapist. Do you remember that one, I think it was [UNINTELLIGIBLE], where the woman is chained to the man for like half of the book? When you read those as a kid, did you think that's what it was going to be like? Did that actually-- Did you know that it was sort of a fantasy, or did it actually inform you? I don't know. I think I expected to be kind of carried away. I was very disappointed by sex, I have to say. So was I! Isn't that odd? That's got to be unusual. Only little Jimmy climbed the pinnacle. Very quickly, I might add. Really? Because mine wasn't nearly quick enough! Still, everyone I talked to at the conference-- every reader, writer, and editor-- said she believed in romance, and believed it happens in real life. And sometimes in real life, it even follows the rules of a romance novel. One of the most emotional moments at the conference occurred at a keynote address by author Teresa Madeiros at an awards luncheon celebrating librarians. In closing, I'd like to share a brief story with you. They met in 1957, when he was 22 and she was 18. He was a skinny, handsome GI with a motorcycle and a devilish twinkle in his eye. She was his sister's best friend. She was beautiful, smart, and funny. He was in love. They married in 1958, and three years later, while she was pregnant with what was to be their first and only child, he was transferred to Heidelberg, Germany. They lived over a bakery run by a jovial German couple named Mama and Papa Hartmann. On weekends, they would climb into his convertible MG, without so much as a change of underwear, and go racing through the countryside to explore the castles of Germany and Austria. The child was born in 1962. His first indication that something was wrong was when he came home from work one day to discover that his wife had given away all the furniture. Luckily a kind-hearted neighbor had taken it in and stored it in her apartment. She lost weight and stopped eating. Her speech was rapid and slurred. At times she even seemed to forget that she'd given birth to a baby. He had no choice but to seek professional help. The doctors informed him that his wife was suffering from a severe form of mental illness. It would be well over a decade before that illness was correctly diagnosed as bipolar disorder or manic-depressive illness. He went driving along the river that dark, rainy night, at nearly 100 miles an hour, a 26-year-old soldier in a foreign country with a brand new baby and a wife facing a lifetime of torturous uncertainty. He had a choice to make. He could shuffle the baby off to be raised by relatives, and abandon his wife to the care of a German mental institution. He could drive into that river and let all of his decisions be made for him. Or he could choose to live and fight for his family. My parents celebrated their 44th wedding anniversary this year, because my dad meant it when he said "for better or worse, in sickness and in health." I enjoyed a relatively stable, happy childhood, and my mom's hospitalizations were kept to a minimum. My father's love is as unwavering and unconditional today as it was 44 years ago. Although my mother is now suffering from a rare brain disorder that has resulted in severe dementia, when my father visits her in the nursing home every other day, he still sees that beautiful, brilliant girl who won his heart, all those years ago. So when people ask me, "Why do you write romance?" I can only reply, "How could I not?" There you have it. A couple in love, an obstacle to their love, and in the end, emotional justice. Who can resist that? Why would you want to? Robin Epstein in New York. Coming up. If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, what do you have to learn about love when you switch from one planet to the other? Well, it turns out, a lot more than you think. 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, of course, we choose some theme, some subject, some question, and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories. Today's program-- with Valentine's Day fast approaching-- What Is This Thing? Stories about love and people making sense of love. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two. The View From the Other Half. Sure, it's a grand generalization, but I think that it's safe to say that men approach love and relationships differently than women do. Most of them. And in the last few decades, thanks to medical science, tens of thousands of people have switched from one side of the divide to the other. When they did, among other things, they had to relearn how to find love and how to be in love from the other side of the gender line. Griffin Hansbury offers this report from the front lines. A warning to listeners that they do talk about sex in this story. Here's Griffin. Every so often, I get together with the guys. We grab some dinner, have a few drinks, maybe go bowling. It's typical guy time. We talk about the usual stuff. Work, women, the shape of our nipples. I guess in some ways we're not so typical. All of us were born female and were raised as girls. Today, with the help of testosterone, we all live as men. We're trans guys. Sometimes it seems that's all we have in common. If we weren't trans guys, I doubt we'd even know each other. Romance, on the other side of the great gender divide, has meant different things for each of us. One guy lives with his wife in the 'burbs. One plays the field. Another is still trying to find the field. And a couple of us-- myself included-- are in long-term relationships, hoping they'll last a lifetime. But all of us are still finding our way. After transition, it became harder for me and my friend Ray to find women to date. It wasn't always like that. Back in college, we were both known as BDOCs-- Big Dykes On Campus. Here's Ray. Basically, I was the go-to lesbian, I think. I probably slept with a good portion of the women on campus. And honestly, it was never like having to look for a date. I never had any trouble, as a lesbian, meeting women. Ever. Looking at Ray, you can't see a trace of the female he once was. He's got a T-shirt that says "Italian Stallion," a goatee on his handsome face, and impressive biceps that he's built up with weight lifting and testosterone. Testosterone puts hair on your chest, lowers your voice, and basically turns you into a teenage boy. Giddy and girl crazy, staring in the mirror every five minutes to see if those sideburns are coming in yet. Ray looked forward to being a single guy for the first time in his life-- until it actually happened. It ended up being really kind of scary and sucky versus exciting. You know? Appearance-wise, sure, it works for me to go into a straight club. But would I know what to do once I got there? Being socialized as a female, I just feel like I, and many of us, were never really taught how to pick somebody up. You know, I think staring at somebody briefly and looking away was like the big signal that you were interested in somebody. And now seeing the way men are socialized, and how very much men make eye contact, and are able to approach people. I was never socialized that way. Who was our target audience now? Who are we supposed to be trying to date? It doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to try to date lesbians, because generally speaking, they're going to want to be with women. And yet, dating 100% heterosexual, never given it a second thought women, seems to have its own treachery. Because there were some, you know, body differences when you're transsexual. And not knowing if they'll run screaming from the room or like pull a Crying Game-- who wants to expose themselves to that? When you hang out with a bunch of transsexuals and you talk about dating, eventually you get to The Crying Game. When we talk about The Crying Game, what we're really talking about is that intimate scene where the trans woman opens her robe to reveal the truth and the guy responds by puking in the bathroom. For most people, it's a surprise ending, nothing more. But for me, and for many trans people, it's the ending we fear the most-- even for our happiest and most fantastic stories. My friends and I, a group of other trans men and myself, were going away for a weekend down to the Jersey Shore. And on a particular night, we happened to be driving down to Atlantic City. And we were in an SUV. I guess there were about four or five of us. And we were all pretty early in our transition, but we all sort of looked male. Like average, younger than our age, men. And so this carload of girls is kind of driving by the SUV, and we're up a little higher, so we have a good view of everything. And they see us and they start waving, and doing that thing that whatever 19-year-old girls do. Waving and being flirtatious. And, you know, our interest was kind of piqued. And then suddenly, one of them like pops out of the sunroof and lifts up her shirt and flashes us her chest. And so now we're like, really shocked and screaming, and like, oh my God, and we're clapping and egging her on. And the next thing you know, the passenger in the front seat decides to grab the girl who's driving and start kissing her for us. Like, watch this. And then starts, you know, kissing this other girl. I guess that whole, girl kissing girl, turns guys on. So we were just really egging them on and having a great time. And we were just all sort of looking at each other, like we couldn't believe it was happening. You know? Like, this is us. This is not the car past us. They're really looking at us. And so this went on and on, and it got the point where it was happening for like a half an hour that we were alongside of them. And so they pulled up alongside of us eventually. We opened our window. They opened their window. I guess we had just gotten out of a toll booth. And one of them said, where are you guys going? And we said, oh, we're going to Atlantic City. They said, oh, we are too, we are too! What are you guys doing there? We're like, oh, we're going to gamble and stuff. They're like, you want to come hang out with us? And we said, sure! Let's go, let's go! And suddenly she says, hey, we're going to go skinny dipping. Do you want to come? And suddenly we just all look at each other and our faces just drop. You know? Just drop. Because we suddenly realize that this whole fantasy thing that was being created couldn't really exist without the reality of who we are. We were all very early in transition. Some of us had had some surgery. Some of us hadn't. And there is no way we were going to be naked without them knowing our history. So we just kind of like waved and smiled and didn't really answer, and they went away. But I think we all remember that as a really, like, just-- as silly and immature as it sounds-- it was really defining. It was a moment that we had missed. And we had a chance to kind of live that for a moment. Just a moment. But that was enough. You know? I remember having some sadness, but I remember being a lot more excited about the fact that that happened. You know? There was a moment where, because we were a collective together, because there were four or five of us, I had a sadness for us. Of like, this fate that we share, that there is something exceptional. That there is something. We are an exception to most men in the world. I forget that, though. On a daily basis, I do forget that. After a while, you just live as a man, and you forget that you are such an exception. And so there are moments that point it out, and sometimes, they are harder than others. It's so hard to break the news to a woman about your past, that Ray and I have almost never risked it. True story, though. I was on a blind date with this woman. We had lunch. We'd been talking for hours. And I was just getting ready to come out with my big revelation. And she says to me, there's something I have to tell you. She looks kind of nervous and she says, up until now, I used to date women. Does that bother you? I said, no. It doesn't bother me. Because up until now, I used to be a woman. We never had a second date. My friend Ethan doesn't have these problems. Unlike the rest of us, he's had absolutely no fear of The Crying Game. When I ask him how he can be so confident, he just shrugs his shoulders. It never occurs to him to be afraid. An easy-going and good-looking, dance club DJ with mutton-chop sideburns and armloads of tattoos, Ethan's a babe magnet. In his glove compartment, he keeps a spare toothbrush and a clean pair of boxer shorts. That's confidence. Ethan can pick up a woman in a bar, tell her about his past, and go home with her the same night-- no big deal. Here's an example of the kind of story he tells. I went to an all-girls high school. So I went back to my 10-year reunion, and I was like one guy with like 15 women, and it was so much fun. And I tell you, I just had the best time. Well, first of all, in that night-- let's see-- just like there was such debauchery. It was ridiculous. We were like kids. We were playing spin the bottle, truth or dare. I was like, oh, no way! Holy cow, this is crazy. But even Ethan encounters dating difficulties. He's always dated women casually, but it's different now that he's a guy. When he doesn't call someone for a week, or when he's busy with someone else on a Saturday night, he now gets angry emails from unhappy women. The old rules he used to play by have changed. Previously, it was sort of, there was-- you know, if I was dating a straight woman who is used to dating men, because I was a woman, I think she would feel safe. Like, she sort of felt like, well, there's safety here. I don't have to play games, because this is my equal. This is my friend. This is my partner. This is-- you know, feeling like we're on the same playing field. Everything's level. And I feel like that's definitely not the case, or not the approach that's taken when you're seen as a man. We've all had to adjust to these strange new codes of behavior. Before I looked like a man, I could talk to women about how I liked going to strip clubs, and that made me cool and edgy. Now it just makes me a jerk. My friend Nate is a different story than the rest of us. Most of the guys in the group always wanted to be men and were attracted to women. Nate wanted to be a man, but he was attracted to other men. One common response I get when I tell people I'm transgender is they say, well, why didn't you just stay a girl? If you're attracted to men, why not just be a straight woman? As if that's all it takes. It's just being attracted to men. My entire persona. Like, my personality, everything about me is male. I mean, a straight woman, I may in fact be attracted to-- both be attracted to, say, Antonio Banderas, but I think that the ways in which we-- everything else is different. Who we are is different. Very different. It is a little hard to understand, I know. But today Nate is a cute gay man with close-cropped hair, stylish glasses, and a trim, compact build, looking for another cute gay man to date. In his search for love, Nate had a harder time than the rest of us figuring out his target audience. Like everyone else, he couldn't understand how a female-bodied person could be a gay man, and he went through a long process of elimination. He knew he wasn't a straight girl. He felt like a boy. Maybe he was a lesbian. I made every possible effort. I bought all the folk music albums. I was good at the cultural stuff. I wore sandals. I went to Mexico and studied, you know, women and their struggles in Latin America. I own every Indigo Girls album ever made. Every Ani DiFranco album. Gosh. I became a vegetarian, had a heavily soy-based diet. I mean really! I'm not kidding. It was actually being a woman attracted to women that was the hard part. I even went through a man-hating stage. Not that all lesbians did that. I mean, certainly, this was my attempt at being a lesbian. That came more from my resentment of everything men had that I wanted. I would just look at men on the subway and just feel so resentful. I felt like men just took for granted the fact that they looked like men. I'd look at these men just sitting there on the subway. I was like, God, if I were them, I would just be jumping up and down, jumping for joy. And they're just walking around, these schlumpy men, you know? Just all these different men, with their male chests and male genitalia and wearing a tie to work. Just not even appreciating it. After the lesbian experiment failed, Nate finally realized what he had to do. He got chest surgery and started taking testosterone. Nate liked to joke that he's the only person he knows it's been L, G, B, and T-- the common shorthand for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. And for every letter, there's been a coming out to his parents. Think about that for a second. But so far, all his hard work hasn't helped his love life much. Meeting men isn't too difficult for Nate. He's got a couple ads online, and gets regular responses. He goes out on a lot of first dates, but there aren't a lot of seconds. I haven't had anyone, you know, throw up like in The Crying Game. So I guess that's a good thing. But the best one was, I met this guy through a friend of a friend, and we met up, and walked around the city. And we ended up at Hudson River Park and we watched the fireworks at the end of the Gay Pride Parade. There's some beautiful fireworks at the end of the parade. And I don't know. I guess you could say it was romantic. We had a subsequent date, and at the very end of the date, I said, you know, there's something that's kind of hard to tell you, but I feel like it's time to let you know. And he said, what, you're transsexual? And he was joking. He was trying to come up with the weirdest thing that he could think of, just to make me feel better. And I wish I could just go out there and date whoever I wanted, and they didn't have to be this incredibly open-minded person, you know? My therapist the other day said, he actually said, we'd be both [BLEEP] ourselves if we didn't say that it's going to be incredibly difficult for you to find a life partner. And I'm thinking, God, I'm paying you for this? Still, Nate keeps trying. He's cute and funny, and he's playing the game, which is more than he ever did before transition, when he couldn't even get off the bench. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before Nate finds someone to curl up with on the couch to watch Will and Grace. So you spend all this time waiting for love to come along, worrying that it never will, and wondering what you'll do with it now that you've got this new body. What happens then when love finally shows up? Ray, the Italian Stallion from earlier in my story, has been with his girlfriend Amy for nearly a year. She knew he was trans right from the start, because Ray's roommate introduced them. Ray fell for Amy the moment he first saw her, and she fell for him. But Amy had never dated a trans man and Ray had never dated a straight woman, so nobody made a move. Six months passed with no contact at all. Finally, it was Amy who got things going. She dropped Ray an email and their courtship began at a glacial pace, including a long series of platonic lunches and dinners. Well, it got to the point where it was ridiculous. Like, we went out to dinner, we heard this band, and we were sitting really close, sort of-- it was like a Moroccan restaurant-- we were sitting on pillows on the floor. And we were sitting there, and it was sort of like-- you were talking, but both of us were sort of like, kiss each other. In, I think, both of our minds, it was like, somebody has to kiss somebody. Sort of like you're talking, but then you lose track of what you're saying, because you can't even pay attention to it, because you're like, we've got to kiss, we've got to kiss. And we didn't. Finally, one night after a movie, Ray walked Amy home, and they lost themselves in conversation for 70 long blocks. It's miles, yeah. It was definitely miles. And we weren't in walking shoes, and we were carrying bags, and it was nighttime, and there was a million different reasons why we should have just taken a cab or the subway, but we did not. And she did say that she wasn't really sure, like, completely how she felt about the trans thing. And then at the same moment, or like the next moment, she'd be very physical with me. So I was getting these two different signals. When we took that 70-block walk and we ended up at my house, I thought, well maybe he'll kiss me goodnight. And then he kind of hugged me goodnight, and I was a little disappointed. But it was my choice. Like, I was the one who went, you know, saying, let's be friends. And then I don't know why I was disappointed that he didn't kiss me. I couldn't-- I was sort of confused-- and I couldn't really figure it out, what I was doing. What I was doing. I couldn't figure out what I was doing. In retrospect, what do you think you were doing? Because I liked him so much, I wanted to make sure that if we-- I just knew that every step I was taking was like a step I couldn't turn back. Romance is about overcoming obstacles. And in a way, Ray and Amy's story is the perfect plot for a romance novel. Girl meets boy. Girl grapples with the fact that boy used to be a girl. Girl falls in love with boy. I'm surprised Harlequin hasn't jumped on this one yet. I like to think that trans men give you the best of both worlds. I hear so many women say things like, I wish my gay best friend were straight for like a day. Well, that's us. We're your gay best friend, and we want to date you. We want to go shopping and take dance lessons with you. It's not a bad deal when you think about it. But of course, even with all the good stuff, no trans man is perfect. There is one big thing missing. Or maybe it's not so big. So what everybody really wants to know is what our sex life is like. And it's weird, because when I talk about it, I feel like a science experiment. I mean, I get really sick of that question when people ask me, and here I am asking you about it. And as a trans man, I think that that's a question that-- an answer that is something that I really want to know, and that I'm afraid of. Like, do you miss having a penis? I think it's on every trans man's mind too. It's a difficult question to answer. Because you love this person, and in some ways, it feels-- you know, modern technology has made it possible for it to be very similar. And you know, sometimes I think-- I don't necessarily say I would miss a penis. I missed an ease. I miss a little bit more simplicity. I miss the simplicity of it, I think. Not the actual body part. If you passed them on the street, you wouldn't know that Ray and Amy were anything more than ordinary. The only way you would know is if they told you. Coming out is something Amy never had to do until she fell in love with Ray. Now all of a sudden she's co-starring in The Crying Game, and people look at her differently too. Half of your listeners, they're wondering what I'm like. They're wondering what I look like. Am I attractive enough? Couldn't I go to a bar in New York and pick out a nice single Jewish man? And I'm definitely the kind of girl who'd go to a bar. I look like every other cute girl New Yorker who wears expensive clothes and pointy-toed shoes. Like, I look like everybody else. And I'm choosing this. Like, I've chosen this person. I fell in love with this amazing man. And all my friends who know him are jealous. Like they wish that they could meet a Ray. Transition itself is in some ways the most romantic undertaking of all. It's an idealistic adventure, extravagant and kind of unreal. You commit yourself to a feeling early on, a dream you've had all your life, and then you do it, believing all the while that the impossible can be made possible, that the great divide can be crossed. It's a total leap of faith, like falling in love. You don't know what will happen when you get to the other side, but you go there anyway. Griffin Hansbury. Act Three. A Love Story. Well, we wanted to end our show today with a love story. A little real-life fable with an answer to the question, what is this thing called love? Sarah Vowell believes that she has just the one. The marriage of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash is the greatest love story of the 20th century. The first time Johnny saw June, he was on his high school senior class trip to Nashville, and she was on stage at the Grand Ole Opry, singing with her famous relatives, the Carter family, and cracking jokes with Ernest Tubb. Years later, in 1961, the Opry was where they would meet. They were backstage, and Johnny went up to June and told her, "You and I are going to get married someday." She laughed and told him that she couldn't wait. I'm guessing that when Cash went home that night, he didn't mention this to Vivian, his wife. Not long after that, June joined Johnny's road show and they were traveling around the country together on tour. His wife mostly stayed home, and so did her husband. But June Carter was a lady-- a solid, accomplished, well-meaning Christian professional. And no solid, well-meaning Christian pro willingly falls in love with another woman's husband, especially if he's a pill-popping speed freak like Johnny Cash was back then. Years later, June would describe falling in love with Johnny this way. "I felt like I had fallen into a pit of fire and I was literally burning alive." So June, who had been a professional musician since she was as tall as a ukulele, called her songwriting partner, Merle Kilgore, and they wrote about June's forbidden feelings for Cash. It was a song straight out of Dante. They gave it to June's not particularly Dante-esque sister Anita, who recorded it as "Love's Ring of Fire." [SINGING} Love is a burning thing and it makes a fiery ring. Bringing hurt to the heart's desire, I fell in the ring of fire. I fell into, into the burning ring of fire. I fell down, down, down, down, into the deepest mire. And it burns, burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire. The ring of fire. The ring of fire. Johnny Cash heard Anita Carter's record, and then one night, he had a dream. He dreamed of mariachi horns playing this song. Some say it was the influence of the then-popular Tijuana Brass. Others say it was the barbiturates he took before bed to take the edge off the amphetamines. Either way, Johnny cash went into the studio with a couple of trumpet players and made his dream come true. [SINGING] Love is a burning thing, and it makes a fiery ring. The peculiarity of the song's orchestration is topped only by the weirdness of its credits. Here was a married man singing a song written about him by the betrothed woman who was in love with him, and singing the record back-up "oohs" were said woman, June Carter, as well as her sister and her mother. Mother Maybelle Carter, the most respectable elder in the history of country music, if not America itself. Listen to how cheerful they sound. [SINGING] I fell into a burning ring of fire. I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher. And it burns, burns burns, the ring of fire, the ring of fire. In this song, to compare love to fire, isn't just the pop music sexy heat cliche like "you give me fever" or "hunka, hunka burning love" or "it's getting hot in here." This is fire as in brimstone, old-time religion, written by the daughter of a people who believed in the eternal flames of hell. June Carter was coveting her neighbor's spouse, which meant she was breaking one of the Ten Commandments. Loving Johnny Cash was a sin, and for her, the wages of sin were death-- a death in which the sinner spent all eternity as nothing more than kindling. When June Carter admitted to herself that she loved Johnny Cash, it is, in a small Country and Western love song way, not unlike the moment Huck Finn resolves to help the slave Jim escape, even though he's been told that doing so would be wrong. "All right then," he says. "I'll go to hell." This is from June's recording of "Ring of Fire." Notice, no trumpets. Just an old-timey fiddle, and she strums her autoharp, maybe ribbing her husband a little by pointing out in the liner notes, "That's the way I've heard it from the beginning." [SINGING] The taste of love is sweet when hearts like ours meet. I fell for you like a child. Oh, but the fire went wild. There's an acre of misgiving in that little word, "oh." As in, oh, what have I done. Oh, his poor wife. Oh, Lord, forgive me. Oh, for crying out loud, I better flush his pills down the toilet yet again. Oh, I am Grand Ole Opry royalty, and this belligerent drug addict is about to get banned from my beloved Opry for smashing out the stage lights with a mike stand, and oh, I'm going to love him anyway. "Ring of Fire" became a number one hit for Johnny Cash in 1963. Then, finally, he got divorced, and June got divorced, and he got sober, and in 1968 they got married. When I say that Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash's romance was the greatest love story of the 20th century, I'm not just thinking about their fiery courtship, though your better love stories do require that obstacles are overcome, and the Cashs had plenty of those. I was really thinking about their marriage-- 35 years of actual happily ever after. The pictures of the two of them together through the years are almost suspiciously entertaining to look at. Johnny's cracking June up, or she's cracking him up, or in my favorite, the photo on his compilation album, Love, she's fallen asleep against his shoulder. His chin is resting on her head, and he might be smelling her hair. In his liner notes next to that picture, Johnny Cash says that he's sitting there thinking about Robert Browning's poem about the death of his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when June Carter Cash walks in and wonders what he'd like to eat for lunch. And that seems about right-- the two of them in a room together, pondering sandwiches and poetry. Grandly, he often credited her with saving his life. But he also bragged, she likes the same kind of movies I do. On June's solo album, Press On, after her "Ring of Fire," the very next song is a duet with Johnny. It's a gospel ballad narrated by an old married couple worried that one will die before the other. Worried about getting left behind. "If it proves to be as well that I am first to cross," June sings, "and somehow I have a feeling it will be." [SINGING] But if it proves to be his will that I am first to cross, and somehow I've a feeling it will be. When it comes your time to travel, likewise don't feel lost. For I will be the first one that you'll see. And I'll be waiting on the far side banks of Jordan. I'll be sitting, drawing pictures in the sand. And when I see you coming, I will rise up with a shout and come running through the shallow water, reaching for your hand. As she predicted in the song, June died first. Four months later, Johnny was buried next to her, because, as he once said, "This thing between us has been happening since 1961, and I just don't want to travel if she can't come with me." [SINGING] So I'll just rest here on the shore and turn my eyes away until you come and we'll see paradise." Sarah Vowell has got a brand new book, Assassination Vacation, that comes out in April. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself with Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, and Starlee Kine. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Stacy Tiderington. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who is officially our boss, but really, at this point, after all these years, he's more like a co-worker, and he's my friend. And his dad just died this week, and all of our hearts go out to him, and his mom, and his family. We'll resume making fun of him in a week or two. 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 David Rakoff, sitting in for Ira Glass. There was an old cartoon, it was either in the New Yorker or National Lampoon, I can't remember, where a man is sitting on the bus. It's pretty empty. An odd stranger boards, and the man in the seat thinks to himself, "Oh, God. Please don't let him sit beside me. Oh God. Please don't let him sit beside me." The guy approaches and says, "God told me to sit beside you." In the spring of 1978, I was 13 years old. The local public high school that I would be attending in a year's time was having an evening screening of Casablanca. So I took my friend Jeff and we went off to the high school. In addition to my love of old movies and my general cluelessness about popular music and youth culture, I was also a really tiny child. Maybe five feet at time. Probably closer to for four foot eight. So I looked markedly different from other kids my age. I was also a little neurotic. I was riddled with phobias. It all served to make me seem a little odd, I'm sure. I didn't lack friends, but I was a strange, round-limbed, feminine little kid. A strange, round-limbed, feminine little kid for whom a screening of Casablanca at the high school, no less, was a fairly important event. If I think about it, I guess the fantasy going through my head was that I would meet other old movie buffs who would see past my juvenile exterior and into my very poet's soul. And then I would have, you know, a community of people who didn't care that I was dwarfish or 13. Maybe we would smoke and talk about films. Jeff and I were the only ones who showed up. The only two people in the auditorium, aside from two older boys at the back on a ladder who were taping up some banner of some sort or another. So the lights are still on and we're waiting for the movie to start. And I hear one of the boys on the ladder call my name. "David! David!" If you're a gay kid, or even just a gay-ish kid, you basically spend your life anticipating having the crap beaten out of you, or at the very least, being given what used to be known on Leave It to Beaver as "The Business." I didn't know this guy calling my name. I knew that much. He wasn't a friend of my brother's or my sister's. I knew, actually, two things with complete certainty-- one, that I wasn't the David that he was calling for, and two, that if I did turn around, he would give me "The Business." So I didn't turn around. But it just went on and on. Him was calling my name and nobody else being in the auditorium. After about a quarter of an hour, against my better judgment, thinking, perhaps, that there had been some wrinkle in the space-time continuum, and maybe this older guy did somehow know me after all-- there was no one else in the auditorium and he kept on calling "David! David!" So eventually I turned around and I said, "Yes?" It was as if I could see the words coming out of his mouth, printed like a speech bubble in a comic, moving through the air towards me as if the entire atmosphere was viscous. Moving as slowly towards me as a bubble traveling through liquid Prell. And I knew, I knew what the words would be before they even reached my ears! "David! David!" "Yes?" "Not you, you fag!" Of course, that was what he said. I had thought that the unforeseen bonanza of the evening was that I was going to be somehow enfolded, all four feet eight inches of me, into some Bohemian clique, when in fact, what I should have seen was this. If I hadn't turned around, he probably would have just gotten down from the ladder anyway, and walked over to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and called me a fag. "God told me to sit beside you." Hope might spring eternal, dread might loom like a dark cloud on the horizon. Sometimes, regardless of your action or inaction, half-empty, half-full, some things in this life are just bound to happen. Today on our show-- stories of inevitability. Those things that will happen, like it or not. Our show today in four acts. Act One, If It Drives, Go Live. A true crime story about the world's most law-abiding perp ever to receive four hours of continuous live news coverage. Act Two, Don't Just Stand There. You can't change the people you love even when your life might depend on it. Act Three, Hello, Baby. How to prepare yourself for one of life's greatest inevitabilities, like it and not, with little more than a wobbly movie projector and a breathing chart. Act Four, On the Eighth Day, God Created Tartar Sauce. How mother nature, in an act of pure generosity, annually lays out the world's greatest all-you-can-eat raw bar on a small beach in Alabama. Stay with us, won't you? In Los Angeles, on August 31, 2001, all other news and KCAL 9 was interrupted in order to bring you this car chase. And the pursuit continues. And I believe we're north of the airport now. Larry Welk? Yeah. Back with you here. This suspect has been going on now for over three hours now, well over three hours. Almost four now. With showing no signs of giving up, no signs of stopping. This, of course, would have been no big deal, since in LA, there's car chases on TV all the time. And really, this one is no different than your basic high-speed police pursuit-- except for that speed part. The suspect still driving well within the speed limit. In fact, lower than the speed limit. Driving very reasonably right now through the streets of southern California. And the police part. There's nobody else behind him right now. Everybody has pulled off, including the LAPD, Hawthorne, Inglewood. They are not there. Nowhere to be seen. Oh. And the pursuit part. You know, at this point, the officers are saying that they have a really good idea of who he is. They have a pretty good idea of where he lives, even. And so at this point, they're going to go ahead and let him drive home, if that's what he wants to do. On Thursday, August 31, 2001, viewers of KCAL were told they were watching a car chase. But what they were actually watching was a white Geo Prizm driving slowly up and down residential streets, stopping at every stop sign, and signalling every time he wanted to turn, with no police behind him. If you tuned in the day with the sound off, you'd be wondering why it was on TV at all. Of course, if you had the sound on, you were probably even more confused, because the image on the screen had very little to do with what was coming out of the news announcer's mouth. It was as though they weren't looking at the screen at all, but were instead reciting their lines for memory, drawing from all the past car chases they covered. The car chase began normally enough. At around six o'clock, the car's driver pulled a hit and run. It was a minor fender bender and no one got hurt, but he took off anyway. The LAPD tried to pull him over, but he refused. They chased him for a few hours before finally deciding to stop. In the past couple of years, many police departments have begun to rethink their strategies when it comes to chasing. If a suspect doesn't seem like an immediate threat, the police will often pull out, or try to get his license plate number so they can arrest him later, reasoning that the risk of hurting innocent bystanders in a car chase is greater than the risk of letting a guy who ran a red light get away. At the time of this chase though, this was still a relatively new procedure that most people had never seen before. We were in shock. We were saying, wait a minute? What's going on here? They're letting this guy go. This is Larry Welk, the KCAL helicopter pilot whose voice you've been hearing. And it was tough to be on TV and explain to people what was happening. Because we had this pursuit going on, then the police pulled up, and it's almost like the news story just went away. Well, what are we doing here now? That was indeed the question. With their top story called off right under their very noses, the KCAL news team suddenly found themselves in the unique position of being the only one following this guy around. But rather than turn to another story, the station decides to stick with this one. And it's around this point that the situation goes from being merely baffling to truly absurd, when the newscasters begin floundering for things to say. In fact, right about here. I guess one thing we've certainly learned-- this is a fuel-efficient car. I guess just the kind you want to have in a pursuit. And forgive me if I'm making light of the situation. I'm not trying to do that and you guys know that. But for goodness sakes, this has gone on, as you say, for four hours now, and he has not run out of gas yet. So that says a lot about the vehicle he's driving. The chase even survives a shift change. We are going to stay with this case, so stay with us. There is another hour of news ahead. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and Gary standing by. KCAL 9 news at 10 starts right now. And thank you, Dave [? Cillia. ?] A pursuit that continues right now only by air. Ground units have completely pulled out. KCAL is a local independent station. In addition to news, it also airs shows like People's Court and Family Feud. They usually show one car chase about every two weeks, and the effects on the ratings are dramatic. On a typical day, about 400,000 people tune in to KCAL's nightly news programming. The numbers quadruple once a car chase comes on. And when the chases are over, the numbers drop back down again. Here's the helicopter pilot, Larry Welk. Are there other car chases that don't make the cut? Not really. If we [UNINTELLIGIBLE] had a car chase, for the most part, it'll make it on TV. Do you watch car chases? I'm embarrassed to say that I do. I not only watch the car chases, but I yell at the television screen while it's going on, as though I'm covering it. When the guy blows a red light, "Oh no, look out!" You know? And my wife comes in. She'll be doing the laundry, and she'll walk in and watch me watching a chase, and she'll shake your head and say, "What in the world are you doing? Go take out the garbage." I mean, there could be a pursuit that runs through our backyard and she wouldn't care. But I'm one of those guys that watches pursuits. It's cops and robbers. You watch these guys getting chased, and you don't know what's happening next. And that's what keeps you glued. And you're afraid-- I'm afraid to go to the bathroom. I'm afraid to go get a glass of water. Because I'm afraid that when I walk out of the room, the guy's going to pull a Dukes of Hazzard and jump over a bridge or something. Well, you know, he's picked up speed here. Look at this. That is a good observation on your part. He has picked up some speed. He got up to about 45 to 50 miles an hour, the suspect, right now. He makes his turn. He's slowing down again, Larry. He is. He's slowing down. Begs the question, how much gas-- It wasn't, however, just the news team that was at a loss about how exactly to proceed. The cops who weren't chasing him were confused as well. Detective Brian Spencer of the Inglewood Police Department was on duty that night and remembers getting a strange call on his radio. Well, when I first heard about it, we were out on patrol in our marked police car. And California Highway Patrol or Los Angeles Police Department got on our radio frequency and said that they didn't want to follow a car anymore. And basically, they told all the police units to back out of it completely. And you know, we were a little frustrated. Be like anything. Pick any profession, you know? You're supposed to do this, but then you don't do it. It doesn't feel like you fulfilled your job. For me, it's pretty simple. They run, we chase. So, like legions of cinematic counterparts before him, Detective Spencer decided to go with his gut and take the law into his own hands, even if it meant disobeying his superiors. We just decided to follow him anyways. Oh really? On your own? Yeah. Just the two of us. We found the car on Century Boulevard. That's a street in our city. And we happened to be down in that area, because we heard the pursuit was coming in our city. So we went down there snooping, and lo and behold, there it was. Of course, now that they'd found the car, there was still the question of what to do next. I mean, how hard really could it be to catch this guy? He had stopped initially right-- there was a traffic light there, and he was stopped right there. And we wanted to just, you know, get out of car, and like open the door, and get him out of the car, but we knew we'd get in trouble if we did that. How many feet behind him were you when you were following him? Oh, I mean, we were right behind him. We were the car right behind him. Yeah. It was just like regular driving. He was doing like 35 on Century. He would stop at all the red lights. Just like we were on patrol, just driving around. Detective Spencer and his partner continued tailing the fugitive on their own for another quarter of an hour before they were called off for good by their boss, who, it turns out, was watching KCAL'S coverage of the chase back at the station. What happened was, when the car was on Century Boulevard, I had stuck my head out the window to yell at the guy to pull over. But it wasn't working. And the watch commander saw the car on the news, and that's when he told us to leave. So we did. We do know that he has stayed in the relatively general area around the airport, and-- That's at KCAL. The chase is still on, and the news team is no closer to answering the story's main questions. Who is this guy and why is he running? Ordinarily when you watch a chase on TV, the very least that you, the viewer can expect is that the people actually on the TV know slightly more than you do about the situation. It's usually a given. But in this case, the announcer didn't know the answers any more than anyone else did. So they just speculated like crazy. You just have to wonder, Patty, if the guy has to be aware of the fact that police have unmarked vehicles. And you have to be wondering if he's wondering if he's being pursued now by an unmarked police vehicle, being that SUV. And while police may know who this individual is, the question still remains. Why did this person flee the scene of a relatively minor traffic accident, and then lead police on a chase that's now gone on for more than three hours? Do we have any idea if there are outstanding warrants, if this individual may be wanted for something else. No. There was no warrants. Not a one. No. I hate to disappoint them, as a precedent-setting individual. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the fugitive. He turned out to be a very affable and helpful guy, and he agreed to talk to me on the condition that I didn't use his name. So I'll just call him Dr. Richard Kimball. Dr. Kimball for short. On the night this all happened, Dr. Kimball had just finished up a big project for his consulting firm. He decided to celebrate by getting high. Because you see, aside from being a workaholic and Georgetown graduate, Dr. Kimball was also a crack addict. He'd gone to a hotel to smoke up that night so his family wouldn't see, and he was just leaving when he got into the fender bender. When he saw the flashing lights behind him, he ran. By no means was there ever any delusion of thinking I was going to get away. No. That's the farthest thing from my mind. I knew that what I had done was wrong. They're on your tail right now. So I told myself, well, just drive a little bit more. Try to get your resolve together. Calm down. So the plan you had was to gain composure. Would you call it a plan? A plan! But you know. It's unfortunate that-- and I can say this, because certainly, I'm black. Being stereotyped as a black man and having to step out of a vehicle looking all shoddy and sweaty, and hair all awry, and with that obvious-- man, the guy's on drugs-- it was like, wow. At least try to clean up your act a little bit. Talking to Dr. Kimball, he defies everyone's theory about why people run. He hadn't hurt anybody or stolen anything. He didn't think he could get away. And he definitely didn't want to be on TV. There are people who study pursuits. Yes, there are actual people who do this. And they say that trying to figure out the reasons behind why people run, the cause behind the effect, is the wrong approach. What these experts have discovered is that there aren't any reasons behind why people run. There's just a type of person runs. They don't stop to weigh the consequences or to factor in all variables. They just run. They run because it doesn't occur to them not to. Which is to say, Dr. Richard Kimball ran because he was born to run. Oh, yeah, well, something you may not know, I've done this once before. This happened had happened three years before. Really? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, really. The first time, I don't remember too many details about it. There was no hit and run. There was no accident or anything. I think it was a traffic infraction that just turned out to be a couple hour slow speed chase again. You know, I take great pride to think that I am a relatively decent, law-abiding citizen, OK? So even while under the influence, I'm very cognizant of stop signs, turn signals. Dr. Richard Kimball tells me that driving around, he had no idea he was on the news. He also tells me that he didn't know the cops had pulled out. So I run by him some of the questions that the newscasters had. I asked him if the cops were in contact with his family. He tells me no. I asked him if he thought that SUV driving behind him was an undercover policeman. He tells me no. I asked him if he planned on driving home. He tells me he wasn't thinking about it that clearly. Did you have any particular pattern of where you were driving or a particular area that you were circling? Oh, no. Strictly random. Like a leaf in a windstorm. Does your car get good gas mileage? I think it's probably like 24, 25 miles to a gallon. Would you call it a fuel-efficient car? I would, I would. Did you have a cell phone in the car with you? I did. Did you use it to call anyone? Nope. Nor did I keep the radio turned on, either. Just had a CD playing, if I recall correctly. What was it? Boston. Yeah. Their first album, More Than A Feeling. You laugh, but I mean, that's my favorite group. Can I just tell you that learning these answers was ridiculously satisfying? It's hard to put into words exactly, but it felt sort of like scratching an itch, while simultaneously solving a crossword puzzle, at the precise instant that, after racking your brains for it for two solid years, the name of your best friend from kindergarten suddenly pops into your head. It felt like that, only better. Incredibly, there was one piece of KCAL speculation that came true. It was something they latched onto early on and that they kept coming back to over and over again, throughout the four hours, debating about when it would happen. Somehow they knew that this chase wasn't over, would never be over, until the fugitive ran out of gas. I think the low fuel indicator light came on. If I recall correctly, the red light came on, and I'm sitting there going, well, maybe two gallons, three gallons at the most. What are you going to do? Are you going to run out on the freeway, or are you going to pull over and give up? So right now, the suspect is pulling over now, here in Inglewood. We don't know if he's out of gas, but he has completely pulled over and blacked out. And stand by one second. We'll see what's going to happen here. We'd driven away, and went somewhere and parked, and we're talking about it, a partner and I. Again, Detective Spencer. After getting called off the chase, he and his partner pulled over and parked in a nearby area. They kept listening for any word of what was going on, but the radio was silent. They had no idea that the fugitive had pulled over, and were in fact still feeling frustrated that they'd been called off. We were just taking a breath, you know? Venting. Yeah, exactly. We're just like, we couldn't believe that after four hours, he was just going to get away. No ground units yet, as far as we can see. Don't see any movement of any doors at this particular point, and we do know that law enforcement agencies did back off, and they will probably be sending in ground units momentarily. No helicopter lights on the suspect. We can see a vehicle approaching-- I guess, no, he's just making a turn. But-- I distinctly remember sitting there in the car. Certainly there was no sirens, no lights. And then, I'll never forget. There was a couple of young black women were coming from a gas station on the corner. They were walking across the street. And one of them yelled out, "There the fool is!" And was that when it really registered that this might be on TV? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Meanwhile, while sitting in his parked squad car, Detective Spencer received a phone call. My wife called me on my cell phone and said, "You know this car that everyone was chasing is in your city? It stopped at like Ash and Manchester. And he's just sitting there." And I said, "Really? The car's where?" She'd been watching the chase on TV? Yeah. She was flipping back and forth between that and a Dave Matthews interview. And then she said, "You know, you guys look really dumb right now. There's a guy sitting in your city, and the helicopters are up, and it's all over the news, and they're saying that Inglewood police isn't doing anything. And the guy in a helicopter's saying that normally I tell them not to run from the police, because you'll never get away, but this guy seems like he's going to." And she said, "You know, you might want to go over there." And you can see our car just come down the street. --this driver presents any kind of an immediate threat-- I see an LAPD officer right there. Through that intersection there. There's one right behind him, too. OK. There they are, right behind him now. So officers just pulled in right now. They have their guns drawn. The suspect is now getting out. The suspect appears to be an older man, heavy-set, and he's making his way back. No resistance whatsoever. Those are Inglewood PD officers. And now the suspect is in custody. He's in the custody of the Inglewood PD. Throughout all of this, the only person who didn't doubt that he the fugitive would get caught was the fugitive. And in the end, perhaps that's why he got caught. His faith in his inevitable capture turned out to be self-fulfilling. Here's Detective Spencer. I mean, if he would have ran or did something, you know, I believe that news helicopters up there, and they don't have like to the infrareds and the spotlights and all that thing. And so I mean, technically, he probably could have got away if he would have ran, but he didn't. He just sat there. I don't think I ever thought that. And it certainly isn't, it is not my MO to have gotten out of the car and added yet another segment to the chase by me running over fences and through backyards. So you weren't surprised when the cops showed up. Well, no, no. Because that's what happens in those sorts of situations. No, I wasn't surprised. Of course not. [INAUDIBLE] pursuit that we've never really seen anybody get away here, and this would have been the first one. The news team gives its closing comments. And consistent with the rest of the evening, they seem to apply to a whole different case altogether. And I have to point out that out after this entire pursuit here, four hours long, nobody got hurt during this pursuit, and that is the best news, Bob. OK. The executive producer says we have to take a break, Larry. OK? Sounds good to me. All right. We'll be right back. Here's what happened next. Dr. Richard Kimball was arrested and taken to trial. He was given two years for felony evasion and possession of cocaine, although he only had to serve a year. Ironically, the initial hit and run charge that started it all was dropped completely due to a lack of evidence. If he hadn't run in the first place, he probably wouldn't have gone to jail. For a short while, on the night of August 31, 2001, this chase was KCAL's biggest story. A possibly dangerous fugitive who obeyed all traffic lives had managed to elude LA's police force for four hours for reasons nobody could fathom. And now that he'd been apprehended, we would finally learn the story behind it all. But immediately after the capture of Dr. Richard Kimball, KCAL returned to its regular programming. There was no follow up the next day or the next week. In fact, there was never any. My conversation with Dr. Richard Kimball turned out to be an exclusive. In the two years since the case, no one has ever contacted him from the press. When I called him, it was the first time he'd learned that he'd been the star of that night's news. Most everyone remembers where they were during the OJ chase, because it was one of those times when you could tell beyond the shadow of a doubt that you were expecting history in the making. But if all history starts off as news, not all news becomes history. No one remembers where they were for this case. Except, of course, the man wasn't being chased, the man he wasn't chasing, and the diehard fan hovering in the air above. Starlee Kine. Coming up-- a film that makes you cry every four minutes, or me cry every four minutes, and a seafood buffet on the shores of Alabama. That's all in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. My father has always been a mild man, and all my friends whose fathers were mean or domineering always told me how lucky I was to have him. He's gentle, kind, and introverted. His great loves have always been the once-removed kind-- architecture, opera, multivolume Jefferson biographies. But he's what psychologists would call, well, passive. When he helps you carry the groceries into the house, he'll stand next to an empty kitchen counter and wait for you to tell him to put them down. Most of the time, this is not a big deal. You say, "Right there, on the counter," and he puts them down. He was the kind of dad who could read a newspaper completely unflustered as you had a temper tantrum. The detachment wasn't a parenting strategy. He just wasn't so keen on being an authority figure. Faced with my dad's passivity, my mother used to say to me, "When I get old, I'd rather be in a state nursing home than have your father take care of me." That was her worst fear, I think. What he'd do, or more to the point, what he wouldn't do if she was totally helpless and needed him. Then last year it happened. My mom was at home alone with my dad and she started feeling breathless, and he waited to call 911. He waited for her to ask him to do it. It was nine in the morning on a sunny July day. They'd been setting up in armchairs at the kitchen table, dozing on and off since 3 AM. She was afraid of lying down, afraid of really falling asleep, because of what had happened a couple of days before. She had woken up feeling breathless and said, "Honey, call 911. I can't breathe." He did, and the ambulance rushed her to the hospital. They put her on medication, and kept her for 24 hours for tests, and then sent her home, telling her it wasn't a heart attack, just an episode, because she'd skipped her medication for three days for a heart arrhythmia she'd managed for decades without a hitch. I think she left the hospital feeling she might have overreacted. They certainly didn't tell her, "If it happens again, call 911 immediately." They didn't say, "If you don't feel better, come right in." So there they were, sitting in the kitchen armchairs, and the phone rang. We don't know who called. My dad assumes it was a telemarketer. Later when he told me he would shake his head bitterly, as if the telemarketer really should have known better. My mother jumped up to answer it. It didn't take much to trigger her heart racing. She said hello, and then put the phone down. "I wish I hadn't done that," she said. suddenly breathless. "Should I call 911?" my father asked. "Oh, not that again," my mother said. So my father waited. My mother hated doctors, and the last thing he wanted was to incur her wrath by inviting those arrogant young men to manhandle and advise her all over again. She took an aspirin. My father helped her take her shirt off, because she said she was hot. Gradually the attack escalated. She panted, squealed, yelped. She held her arms out in a stiff imitation of a Frankenstein shudder. I know these things because my father offered muted renditions of them the first few days after she died for whoever would watch. Then she passed out. My father would act this out as well, dropping his head back in the chair where she died, his mouth open, arms slack. "She was just gone," he'd say, shaking his head. It was then, he said, after she passed out, that he called 911. "How long did this take?" I always ask, wanting to hear something different. "10, 15 minutes. I don't know." "That's an eternity," I say. My dad nods, agreeable. "So you waited until she passed out to call 911?" I really want to say "died," but don't have the heart. "I think so. I don't remember," my dad answers. The paramedics finally arrived. They put a tube down her throat, did CPR, but she didn't come back. In his own car, my dad had to follow my mom's ambulance to the hospital for the disposition of her body. When it had sunk in that they weren't reviving her, he called the family from hospital. He left a message at work on my voicemail. He said, "I have some very sad news. Your mother passed away this morning. I'm here at the hospital and I'm all alone, and it's just awful, awful." He hung up. In the days just after my mother died, my father talked guiltily about not responding quickly enough, about not feeling he had the strength to lay her on the ground as the 911 operator instructed him to do. I told him, no, don't blame yourself. How could you have known? But secretly I had to wonder. Had my father done with my mother's life what he'd always done when he noticed there was no butter at the dinner table? He'd ask, "Where's the butter?" then place his hands slowly on the table, pretending to raise himself up in a supreme effort, waiting to see if anyone else would leap into action. My dad wasn't negligent, exactly. All she had to do was ask, of course. But it's hard not to see this moment-- her dying, him waiting to be asked to call 911-- as the inevitable ending to a 50 year relationship that simply never changed. She was always looking to him to provide the final word, and he was looking to her for the same. The problem was, they wanted completely different final words. She wanted him to say, "Let's talk about the state of our marriage, let's plan a party, let's worry about one of our children and devise a way to make a million dollars. How about it?" And he wanted her to say, "The spatula is in the second drawer to the left. But don't bother, sweetheart. I've already cooked your one egg sunny-side up. Yolks broke, whole-wheat toast buttered, coffee very hot, not too strong, with half-and-half, not milk." No matter what she threw at the relationship-- philosophy, feminism, therapy, Prozac, love, and patience, and rage-- she could never get him to play her way. "What do you want me to do?" he'd say, after she'd been lecturing him about one thing or another, an unreadable smile just visible behind his eyes. "Just tell me what to say, and I'll say it." In the end, maybe I wasn't any better than my dad. I acted the same way I'd always acted. I pretended things would be fine. The day before my mom died, I called her from work and asked her how she was. "Oh, I've been better," she said cheerfully, explaining she'd just gotten back from the hospital and was feeling breathless. "The cardiologist really acted strangely," she added. "I'll tell you all about it when we have time." The next morning I awoke feeling uneasy, and told my husband so. Still, our life was crazy, and I didn't have room for another crisis, so I decided it just couldn't happen. Now looking at all or behavior, I think, how could we all have been so stupid? Why weren't we all acting like life didn't sometimes require us to just act a little differently? Why didn't I drop everything to take care of her? Why didn't he notice she was dying in that moment, that she couldn't ask for help? After my mother died, a friend who had suddenly lost her father wrote me. "The only thing we can learn from her parents," she said, "is to resolve not to make the same mistakes." I keep on trying to figure out what I'm supposed to learn from this. If my mother died from her worst fear, what must I do to avoid mine? My worst fear used to be my mother's death. Now it's that I have a blind spot like she had about something in my life I'm not able to transform, no matter how hard I try. How do you begin to see your own blind spot? Weird little things help. Like it helps to remember a conversation my brother said he had once with my father, when his world, like some mountain cracking open for the Pied Piper, became visible for the briefest moment. My dad was staring into space and my brother asked him, "Dad, what are you thinking about right now?" "The hippopotamus," answered my father, apropos of nothing. "What's the hippopotamus doing?" my brother asked him. "Oh," my father said, "he's going back to the forest." Sheila Peabody from the San Francisco Bay Area. To push this giant, you know, melon out of your vagina. Well, how high is your level of fear from a one to ten? Probably nine. Probably a nine. Part of it is this feeling of, there's nothing I can do. Like, I have no choice now. What else am I going to do? Like, find a substitute? Or quit? Or just decide I don't want to do it anymore? There's one way out. She's right. There really is only one way out. And the basic belief is that the better you prepare, the better you'll be able to deal with it. There are books about what to expect, videos you can watch, classes you can take. But does it actually help to prepare for something like this? My name is Wendy, and my due date's the 26th. Wendy takes me to her Lamaze class to see. We're in the Elizabeth Bing Center for Parents, a ground floor apartment in a building on the Upper West Side. Six women, three husbands, myself, and Fritzi, the teacher, sit on chairs in a circle in the main room. The highlight of today's class is going to be a film of childbirth. The hours that precede your baby's birth may provide physical and emotional challenges that are hard to anticipate. But taking time to prepare will give you confidence. Also, it will reassure you that although bringing your child into the world takes work, it is work with a very special reward. We did it, he's here. Hello, baby. Hello, baby. That's the name of the movie. The title card comes up at that moment. At 20 minutes or so, it's the highlights of childbirth. It's not some 18-hour Andy Warhol verite epic. It looks to be from the early '80s. It's shot on film. It's three couples, each going through the labor process, and ending, of course, with the vaginal birth of a healthy baby. The same thing happened all three times. Which is, you begin by focusing on how dated things look, how fried their hair seems. But that recedes as you go along. It's incredibly intense to watch a baby being born. You get sucked into the undeniable drama of it all, even though you know how it's going to end. It was so incredible looking in the mirror when his head was born. Then, all of a sudden, Kyle Junior was in my arms. Oh my God! At this point, I'm crying. I cried three times. Every time a baby was born. But Wendy cried, too. Seeing it firsthand made it seem significantly less scary to me. Then again, I'm not having a baby. It was-- I guess I felt the same. It seemed really painful and out-of-control to see it. She's still glad she saw the movie. She's glad she took the prenatal course. It hasn't made the inevitability that much less scary. But as we talk, it emerges that preparation might not even be the real goal of these classes. What the classes, is just-- it's like having something to do with your hands. It's just busywork to get you through the weeks of waiting. And it's doing that. It's keeping me preoccupied. But then why not just pick up a hobby? Why not learn lacemaking or something? What is it specifically about confronting the details? Lacemaking? I would feel a little irresponsible. Because even though I realize that I'm going to have pretty much no control over what happens when I actually do go into labor, there's this sense that the more I learn about it, the more I can feel like I'm in control, even though I know that I won't be. Producer Wendy Dorr. Four weeks after that interview, she gave birth to a daughter, Lucy. As people in Mobile Bay explain it, there's nothing quite like a jubilee. They're strange and exciting, and they're really, really fun. Have you ever seen so many fish? There's a big flounder coming in. See him out there? Let him come in a little bit. This is a videotape of a jubilee shot in 1991 by a man named Bird Zundel. It's dark out, so as people walk around in a shallow water near the shore, they're shining really bright lights. In the water, there's basically this chaos of fish. Eels slithering by, and flounder carpeting the sand, and catfish swimming in huge schools, and crabs moving sideways or climbing up on a jetty. I'm not sure how else to say it except that the water is crowded, like Penn Station at rush hour. That is wall-to-wall flounders right there. I don't know how many there are. And they're just as stunned as they can be. A crab of lying on top of two flounders, right? Mr. Zundel is helping some friends who have never seen a jubilee before. He's advising them on how to use gigs, which are spears for impaling flounder, and how to gather crabs in a net. This is jubilee at its strongest. Here's flounders on the beach-- glitter you see on the war is fish. Just thousands of fish with the sun hitting them. Come stand out here and look at this. Good [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Mobile Bay is 32 miles by 8 miles. The eastern shore, where the jubilees occur, has a timeless feel to it. Some of the families have lived here since the 1800s, and several generations might share a cottage or group of cottages. A lot of the houses have sleeping porches, and some have real, actual white picket fences. I learned about jubilees last summer when I was a bridesmaid in a wedding with two sisters named Murray Douglas and Marion MacPherson. They grew up on the bay, and Murray told me that from the age of five to the age of 15, she spent every night of the summer sleeping in her bathing suit on top of the covers, waiting for a jubilee. Basically, for ten whole years, she existed in a state of anticipation. As I talked to Murray and Marion, I began to see jubilees as some sort of intersection of anticipation, inevitability, and luck. I decided to go down to Alabama to try to catch one for myself. When I got there, I discovered that everyone has a jubilee story. When the jubilees happen, of course, it's still early, early in the morning, and usually still very dark. So you go out in in your little shorty nightgown, and you know, your little babydoll pajamas, because it's so dark. And you're out there, and you're digging, and you're scooping, and all of a sudden, you realize it's broad daylight and you are out there in your pajamas. And then you kind of slink on back to the house and get your clothes on. My favorite jubilee was when my husband and my son and I went down the beach just to flounder. And we come into a big jubilee then at Bailey's Creek, which is about a mile from here. One of the most biggest jubilees I have ever seen in my life. They were literally five and six lying on top of one another. You could get one and come up with five. When we got in that night, we had 720 big flounders. It was beautiful. So I stayed and didn't go to work that day. Cleaned all of them, fileted them, put them in a little bag. Then three weeks later, Hurricane Frederick came, and we were 79 days without any electricity over here. So all those free flounders we got from the bay went right back to the bay. That's why I call it easy come, easy go. It turns out there's a whole etiquette to jubilee. Some people say that a jubilee reveals who your real friends are. If you call people to alert them when you find one, they'll call you the next time. And if you don't do your share of patrolling the beach at 3 AM, you might find that your phone's not ringing as often. Also, it's totally acceptable to miss a day of work because you were up gigging flounders the night before and now you have to clean them. The only thing is, you have to bring in some flounder for your boss. Down there. Ooh, did you see it? Yeah, it was down there. I saw one! At night, around 10 o'clock, I go with Marion McPherson, whom I know from the wedding, her four year old son Skiddy, and their ten year old neighbor, Sayer Kerley to check the conditions. We've walked up the dock and now we're peering into the water with flashlights. And believe it or not, there are more and more signs of an impending jubilee. We see a crab near the piling of the wharf and a few catfish. Ooh! They're all around there. Jubilees believe can be several miles long or less than 100 feet. They can contain all sorts of fish or just one kind. For example, you can have an all-shrimp jubilee. I thuink there might be a jubilee. Do you think there might be? There's at least three crabs on that [INAUDIBLE] over there. There's little fish, aren't there? Sayer says he thinks there's a seven in ten chance of a jubilee. Even though I'm really excited, I try to remember he's in fifth grade. I ask Marion to weigh in. I would say that really there are very good signs tonight. And this would be a night, if I-- well. This would be a night, if I were hunting jubilees, that I would sleep on the wharf and look for one. So I decided to sleep on the wharf. And I have some company. I'm Sunny Kerley and I'm 14, and I'm about to go to sleep. Why are you on the wharf? Because we're waiting for a jubilee. Are your parents making you do this? Ah, somewhat. Not really. No comment. Sayer is also sleeping on the wharf. Our plan is to get up every couple hours to see what's happening. I ask Sayer if he thinks we should set an alarm clock, but he says he'll be able to wake up without one. Before crawling into his sleeping bag, he drinks a Coke. Less than fifteen minutes after saying goodnight, we have our first jubilee casualty. It's really buggy out, and Sunny decides to go sleep in his own bed. Sayer and I settle back down. But an hour later, we hear a noise. OK. There's some mysterious thing that is floating with two lights in the front. Has a very loud generator engine on it. And it looks like he's catching some flounder, and we're going to go interview him, see what he's doing. We've been here for like almost an hour. I did not come close to sleeping. Neither did I. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] didn't do anything. We walk to the shore to meet the boat coming in. Hi. You think there's gonna be a jubilee? I don't know. There's a lot of flounders out here, I know that. The guide tells us he's caught 50 flounder so far, which is more than twice as many as you'd get on a normal night. His plan is to stay out until morning hunting the jubilee, and he seems pretty sure that it's a matter of where, not if. After this excitement, Sayer and I go back to sleep and wake up a few hours later to check out the conditions. Look where we're stepping. We've established a routine Sayer fires up a flounder light and we walk about a half a mile down the beach. We're sloshing through the water and climbing underneath docks and over jetties. We don't find anything. Sayer and I wake up for good around seven. There wasn't a jubilee, which is weirdly hard to believe. In my head, I had imagined the jubilee so clearly that at some point, it began to seem inevitable. Since I didn't get to see a real one, I decide to pay a visit to Manci's Antique Club, a nearby bar that has an entire wall covered with pictures of jubilees. I walk in and introduced myself to Mr. Manci, who immediately tells me there was a jubilee. This was a big one, up in [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. It started at like seven o'clock in the morning. I can't-- it was at seven o'clock in the morning? I was literally up at seven o'clock looking, but I was in the wrong place. Well, you've go to be at the right spot at the right time. Clearly I wasn't in the right place at the right time. But people console me by saying I have had the most authentic jubilee experience of all, which is the sort where you stay up all night chasing the jubilee, and you come close, but you don't actually find it. You invest all this time and excited energy, and then nothing happens. Of course, it's still fun to get excited. To me, one of the coolest things about jubilee is that it's both unpredictable and good. I've been trying to think of other things that are like that, but it seems like there aren't that many. Usually stuff is unpredictable and bad, like a car accident, or predictable and good, like Christmas. While I'm in Alabama, I keep coming up with comparisons, but none of them are quite right. This is the one I finally hit on. A jubilee is like hearing a song you love on the radio. Just like you can go out and buy shrimp at the grocery store, when I was 19 years old, I could have bought a Tom Petty CD and listened to "American Girl" anytime I wanted. But somehow it always sounded better when I was driving along in the car and it just came on. It sounded better when I was surprised by it. And even all the times you don't hear your favorite song, you still know that it exists in the world, that it's only a matter of time. It's not that big, but it gives you something to keep hoping for. Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the novel Prep. Hello, baby. I'm David Rakoff. Ira Glass will be back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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It's like uncovering a vast secret conspiracy, but one that is right there in front of your eyes. 5:30 in the morning. It's still dark outside. And I'm on my way to record some New York City garbage men on their morning route. And the person I'm with, this anthropologist from New York University named Robin Nagle, who's spent years studying how New York City moves its trash. She points to a set of buildings-- these huge, corrugated metal barns-- right on the waterfront at 59th street. This is where the garbage trucks for the island of Manhattan come to dump paper onto barges to be taken away. I've seen photographs of this as a dumping point-- this exact location-- back dating to the 1890s, when it was wooden planks and horse-drawn carts, dumping directly into scows, where men were waiting with rakes to rake the garbage, which was usually steaming, because it often included ashes and things. And men died by falling off the scows, or getting kicked in the head by the horses, or falling through rotten boards in the planks. There are no signs-- nothing to indicate that this is part of city government-- except for one city seal that is actually too faded to read. Which is not unusual. You'll see a lot of sanitation facilities-- there's no name over the door, there's nothing telling you it's a sanitation facility. The perception of sanitation in the public's eye is generally not great, and so it's easier if they can go below radar. On maps of the city, you can see these piers, but it's not labeled what they are. Just like Fresh Kills on Staten Island, the largest landfill on the planet, for years has appeared on maps as a public park. People want everything having to do with garbage to be invisible. We want it out of sight. We don't want to think about it, don't want to be associated with it. One guy who I interviewed for today's radio program has a kind of high up job in the department of sanitation. Makes tons of money, lots of responsibility. And he got in contact after the interview to ask that I not use his name. His neighbors didn't know that he worked for the sanitation department, and he didn't want them to know. One sanitation worker told Robin that one day he was picking up a bag of trash and a lady's walking a poodle. And the lady lets the poodle start peeing on the bag as he's grabbing it. Like he's not even there. Sanitation workers will tell you that they're invisible. How can a pedestrian let her dog pee on a bag where a man is reaching for that bag and has his face not 18 inches from the dog who then lefts his leg to take a leak? That man must be invisible to that woman, that she would let that happen without giving it a second thought. Today on our radio show, we take what's invisible and we make it visible. Stories of garbage, yours and mine. We live in a way that produces more waste than any people have in the history of civilization. We come here today not to feel bad about that, not to condemn that-- I know this is a public radio show, but I make a guarantee to you right now that this is not a radio program today about feeling bad about the immense volume of trash poking around the edges of all of our lives. No, no, no. This is a radio program about understanding the actual fact of it, finally. Our program today in three acts. Act One. Oh, Mr. San Man. In which we get our hands on your trash, yours, with the men who do it every day. Act Two. Except For the Smell, I Think I Have a Crush On You. There are squatters who build entire neighborhoods on top of rotting garbage heaps in Mexico. They scavenge in the trash piles for their living. We go there for a little love story. Act Three. I am a Legitimate Businessman... Waste Management. In that act, the secret recordings that ended mob control of New York garbage. We got them. Stay with us. Act One. Oh, Mr. San Man. The government has a number where they take the amount of waste-- residential, commercial, industrial waste-- created in this country, and they divide it by how many of us there are to tell us how much garbage is produced per person by all of us just living our normal lives in this country. That number? 4.8 pounds per person per day. One rainy morning I wanted to see exactly what that means on the ground. We're doing this block, right? No, the next block. I'll get on the running board. OK. You sit there. I get on the other side. For more than a year, Robin Nagle-- who you just heard from-- has been riding around with New York City sanitation workers, doing the job alongside them, as part of her research. She wears the green uniform. She slings trash. I went out with with her and two guys. Andre Ramos-- who reminds me a little bit of a Latino Billy Crystal-- in his early 40s, goatee, turning a little gray, chatty and outgoing. And his partner, an older, rather dignified man. My name is Roger Patton. But because my name is Patton, everyone on the job calls me General. But I'm not a general. I don't behave as one. The General drives. Ramos rides the running board. And when they tell me the amount of trash that the two of them lift and throw into the back of the truck on their morning route, Ramos gives me the number in tons. 14.4 is our target weight, or better. 14.4. So that means that you're personally picking up seven tons of garbage a day? More or less, yes. That seems crazy. Really? Why? Because it just doesn't seem like a person can even pick up-- After a while, all you see is black bags, and you just keep throwing it in there, throwing it in there. Until you fill this truck up. The sheer athleticism that this requires is something that most of us don't think about, usually. When Ramos talks about what it was like to first do this job, throw trash all day for a living, he sighs. It was hard. It really hard. Because you're not used to the lifting, the dragging, the pulling. Everything is different. Because on this job, everyone hurts. Your back, your shoulders, your legs. My body, we saw plenty of Tiger Balm, plenty of Ben-Gay. So how many months did it take before you were able to lift comfortably, and at the end of the day, you weren't wiped out? I tell you, it took more than a few months. It took the years. It really did. Yes. Because this is something, you know, you've got to tailor your body into. It's not something that you get used to overnight, no matter if you were a hard worker all your life. As with a lot of physically demanding jobs, it's all about pacing yourself, conserving your energy where you can. A typical stop. The General pulls up the truck to 30 trash bags set out in front of an apartment building on the Upper West Side. He tries to get the truck close to the bags. Most of the bags are at 60, maybe 70 pounds. Small enough for Ramos or the General or Robin to carry alone. Some buildings use these big, black sausage bags packed by compactors. They do those together. This one is heavy. What would you say, like what? It's about 120 pounds. That's about 120 pounds. This bag is heavy. In this case, we try to get as close to the truck as possible, and we both lift at the same time. The General, by the way, is doing this-- lifting seven tons a day-- at 58 years old. Come around on this side. Come over here. They wave me away from the back of the truck to the side. Never stand behind the hopper while it's running. It will come spewing out on you. So it's best to stand to the side. And the reason for that is that, odds this is compressed. It can go to 3,000 pounds per square inch. And it's crushing these bags, 3,000 pounds per square inch. An object can come flying out of there. It's like somebody is literally shooting a bullet at you. It could be a nail, glass or something. It can do damage. There are all sorts of ways to get hurt on this job. Guys ding their legs into car bumpers. They get scraped or cut by glass or metal that slices through the trash bags. Guys get hit by cars. At one stop, Robin and the General dragged over this rust-colored couch and they placed it in the hopper. It's so big that half of it sticks out the end of the truck. Ramos makes the blade of the compactor come down, and-- and I have to say this-- but one moment, there's a couch there, and the next moment, it is completely flat. Snapped from three dimensions to two. Then the blade cycles around slowly crushes this big, rust-colored rectangle in with the kitchen garbage and the other trash-- and it's gone. In just a couple of hours we smash a TV, and a couple of futon frames, and a bookcase. I've seen refrigerators crushed to nothing. It's able to crush almost anything. Almost anything. Given how it's just one of the unquestioned facts of modern life that somebody's going to come and pick up almost anything, almost anything today, it's amazing to think just how recent an innovation garbage collection is. Cities have been around for thousands of years. And for most of that time, spoiled food and household waste was just left outside, on the street, just to rot. And Robin, who studies this, says that's what New York was like. The city was, compared to today, unimaginably filthy. Gunk and mud in the streets, ankle-deep with rotting horse carcasses and piles of animal dung. Just really unimaginably dirty. This finally changed in the late 1800s. New York created a sanitation department first in 1881, but it didn't actually accomplish anything until 1896, when a civil engineer slash Civil War vet took over. In 1896, a guy was appointed commissioner named Colonel George Wearing. And he came in and he turned it around. He had some very savvy ideas. He put the men in white uniforms to suggest cleanliness, and he gave them pith helmets, like the local cops of the day wore, to suggest power-- enforcement power. And he set out the routes. He gave them standards they had to meet each day. He organized, he bureaucratized the job, but he also made the men accountable. So there are before and after pictures of streets around the city that were this ankle-deep muck before he came. And then after he came, they're pristine. You can see the curbs very nicely defined. There's no garbage anywhere. And they got the nickname White Wings because of their uniform. And the men had an interesting status now that they have since lost. There were parades down Fifth Avenue every year for a long time. And the White Wings were heralded as the heroes who had cleaned the streets effectively for the first time in the city's history. See how this is put out, with the nails standing up? They're supposed to drive the nails down or take them out. On 103rd street, the General shows me these boards left with the trash-- maybe eight feet long, maybe ten feet long-- with nails sticking out, like a medieval weapon. From the same stop, Ramos shows me a piece of metal eight inches long sticking out of a bag, ready to slice into your leg if you don't spot it. It's like Russian roulette, he says. They throw everything in here. They throw all kinds of-- this is garbage, after all. They don't think that another human being has to come and pick this up, that has responsibility, that has loved ones, just here for eight hours, just wants to do his job out here, safe as possible, and make it through the day. People don't consider the fact there's another human being's got to pick up this. So don't just throw it in there. After all, it's just garbage. So yeah. One time this truck, about a year and a half ago, we went to a Jersey dump and came up radioactive. Yeah. They took us off the scale, and they had one of the personnel come with, I believe it's a Geiger counter? And they went around the truck and took a reading. And it came up radioactive. We had radioactive material in there. Where we picked it up, we got no idea. Only we know it was in one of the black bags. One of the most famous stories among New York City san men is the story of Michael Hanley, a san man on the last stop of the day in November 1996 who was standing behind the truck when a jog of hydrofluoric acid in the trash exploded, shooting out of the hopper and killing him. It's a coveted job to be a New York City san man. When they last gave the qualifying test, 30,000 people took it. The General waited five years after passing the exam before a job came open, which is typical. And though the work is grueling, the pay-- if you're actually on a truck-- starts at $40,000 and can go to $60 after just five years. A good winter, meaning one with lots of overtime for clearing snow-- they clear snow, too-- can make for a $90,000 year for a senior guy. Today everything goes smoothly. The trash is usually put out neatly for us, in bags, because we're in pretty good neighborhoods. We block traffic for ten minutes at a time. We get rained on until we're soaked. The rain actually never lets up all morning. At some point, I finish a take out coffee that I'd been drinking, and I start looking around the street for a garbage can to throw the cup in. And then I remember-- I have a garbage truck right here. I walk around to the back and I toss the cup right into the hopper. It feels good, tossing it straight into the truck. Like the feeling that you get driving to a farm, picking apples off the trees yourself. Mostly the thing that hits you as you ride around on a garbage truck is just how much stuff we throw out each day. One bag after another, block after block, all smashed together in the hopper, where everything merges into a disgusting, liquidy sludge. Robin teaches a class on the anthropology of garbage. She's writing a book about garbage men. So needless to say, she has thought about this quite a lot-- about the sheer volume of waste that we create today. Trash today-- the meaning of trash today, in part, is about a different kind of relationship to time that we have now. We depend on disposability, to move at a certain kind of speed. You and I had a cup of coffee this morning. It wouldn't occur to us to save the cup, rinse it out, use it again. It wasn't a ceramic cup. If it were a ceramic cup, I've got to keep it somewhere it's not going to get knocked around in my backpack and broken. I've got to bring it home and wash it, carry it out again. I have to remember it the next day. There's even a whole way in which our mental life is organized that depends on disposability. I don't have to pay attention to-- when I go to the grocery store, once in a while, I remember to take a cloth sack, but usually I don't, because they'll give me a plastic one. I know that. I know, but it's nice to not have to think about those things. Of course, of course. One of the things I used to do was save things to use again. And I've stopped doing that. Because it is much easier and much more-- I don't know. I'm not saying-- I mean, I would be the first person to have a very, very hard time slowing down-- I don't know, it's just simpler. The way we live now. But again, this is how we organize this socially. That's new. We didn't live like that before. It's new with industrialization. It's new with plastics technologies and plastic sciences that make light-- I mean, it's now cheaper to buy a new VCR than to fix a VCR, to buy a new pair of shoes than to get them repaired, to buy it rather than repair it. After two hours on the street-- it's 8 AM-- time for the union-mandated 15 minute break. I call a 15 minutes of fame. You can eat what you want in 15 minutes. You can relieve yourself for 15 minutes. You could sign autographs for 15 minutes. It's our break and the union fought hard for it, and why shouldn't we take it? The General parks the truck and we duck into a diner on Broadway. Ramos gets a vitamin water. Somebody gets a bagel. There are coffees. And I ask the guys if they ever get overwhelmed or disgusted by all the trash. They mostly shrug this off. Yes, we do. But we know it's a job, so therefore, somebody has to do it. And it's part of our job. It's part of the job. And you don't think too much of it. You just see it as what it is-- waste. I know. But just riding around with you, just this little bit, I just feel like, God, people have a lot of crap. We do try to treat it with the utmost respect and-- [LAUGHTER] 15 minutes goes fast and we stand up to leave. After a morning of picking up other people's trash, Ramos leaves his empty vitamin water bottle at the table. He doesn't say anything about it. He doesn't look back. Throwing that out is somebody else's job. Coming up. Taking your teenage kid to the garbage heap where you spent your youth. Literally, the garbage heap. In Tijuana, how one American teenager reacts to his dad's trash-filled past. This 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, Garbage. We make the world of garbage, a world that's usually invisible to us, visible. Here on the radio where, I guess, everything is invisible. We've arrived at act two of our program. Act Two. Except For the Smell, I Think I Have a Crush On You. Luis Alberto Urrea was born in Tijuana and grew up moving back and forth between Tijuana and San Diego. When he got older, he moved away from the border and all its poverty. Now he lives in the Chicago suburbs. And recently, he headed back to Tijuana, to the border, for the first time in years. I used to work with the garbage pickers of Tijuana's municipal garbage dump. People who survived by scavenging through the trash. They'd recycle glass and aluminum for cash, find food and clothes they kept for themselves, all just minutes from downtown San Diego, which was not far from the border fence. I was translator for an American missionary group that brought them food, clothing, medical attention. In the years since I'd left, many things had changed. The trash pickers had taken over the dump, squatting on the land and building homes atop the garbage. And I had gotten married and started a family. My wife and I decided to return to the dump so my old friends living there could meet my new family. In particular, we were going to find Negra. When I first met Negra, she was seven. She was a skinny little dark girl with bare feet in a sack dress, one pair of panties. That was all she had. Her family lived in a one-room shack with two beds inside, a little wood-burning stove. We kept in touch for decades. I'm godfather to one of her kids. I had lost Negra seven years ago. Where she lives, without a phone or a street address, it's impossible to stay in contact. Letters can never be delivered except to a nearby grocery store, and then you hope the store owners will give her the letter. We decided to take our boy, Eric. Eric is 14. He has a pierced ear. He wears an MTV Jackass cap. He's entering his first year of high school and he plays the drums. Eric. Eric. Eric! Well, before I went down there, I was scared. I actually thought against going. And I have to admit, I cried because I was scared. We live in Chicago, and nothing there could have prepared Eric for Tijuana. I showed him the neighborhood where I'd been born and the tumbling dirt hill where my grandmother's house had been. And then we headed to the municipal dump. It starts out normal, like just a regular city. And then it starts getting weirder and weirder. And then you end up in dirt. This was all a dirt road where the garbage trucks would come up to bring trash when I worked here. So this whole hillside is now full of auto repair shops and little houses and little restaurants. And we're just getting to where the-- the road just ended, and we hit the rocks. I saw this one donkey-- burnt. He was all-- That's mange. It's called mange. No, I mean he had like little patches where there wasn't any fur-- That's called mange. That's what I'm telling you. It's a disease they get. Oh. At this point, Negra's barrio looks a lot like any other Tijuana neighborhood. Stucco here, cement brick there, mixed in with tumbledown shacks made of plywood, dirt streets. The only sign that it's built on a massive garbage heap is that when it rains, the ground cracks open and gas escapes through small volcanoes. There are garbage mines where neighbors dig shafts in their yards and pull out buried bottles and cans to recycle for money. Street dogs still roam the alleys there. The houses are jury rigged, fences made from bed springs, old mattresses the people pulled from the trash and set afire. Eric had never seen anything like it except in Mad Max movies. I was worried about Negra. I didn't know what we would find. When I had last seen her, her house was a wooden thing back off the dirt alley. We had built it out of scrap garage doors. We drove up the hill and turned down her little street and it looked alien. No one lives in a cardboard box houses anymore. Now there are power poles and telephone lines, lights. Cement walls line the street, built right to the roadway. I stopped a boy and I asked, where does Negra live? He pointed. Right there. When I pounded on the door, the children let me in, and Negra came running. We were both adults now. As we embraced, she seemed small to me, and I seemed gigantic to her. But as soon as we were together, the intervening years disappeared. I remember the first time my sister introduced him to me. I grabbed Luis's hand and we went to walk in the dump. And I was really happy because I had him by the hand, because I could show him off to all my little friends. "Look! He's my friend! He's my friend!" I was very proud. I began to show him all this stuff-- how to [? order ?] trash, how to collect boxes and sort out bottles, aluminum. I show him how to do it. And I said to my friends, "Look! Luis come to help me!" Negra used to come running when we showed up, calling my name from far out in the trash. I would come to this apocalyptic scene on a hillside above Tijuana amidst wrecked cars, piles of trash, paper shacks, and sometimes towers of dead animals set afire. I would hear this little voice in the racket, calling me. "Luis! Luis! Luis!" She would leap out of the trash and fly like a little bird and land against my chest, small-boned and tough and sinewy. And she would say, "Give me a piggyback ride." And I'd carry her through the garbage. So now here's the situation that her man, Jaime, my compadre, has apparently been sort of macho and bad, and gotten a girlfriend or two or three or four. And Negra has sent him packing. So now she's got a house full of women in a very tough neighborhood. Girls. Her sister was beaten by her husband in a drug frenzy and sustained some brain damage that ultimately killed her. So her sister Maria has died. And Negra has now inherited Maria's three daughters. So Negra has gone from having three girls on her own to having six girls on her own. So at the age of 31, she's suddenly the mom of girls ranging from eight years old to 19 years old. As it turned out, we had shown up just in time for the graduation of Negra's niece, Blanca. Negra called me upstairs and I ascended into a world of lace and perfume and clouds of Mexican hair. I said, Eric is going to faint. Somehow this comment began the miracle. I went back down and sat with him. He looked lost in the scrap couch, all alone, blushing with fear. Then the angels began to descend, and they did it with a kind of natural drama our Latina women know. They came down by age, youngest first, and they walked with grace, as if they were all in the graduation ceremony. In Eric's world, the chicks flounce into a room and toss off a nod and mutter, "What's up?" In Negra's house, each girl came downstairs, walked to Eric, and kissed him. Whoa, dude. His ears were bright red. Yes, they kissed me on the cheek. I probably was blood red. I know I was red. For sure I was red. And I didn't know what to expect, you know? It was-- I don't know how to describe it. "Nayeli" is a word that means "flower of the household." When I last saw her, she was a tiny seven year old. She was Negra's eldest daughter, now a somber and beautiful young woman of 16. Eric arrived, and I was like, ay, he seems so timid, so serious. He was stuck like glue to Luis, just stuck to him. So if Luis moved over there, Eric went too. The 10-year-old kissed him. The 11-year-old kissed him. Then-- uh oh. The 14-year-old kissed him. The redness spread from his ears to his cheeks. The gorgeous 15-year-old graduate, in her lavender gown, descended and kissed him. He started to giggle. She sat on the arm of the couch near him and he sat up straight. It was probably his first experience like that, with those kisses we gave him. And that's why he got so embarrassed. Then Nayeli, all in black, looking 25 in a belly button Shakira outfit, came down and stared at him, then kissed him. Finally the 19-year-old, in Shakira's other outfit, with blue eyelids, came down and said things in Spanish that he didn't understand, and kissed him, and put her hand on his face. He says he didn't wet his pants. They started playing-- I think it was Eminem. They started playing Eminem, and they're like, you know this? And then, well, I'd rather not talk about it. Well, I was with my mom, and my mom was standing next to me. And Martha, the 19-year-old, she starts pointing at me, and I'm like, what's going on here? I have my bear claw necklace on and I hold it up, and I'm like, this? And she's like, no. And she grabs her belt buckle and says, "belt buckle, belt buckle." And then her and Nayeli start giggling. And my mom's, like, looking at my shirt. And then she says-- Martha says-- "I don't know how to say it!" And then my mom looks down. And my fly was open! You know, I'm standing there, like, hey, check out my bear claw! Is this what you're talking about? Yeah, this is cool, huh? And then my fly was open! The girls laughed, but it wasn't cruel. His haplessness won them all over at once, and he became the cheerful fiance to the entire crowd. They began to fight for his attention. What did I think of Eric? I thought, he's still just a kid. He's just a kid. That was my first reaction. A kid. And it's not every day that he's surrounded by girls who are hugging him, and grabbing his hand, and giving him kisses on the cheek. If he didn't flirt with the 16-year-old, she'd pout, while the 14-year-old fumed because the 19-year-old put her arm through his. "Daddy," he said, "nobody back home is going to believe this." There was a pause. "Please, take some pictures." Now, were the girls holding you and hugging you and stuff? I seem to remember, they were holding onto you pretty tight. Yep. I guess I was like-- a Teddy bear. It was weird. Because you know, if I had met those people in nicer conditions, I would never have guessed they were poor at all. I don't know how to describe it. I guess they could still maintain their dignity. It was just so weird how they could do that. Like, if I were them, I couldn't do that at all. We were all together, and in classic Mexican fashion, it was time to eat. Eric was nervous about the meal, since he's a picky eater at the best of times. And here we were in this neighborhood that's not terribly hygienic. He had no way of knowing that everything around him-- the couch, the table, the plates and silverware and pans-- had all been scavenged out of the garbage. I decided not to share that information at the moment. They were going to cook us carne asada. I told him it was safe to eat the cooked meat and the tortillas, but the boiled beans or the salsa might make him sick. He nodded. His eyes were huge, but he smiled at Nayeli as if he couldn't wait to dig in. The girls had to go to the store to buy charcoal. They refused to go without Eric. They snagged his arms and vanished. At the store, they didn't have enough money to buy a bag of charcoal. They bought six briquettes. The woman in the store had the bag cut open, and they counted out six and wrapped them in a piece of newspaper. It was such a gift those girls gave Eric. They held him, but more importantly, they held him publicly. They made a show of him. When I was a boy, unloved and unlovely, unpopular and scared to walk in the neighborhood, my teenaged cousin Margarita came to live with us. And when we walked down the street, she would hold my hand so everyone could see us. And when my enemies came in sight, she would lace her fingers through mine as if she were my girlfriend. As if she loved me so much, she needed to hold me even tighter. The graduation was at the John F. Kennedy and Juan [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Academy. Our car became the shuttle running 100 people up and down the hill. The faculty of the school sat an old record player on a folding chair. All the kids were in their uniforms, and the girls were in their inexpensive taffeta gowns. The theme was lilac. Each girl also had a small cotton stole. They all had hairdos, and they wore really painful-looking high heels, looking as beautiful as possible. The small kids were in their uniforms, and the kindergarten kids were dressed in cowboy suits. The school principal first led everyone in applause for the teachers who heroically talked and the guests of honor, who were teachers from other schools, stood and got rounds of ferocious applause. And they started playing, if I remember right, really bad old Stevie Wonder records. Each class did dances to Stevie Wonder, and all the ninth graders did a waltz to it. Each group marched out and did a dance in the rubble. Did San Diego and the United States look different to you after this experience? When we came back, did you feel like you were seeing it through new eyes? Because didn't we go right to Disneyland after that? Yeah, we did go to Disneyland after that. Once we got back there, you know, the whole trip there seemed unreal. Like it never really happened. You know? It felt like a dream to me, because it was just so unbelievably strange. Never in a million years would I have guessed I'd be going there. Would you go back? Yeah. You would go back? Yes. That would be a definite yes. I would go back. Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including By the Lake of the Sleeping Children, The Secret Life of the Mexican Border, and Across the Wire. This story was produced by Barbara Ferry with help from Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman, and Deborah Begel. It's part of the series "Border Stories" from Homelands Productions, which gets funds from the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Act Three. I'm a Legitimate Businessman... In Waste Management. Starting in the mid-1950s, private trash collection in New York was controlled by the mob. Private trash collection, you should understand, means anything that the city won't pick up, which in New York, means any trash that is generated by any business. A restaurant, an office building, a car shop, anything at all. As you might expect, in New York, that is a lot of money. $1.5 billion a year back in 1995, which is when this next story takes place. For 50 years, everybody, including city officials, knew that the mob was running a garbage cartel, driving up prices all over the city. But in the mid-1990s, the entire operation was brought down more or less by one man-- an NYPD detective named Rick Cowan who went undercover for three years, making hundreds of hours of secret recordings. Now before this, Cowen had gone undercover in the narcotics division, but never for more than two weeks. And he had no intention of starting a historic, city-wide undercover sting operation when our story begins. When our story begins, he's a guy in the NYPD Organized Crime division. He's investigating mafia loan sharking in the garbage business. And he just catches a lucky break. It's a truck explosion. A truck owned by a recycling company called Chambers Paper Fiber, was blown up underneath the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn. When Detective Cowen gets there, the owner of the company-- a guy named Sal Benedetto-- tells him that he'd been having trouble with the mob. That the second largest trash company in the city, a mob-run company, had taken his biggest customer, so he turned around and took one of the mob's customers. Ever since then, his drivers had been threatened, and now this truck was blown up. Detective Cowen remembers meeting Sal Benedetto this way. Very personable guy. And 15 minutes into the interview, his shop foreman interrupted us and said, Sal, the guy that burned the truck just drove by. So we thought that maybe we could get outside and follow the car, or see the car, and get the license plate, you know, we'd have possibly information and evidence that we could lead for an arrest. So unbeknownst to us, as I was rushing out-- I was the first one to run out the door-- these two guys were coming in. You know, I startled them, they startled me, and I stopped right in my tracks. This one guy was built like a big football player. The second guy had his hand in his pocket and pointed as if he had a gun. The larger of the two was doing all the talking. He asked who I was, and with no rhyme or reason, the owner, Sal Benedetto, says, "That's cousin Dan. He works here." Or something to that effect. So Sal just instinctively just gives you a cover. Yeah. Calling the cops in this business is a death sentence. It's just not done. Mob guys want to know if the Benedettos are going to give up the customer that they just stole from the mob. And Detective Cowen, aka their brand new cousin Danny, finds himself in the middle of this discussion. And this guy said that there was going to be a sit down over this, and he demand to know, by two o'clock, what our intentions were. And he gave me a business card with a phone number on the back and wanted to be called at that number. And that's what we did. Hello? Hello. Are you the Raymond? Yeah, this is Raymond. This is Danny of Chambers Paper. Yeah. I saw you. I saw you today with Sal. Right. Yeah. And then you guys started getting stupid and started following me. No, we were leaving. We saw you backing up the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] down the street-- I'm not stupid. Listen. I'm not stupid either. Listen-- Now he's accusing you of following him. Did you guys follow him after you left the place? Yeah. We followed him-- and they obviously saw us, and they looped around, and we let them go at that point. We would like to sit down and get together. Next week? Yes. Next week. All right. You know, can you come over here? When? No, I mean-- no, next week. Next week you want to do it? Right. In this tape, you sound a little bit nervous. You can hear your voice shaking. You can hear you breathing while he's talking. Well, I was very nervous making this phone call, no doubt about it. I knew nothing about the garbage business other than what I was told since I was a little kid, that it was all mob-controlled. We will sit down like gentlemen, and we-- No problem. That's what I want. That's what I want. But you know, I mean, I'll meet you halfway. I mean-- I'll meet you halfway if you meet me halfway. The only thing I want is for us to sit down and discuss this like men. We weren't assuming that this was going to lead to a big undercover operation. This was just some thug that came down to Chambers that day. At best, the cops thought this guy might name some higher up in the mob who they could then drag in. But one conversation with the mobsters led to a second, and third, and pretty soon, the cops decided to turn the Irish Rick Cowen into the Italian Danny Benedetto, cousin Danny from Staten Island, full time, to see just how far it could go. The NYPD set him up with a fake ID, an SUV like the SUVs that guys in the garbage business drove, and a dummy apartment in a high rise building on Staten Island where a lot of Italians lived. Every day, Rick would drive from his real home, sneak into that building, get the SUV, and then drive to work at the Benedetto family recycling business, Chambers Papers, where Sal Benedetto gave him a full time job. Because some of the mob guys knew the Benedetto family going back generations-- some of them had actually come from the same town in Italy-- Rick had to learn the entire family tree of this huge family, which was kind of a nightmare, actually. He also had to learn from Sal everything about the recycled paper business. The processes, the grades of paper. The paper recycling business had 25 different paper grades. Single white ledgers, soft color ledger, mixed office waste, CPO groundwood, CPO laser free. Things like this. Any equipment that went along with it. I mean, if-- and this happens later on in the case, where a guy would say, hey, what kind of [UNINTELLIGIBLE] are you running in your shop? I mean, I had to know these things. Man. But I would have coffee with Sal around 10 or 10:30 in the morning, and when we'd go out, we'd talk about things like this. And Sal knew the business, and it was almost like he could do it in his sleep, but he couldn't articulate it to me very well. But eventually, I learned enough to pull it off like people who had been in the business for generations. How much danger was the Benedetto family putting itself in to let you all do this? A considerable amount of danger. Certainly Sal. Sal told people in the industry that I was his second cousin. He could have been killed. The way the sting worked was this. While Rick was working at Chambers Papers, he got himself involved in several turf wars with the mob. One of these actually involved the company that produces the number one mob TV series in America, HBO. HBO headquarters in New York had their paper recycling hauled out by a company that happened to be controlled by the mob-- like most haulers were. Nothing unusual about that. Sal Benedetto's company, Chambers, bid for their garbage collection business. And because their bid was lower than the mob-run company, they got the job, taking it from the mobsters. The cartel wouldn't stand for that. Never stood for that kind of thing. And mobsters came to shake Rick down, demanding $240,000 as payment for taking the HBO job. Naturally, Rick recorded the shakedown, and the negotiations, and the payoffs. He did this with a bunch of different buildings and garbage contracts. And eventually, because of all these deals he had going with the mob, the mobsters asked him to join their club-- to be part of the cartel that controlled New York City trash. Which is great for Rick, because now he was completely inside. He went to their meetings and he recorded everything. As he got deeper and deeper into this world, one of the monsters, Frank Giovenco, became kind of a criminal mentor to Dan Benedetto, teaching him the ins and outs of how you deal with the mob. He was a careful guy. Even though he was young, he was schooling me, and he tended to like me. Let me play you a little clip of tape. Now, this is very hard to hear. It's going to be hard to hear over the radio. Let me just play a little clip. Happens all the time. We always compensate, tell them what's coming up-- [INAUDIBLE]. And basically, he's just whispering to you. Yes. Because we're in the association. So in the association, this is where a lot of the scheming is done. But they don't want to talk about bids there. Because in case the government is listening-- Don't worry about that. That's what I'm telling you. You follow what I'm saying? We can't worry about that [INAUDIBLE]. He liked to get right close to you, right in front of your face, and whisper into your ear. He had a idiosyncrasy. Like, he liked to tap you, tap you at the front of your shirt when he was talking. And I didn't want him to touch the head of the mike, so I put it behind the button, and then all he would feel is the button. [INAUDIBLE] Manhattan? There's always, always work coming out. Look at-- [INAUDIBLE]. One of these tapes you got, this guy named Ed Tamley actually names Vincent Chin Gigante. How significant is it for somebody to name the Chin on tape? That was a home run. That was one of the most incriminating conversations. The Chin, just a couple years after that, went on trial with the federal government. The FBI had a case. And even they didn't have direct evidence like that. They did not have conversations like that. This was a home run. Eddie was explaining who was the boss, and the illegal activities of the association. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] No, the Chin. The Chin? You know. Gigante. Gigante? Yeah. He's like the biggest wise guy around. Are you sure? Listen to me. I know what I'm talking about. There was this family rule that he did not want his name talked about, and people should not get caught on tape talking about him. They might point to their chin. That was a code name for the Chin. But here we had Tamley spelling it out. Yeah, he's the boss there. He's always been. He's the boss, but if I don't pay-- The mobsters were paranoid about being taped, and Rick had many close calls where they nearly found him out. The worst of these happened when one of the mobsters ran into one of Sal Benedetto's cousins from out of town at a waste industry golf outing. Remember, the Benedettos are this big Italian family, and wise guy is talking to this out-of-town cousin, and somehow they get on the subject of Danny Benedetto. Danny, of course, is really Detective Rick Cowen. And the cousin doesn't know about the sting operation, And he tells the mobster, no, no, you got it wrong. There is no Danny Benedetto in our family. No such person exists. As you might expect, this news spreads like wildfire. Maybe Danny, that is, Rick, was a cop. Sal hears about this, and he tells Rick about what's happening. And sure enough, one night as Rick is closing up the transfer station, he gets beeped by Joe Francolino himself, one of the bosses. He wants to see Dan Benedetto immediately at a restaurant called Pirino's. So he gave me directions to a restaurant where I've never been, and he even told me where to park. And I went to this pay parking lot. And as I was going to get the ticket and pay, the guy says, "What's your name?" I mean, no one ever asks you your name in these places. You just pull in, you get the ticket, and you go. I told him Dan. He says, oh, park in the back and take your keys with you. So this made me even more nervous. And I walked up the block, and I went into this place, and at first I saw no one. So I thought I had the wrong address. I stepped back out to the sidewalk, looked at the sign, and sure enough, it was Pirino's. So I went back in. I felt like Luca Brasi, going to that restaurant with those Italians and they gave him that famous Sicilian necktie. I mean, I was-- my knees were weak. I couldn't even feel the ground underneath my feet. I was scared to death. And I didn't see him. I didn't see the bartender. So I went downstairs. And just as I was getting down from the bottom step, Joe Francolino came around the side, out of the men's room. But it just startled me. I was already nervous, and that really put a scare into me. And Francolino took me to a table in the back, and we started having dinner. Small chit chat. He was careful. And then he said to me that someone told somebody, secondhand, that a relative, a relation of yours, says there's no Dan Benedetto. And you know, Joe's a tough guy. He's got this like broken nose-looking kind of look. And he was very, very scary. But I tried to play it off as best I could. Are you actually a Benedetto? Yes. Your last name is Benedetto? Benedetto. I mean, I am-- I'm one of the Benedettos. I'm a Benedetto. Do you have that on your license? Yes. All right. Give me your license and let me go forward. He asks me for my wallet. He wants to see my driver's license, and then we'll go forward. Dan is my name. I mean, my wife is [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Jim, I mean-- It's good that you took off that beard. This don't even look like you. He's saying, it's good that you took off that beard, because this don't even look like you. And he laughed. In the picture taken for the license, I had a beard. You know, it's a picture I know. I know the picture. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] than trying to dye it. So in the end, what do you say that finally convinces him? I know at one point, I'm not sure if you have the clip of it, but I said, you know, I don't know what else to say to you. What we can do is-- He goes, you know, I have be careful. I said, I know, a man like you, you have to be careful. And you're going to check it out. And when the dust settles, if everything's OK, you give me a call, you know where to find me. Other than that, I don't know what to say. In the end, Rick had so many tapes, so much evidence against the mob, that when he testified before a grand jury, it took him three months to tell everything that he knew. When trials began, he was on the witness stand for nine weeks. In 1997, 72 defendants were charged, including all the principal members of the cartel and their trade associations and companies. Two got probation. Everyone else was convicted, barred from the garbage industry, and imprisoned. All the companies were shut down. Price on garbage removal in New York City dropped 40%. The prices dropped dramatically after this case. It was said by Mayor Giuliani, at the time there was a $600 million dollar reduction throughout the city. It was equivalent to the biggest tax break they ever had. In some buildings, the change in price is sort of stunning. 55 Water Street in Manhattan saw its garbage removal costs drop $1 million a year. Blue Cross Blue Shield on Third Avenue saved a half million. The World Trade Center saved $2.5 million. After everything came down, Sal Benedetto was given the option of the Witness Protection Program, but he declined. He was given police protection until he died of natural causes three years later. The leaders of the cartel are still in prison, but most of the guys are out now. Rick could actually run into them on the street. I bumped into a couple of guys I knew from the club, but not any of the guys that went to jail. And what happens when you bump into guys from the club? The one guy just asked what I was doing. I didn't answer him. I said, what are you doing? He goes, a little of this, a little of that. But he said first, he said, "Hey Dan, or whoever you are." And that was about it. I went on my way. And that was it. Detective Rick Cowen. He's written a book with Douglas Century about his life undercover with the mob in the sting operation. It's called to Take Down: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire. Before we leave this subject, I should say that in the years since 1997, when the cartel was crushed, things have changed again in the New York Trash industry. And in a sense, the same thing that happened to the trash business in New York has happened to all sorts of businesses all over the country, which is that lots of little companies have been bought up or driven out of business by a handful, a small handful, of big, national companies. And as a result, that 40% savings that happened when the mob was driven out of the garbage business may be gone. For a brief period there were price reductions. Those price reductions, my understanding is, have been erased. Ben Miller was Director of Policy Planning for New York under Mayor Giuliani. He's written a history of garbage in New York called Fat of the Land. Instead of having a few dozen people collecting waste in New York City, we're down to a small handful of national companies. Certainly the prices have gone up significantly recently, and other waste has gone up as well, so that the prices overall, I don't think, are any lower than they were before this change took place. And we see prices continuing to increase. Watching the prices go up in this industry after the mob got kicked out, Sal Benedetto said, quote, "Look. The only difference between the majors"-- corporations-- "and the boys"-- the mob-- "is that the majors don't actually kill you." Our program was produced today by Wendy Dorr and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, and Starlee Kine. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Stacy Tiderington. Bill Rathje's book is called Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage. You know you can download audio of our program an audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who calls me into his office every day, lowers the lights, and reminds me-- Calling the cops in this business is a death sentence. It's just not done. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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The story goes like this. Recently I heard about this couple. He's in his 40s. She's in her mid-20s. And the way it was explained to me, they were having this conversation, and it was one of these conversations that, if you've ever been in a couple with a big age difference, maybe you've taken part in, he was saying basically, what can you see in me? You know, you are so young and energetic and I'm this older person. I'm so much more serious. And they talked about this and talked about this. And finally, she brought the conversation to a stop by declaring, no, no, no, don't you understand? I am Dennis Rodman. You are Phil Jackson. You ground me. I am wild. You make everything all right. And that's the way it is right now in Chicago, where I speak to you from right now. Our historic championship basketball team, the Chicago Bulls, is not just the winningest team of all time, with 72 regular season wins, now hurtling through the NBA playoffs. What's happened here in Chicago is that the Bulls are now the lens through which we view all of our experiences. They're the benchmark against we're measuring everything in our lives. They've become our reality. Today, in this hour, a dispatch from a city that has left the rest of the American culture and entered into its own little subculture, a basketball subculture. At nights in Chicago, now the Hancock building, which towers over the city, is lit a bright Bulls-red. Bulls posters and souvenirs and caps and T-shirts are for sale in every video storage and corner drugstore, in bars, everywhere. It's like living in China during the cultural revolution. Slogans and propaganda, everywhere, all uniting us as one people. The name United Center was never more appropriate than now. There we are, united behind the vanguard-- Michael, Scottie, Dennis, Phil, Luke, our vanguard, and all the others. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, I'm Ira Glass. You're listening to This American Life. And I know actually that many people who have never heard our program before around the country are hearing us for the first time today. So a quick word of explanation, the idea of this radio show is to document what's going on around the country, in these United States, using all the different forms of radio storytelling that we can think of, including documentary, monologues, found tapes, just whatever we can think of. Each week, we choose a theme. And our theme for this hour is basketball-- stories of people who have a basketball jones of one sort or another. Act One of our show today, The Bulls in Our Hearts. Act Two, Bulls in a Barbershop. Act Three, What Basketball Means, stories of people who love the game. Act Four, Basketball and Commerce, in which, among other things, we visit Bulls star Scottie Pippen's car dealership. And Act Five, the greatest moment in radio-- ever. Stay with us. Act One, Bulls in Our Hearts. As a way to measure the place of the Bulls in the conscious and unconscious minds of everyday Chicagoans, consider this case, members of the radio jury. Anaheed was watching a game with her parents. They'd driven in from Detroit, the parents did, for her 26th birthday, and started arguing over Dennis Rodman. Just a quick word to public radio listeners who perhaps are not following our national basketball pastime as carefully as they might, Dennis Rodman is the player who you may have seen pictures of with the colored hair, the tattoos, the piercings. He's the one who was involved with Madonna for a while, possibly the greatest rebounder of all time. Anaheed's father did not like him. He's a rebel. He's a terrible man. Well, I'll let Anaheed tell the story. He said, "What kind of role model is he? He's no role model. This man is the Antichrist." And I said, "I don't think he's the Antichrist, Dad." What developed between them was the biggest argument Anaheed has had with her parents since she was a child, since she lived at home. It lasted for an hour. And what was remarkable about it is that it got to the most basic issues any family argument can ever get to. He said, "You like this craziness, you are just trying to go against everything of this family. You know that's not what we stand for. You're trying to go against the family. You're trying to divide yourself as much as possible from this family, by liking Dennis Rodman." All of a sudden, I was back in high school all of a sudden. And he hadn't been so completely-- Like I mean, the fight got to the point where he was telling me, like, that I don't love him, and I'm trying to break up our relationship. He wants to have a good relationship with me. He can't even talk to me, and I don't like him, and I don't respect him. And me telling him, I don't think you listen to me, and I don't think you care about the things that I care about, and you don't even know anything about me. And it's all because of Dennis Rodman. And it's all because of little Dennis Rodman. It is impossible to imagine fighting like this, Anaheed says, over any other public figure. My dad and I are both big basketball fans, and we used to go to Pistons games all the time together when I was in high school, and that was sort of the only thing we had in common. And I think that the NBA to my dad is this really great organization. They're really wonderful, and he really loves the game. And to see somebody like Dennis Rodman sort of flip off the whole organization, I think to him sort of symbolizes me and my role in my family. And everything that I'm doing to him is what Dennis is doing to the NBA. Then there are the dreams. I realized a few weeks ago, actually, that even though I had not seen a Bulls game in two years, personally, and even though at the time I really didn't care less about the Bulls-- I wasn't following it at all-- the Bulls are such a presence in everyday life in Chicago-- in conversations, on the street, products, and magazines, and stuff about them everywhere-- that even I was having dreams about them. They had entered my unconscious picture of the world to that extent. So anyway, here in Chicago just last week, I went on the radio and I invited Chicagoans to call in and record their dreams about the Bulls. And people responded. Maybe five or six months ago, I was at a really stressed out time at work preparing for an audit. I had a dream during that period that the auditing team showed up at my office as planned, only the chief auditor was Michael Jordan. I was really nervous and stressed out. And there's Michael Jordan in my office. And it somehow developed, while I was having a conversation with Michael Jordan about the audit, and I wasn't completely prepared, but he knew I wasn't ready, and he decided that, in exchange for oral sexual favors, he would make sure we passed the audit. And I had a conversation with my boss about it, and my boss was, like, "Well, I can't really tell you that you should do this, but it's Michael Jordan, how bad can it be?" And we passed the audit. One of the other really funny things about this is that it's Scottie Pippen who I find absolutely just adorable, not Michael. I'm 52 years old. I teach at DePaul University. Last Sunday, I dreamt that I was Michael Jordan. My dream was that my friend was having a bar mitzvah, and he knew Michael Jordan. And so I was going to be there at the bar mitzvah with him. I'm in a hot tub with Michael Jordan. And he says to me, "I love my wife, but you're my best friend." As weird as the Michael Jordan dreams are, the Dennis Rodman dreams are way weirder. One guy called up to describe a dream in which a mob was attacking Dennis Rodman because he was a Communist. In another dream, somebody else called in to say that a woman said that Dennis appeared in a dream of hers in a feather boa in an appliance store to tell the woman that the playoffs are fixed. It's fixed. It's done. It's fixed. I dreamed that Dennis Rodman was swimming in the ocean, and he was way far out, really deep. And everybody was scared that the undertow was going to drag him away. I had a dream that Dennis Rodman was a woman. And the two of us worked together at White Castle. Except what was interesting about Dennis was that he had no hands. And on one hand, he had a fork, and on the other hand, he had a spoon. And I felt jilted because he wouldn't talk to me. So the majority of my dream was me feeling dissed by the female Dennis Rodman with a fork and a spoon for hands. Other people weigh in with their basketball stories, coming up. Act Two, Bulls in a Barber Shop. A Chicago columnist wrote recently that the Bulls have become the city's royalty, but that does not really capture the half of it. The Bulls are like the soap opera that everyone in the city is watching, with this eccentric cast of characters that we all know. And watching a Bulls game, for most people, is a social event, where everybody swaps stories and theories and predictions. They gonna win. They gonna lose. They gonna sweep the whole series. Shut up [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. They gonna lose today. Bulls gonna lose today. Coleman Brothers is an old-style barbershop on Chicago's south side, been in business 34 years-- pictures on the walls of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, Lena Horne and Minister Louis Farrakhan, five chairs, five barbers. I visited while the third game of the Eastern Conference playoffs was on the color TV near the door. The Bulls played the Orland Magic. Richard Coleman, whose chair is nearest the door, was predicting a 15-point Bulls' victory. His brother, James, whose chair is furthest from the screen, is calling for a four-game sweep, Bulls over Orlando. But sandwiched midway between the two brothers, standing in the middle chair, Tommy was the lone dissenter in a crowded room of probably three dozen Bulls fanatics, some of whom, remember, were armed with razors. It took a certain nerve to placidly insist, hour after hour, that Shaquille O'Neal and the Magic were going to pull this series out of the bag. I like Shaq. And they having a rough time at the moment. But can't give up the shift yet. Right, can't give up the shift. Tommy's customer, Clarence, speaks up. He's not a fan of any Chicago team. They don't play no money. Chicago don't play no money. You have to fight for every penny you get. Chicago don't want to play no athletes. Athletes capture the spirit of the city. You know, they still work hard. They still put forth the effort. They'll go home broke. They'll go home broke. A week before, there'd been a big discussion in Coleman Brothers about Dennis Rodman, his multi-colored hair, his tattoos, the fact that he showed up to a book signing in drag. Guys were not crazy about all this. But faced with a microphone, nobody wanted to say anything too negative about the star rebounder. And everyone had found a comfortable way to explain his behavior. I think it's all right. I think they probably say, well, hey, he making money. This is the main thing, you know? Maybe he's doing that in order to make money. I personally don't care for his dress attire, but I think it's a marketing ploy to make more money, so what can I say? You don't think he likes to dress up in women's clothes for real. No, I personally don't think so. He's just doing it to get attention, and to sell more McDonald cups and-- As far as I'm concerned, man, Dennis is not all that he make up to be. I think it's a big, old marketing thing that he doing, too, man. And you see, he done gotten rich since he got here, you know. And it's all because of this crazy stuff that he does. What do you think about him dressing up in women's clothing at his book signing? I think Dennis, he kind of like dressing in women's clothes. I have a feeling he does. But I don't think that the man really gay. I think if he was, he would go and tell it. He been saying everything else, so why not say that? The Bulls-Orlando game was a pretty typical Chicago viewing experience. By half time, the Bulls were ahead 10 points. And after the winningest season in basketball history, it's hard for fans in Chicago to avoid feeling the game is in the bag. Bulls gonna win. Go on and wait. Ha ha. No, Orlando won't come back. They're too banged up. Bulls gonna blow them out in the second half. Bulls gonna blow them out by at least double digits. Except, of course, for one person, bravely standing alone, against all odds, scissors in hand, a toothpick dangling from his lips, Tommy. Orlando coming back, win by five. It ain't over till the fat lady sing. People stream in and out of the barber shop. Everyone comments on the game. In the second half, when Michael Jordan takes a nasty spill, a customer shouts, "Superman's down!" The man sitting next to me introduces himself as Mr. Popcorn, a customer of Coleman's beginning 34 years ago, and a former high school basketball player himself. That's what I played, basketball, baseball, football. So when you see these players, is there some player who you really relate to the way they play? I relate to Michael Jordan. That's the way I would play. Play it hard, man. You know, a guard. Get the ball to the guy who can shoot, you know. The effect of the Bulls on the local economy is usually measured in millions of dollars, but it extends to 1,000 small shops like this one. Mr. Popcorn says that if the Bulls take the championship, he's going to sell Bulls T-shirts himself. And before long, he asked me the question that he asked a lot of customers at Colemans. I have a Bull watch. Would you like to buy one? No, no. What you mean no? I'm going to sell it to you cheap because you're a radio guy. Nah. I thought you said you was a Bull fan. I am. By the third quarter, I am the proud owner of a Bull's watch, marked down from $12 to $5. By the fourth quarter, with two minutes left on the clock, the Bulls leading by 17 points, and Michael Jordan apparently already sent to the showers, even these die-hard Chicago fans started making jokes. "What else is on?" one guy asked. "What's on the other channels?" James pays off a bet he'd actually made against the Bulls with Mr. Popcorn. Guys start talking about a sweep, a sweep, that is, of four games in a row. And when the final buzzer goes off, it turns out that Richard's prediction, a 15-point spread, is exactly where the game turned out. What did I tell them before the game started? What did I tell you? 15. I told you they was going to win it. They gonna run away with it. Orlando, they're just an inexperienced team that doesn't have the experience to play with the Bulls. Oh, you said 15? That's what I said before they started. Did anybody bet you? Somebody should have took that. I told you they gonna win. And if I tell you-- don't ever forget this-- if I tell you an elephant roost up a tree, you better look up there, you gonna see an elephant. Tommy looked around at the celebrating with a smile. I asked him for a final verdict on the Bulls. Seattle, they gonna take it. Man, you just don't give up, do you? Seattle gonna take them old men. Quote. Seattle, they gonna take it. Quote. Seattle gonna get the same thing the Magic's getting, a whooping, old-fashioned whooping. Then we all looked up, and through the plate glass window in front of the barber shop, we saw a car pull up. A guy climbs out with a brand-new broom in his hand, and strides toward the barber shop. He bringing the broom to Tommy. The guy walks in and stands, broom in hand, near the door. What's the problem? I told you I was going to come back up here now. Hey Tommy, you didn't think they was going to sweep, huh? It ain't no sweep. Tommy, I can't hear you, man. Did you see the bull run down the street? Was Shaquille on it? The guy's name is Derek, a regular at Colemans. Tell him I got to go home and celebrate, man. Me and all my Bull friend buddies, we going to to go celebrate. You going to jump on the bandwagon sooner or later, Tommy. We gonna make a believer out of you. No [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Tommy's unnerved. I've already talked to Gary Payton, and boy, we gonna do it in 4-2. Gary Payton, Seattle. You gotta respect somebody who'll publicly argue against what may be the best basketball team ever to play the game. It takes a certain amount of guts. But soon enough, this Bulls team will have to fade, especially given the age of players, mostly in their 30s. And it can be a sobering thought that, years from now, when all these guys are watching some new incarnation of the Bulls, this is the moment, this is the time right now, that they're going to remember together. One of the other customers, a guy whose name, I think, was Edgar, sat in Richard's chair, the electric clippers whirring, and contemplated this. You should be happy that you can say that, hey, I was sitting there watching them when they did all that. So I know I am. Tell my grandchildren when I get real old, you know, I was there when the Bulls won all them games, probably I'll say I went to a couple of games, you know. Yeah, remember those days when Michael Jordan was still playing at his peak? Remember when Rodman was the only guy in the league with multi-colored hair? Remember when they were on that legendary team together, Dennis, Michael, Scottie? That's how it's going to be, for everybody that was here when the Bulls was doing this. That's how it's going to be. Act Three, The Meaning of Basketball. I wonder if it would be possible to make up a more pretentious name for a section of a radio program, The Meaning of Basketball. The fact is, the meaning of basketball is whatever each player and each fan makes of it, right? Stay with me here, OK? Loving sports, I am arguing to you right now, is like any kind of love. It's idiosyncratic and there's no way to account for what happens to grab your imagination and your heart about a game. In this act of the show, we bring you a couple of stories from different parts of the country. And we begin right here in Chicago. I know that will be, at this point in the show, a tremendous surprise to you. We begin here in Chicago, an explanation of one particular pleasure of the game. There is no greater pleasure than being a Bulls hater in a Bulls-loving town. David Isaacson is a Chicago playwright, and he is not just any Bulls hater. He's a Bulls hater of the most reviled kind in Chicago. He is a fan of the Detroit Pistons. In 1988, '89, and '90, the Bulls lost the NBA playoffs to the Pistons, a team that most Chicagoans see as thuggish, dirty, and worst of all, whiney. How to describe the sweet, sweet pleasure of entering a drinking establishment full of established drinkers, and proudly letting out a roar whenever the diminutive Detroit guard Isiah Thomas scooped a layup high off the backboard into the basket, or Vinnie "The Microwave" Johnson would launch a shot with, oh, three of four opposing players hanging from his thick arms and legs, or Joe Dumars covering the great god Michael Jordan would, through fainting, decoying, and overplaying, manipulate MJ into the waiting arms and oh-so solid body of Bill Laimbeer. To let out a roar as those around me grumbled, all the time harboring grandiose notions that, in so roaring, I was courting a barroom beating at the hands of, say, those five beefy guys at the bar with a pitcher of Old Style, the identical number 23 red-and-white jerseys, and, shaved into their crew cuts Anthony Mason style, the letters B-U-L-L-S, respectively. To stand alone against a sea of popular opinion, to be associated with a great malevolent force, shady underground figures, the Detroit Pistons, this was a spectacular seduction. To be a Pistons fan in Chicago, like being a Navy fan at West Point, or a Dodgers fan in Manhattan in the old days, seemed heroic. I was Pancho Villa on a border raid, Bartleby the Scrivener telling his boss, I would prefer not to, Brando in the Wild One rebelling against, what do you got? It was the same contrary impulse, however, the thrill of being the lone fan, that turned my girlfriend against me. Accepted into an elite east coast graduate school, she suddenly found herself surrounded by elite east coast fans of the New York Knickerbockers. Though up to this point, her interest in the Bulls had consisted wholly in the observation that point guard B.J. Armstrong was so cute, and, in an almost obsessive curiosity, regarding that odd bald patch in the middle of center Bill Cartwright's beard. Her grad school experience turned her into a raving rooter for the team that I so proudly despised. In a world of Knicks lovers, she chose to be the lone fan of the Bulls. Watching games with her became an unsettling experience. When our teams would clash, I would catch her eyeing me strangely, as if contemplating which Bill Laimbeer thrown elbow or Rick Mahorn cheap shot I was complicit in, in what ways I, the bully by association, might have wronged those near and dear to her, and subsequently, what punishments or deprivations she might legitimately inflict on me in response. This year, as every one in the world now knows, the Bulls won 72 games and lost a mere 10, making them, numerically at least, the most successful team of all time. It is also the year I, without meaning to, traded in the great and noble pleasure of publicly hating the Bulls in every bar, tavern, and speak easy of this beer-swilling town for the rather common, tawdry pleasure of joining the masses in whooping up every Jordan jumper, Pippen put-back, and Kukoc [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. And why? Well, for one thing, three of my old Pistons have joined the current version of the Bulls. John "Spider" Salley, who can still block a shot with the best of them. James "Buddha" Edwards, who, at the age of 40, still successfully practices his specialty, the fade away chip shot from the paint. And of course, Dennis "The Worm" Rodman. I've always loved his sloppy relentless enthusiasm on the court. But what's won me over lately is his T-shirt collection. Recent slogans have included, "I'm not gay, but my boyfriend is," and "I don't mind straight people, as long as they act gay in public." But more than that, I think one can say that, for me, familiarity has bred respect. Most of these Bulls are my age or older. Jordan's my age, and as my body changes, as joints respond less readily, bruises take longer to heal, and hangovers get harder to cure, I have grown to appreciate MJ's ability to recreate himself. The mad dash fearless dunking of his youth has been replaced by safer, more adult practices. Watch as Michael becomes a post-up player. Watch his transformation into a master of the three-point heave. See Michael learn and perfect the unstoppable Larry Bird fade away. Facing the cameras for the gagillionth time, following a perfect evening spent revealing the tragic flaws of yet another squad of opponents who had been, until meeting the Bulls, flirting with respectability, Jordan, Pippen, and their teammates exude a pungent, delicious aura. Invincibility is, inevitably, sexy. These are Bodhisattvas, approaching Buddhahood, utterly at peace with themselves, and yet at the same time, striving mightily for the next level of enlightenment. Gone for me the rebel's glory. Gone the exalted status of an arch-antagonist. Gone the thrill of withstanding the Bulls fans contumely. Woe, woe is me. Go, go Bulls. David Isaacson is a Chicago playwright. And now we have for you this rap, part of which seems to be a burgeoning genre of music that perhaps you have not heard of, basketball stars doing raps, some of them, most of them, profoundly mediocre. This one from Seattle Sonics star Gary Payton. [SINGING] Living legal and large, GP's the man in charge. He's got game on you. Coming up as a youngster, the G had faith. I always pray to God that I make it one day. And now my dreams are alive. My mama used to tell me, you gotta strive and try to be the best that you can be to survive. Now I'm living legal and large, got a fat bank account and a bunch of credit cards. Making the opponents bow down on the floor. If you want to hum [UNINTELLIGIBLE], it's because I love the sport. Half the fans yelling for joy because I'm bouncing the ball on 'em like Shanaynay. They call me Payday. The big ball handler. Yeah, yeah, what you want. Slam dunk, hit a three. Talk a little junk. Huh. It's all good if you're feeling inferior, because I'm superior, much better than the average brother. Me and my crew sticks tight when we step in the clubs, we're not getting the [UNINTELLIGIBLE], right. Living legal and large, I'm the man in charge. Coming up, trophies, the strangest basketball dream of all, and more, in one minute, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And this week, as every week in our program, we have chosen a theme. We've invited a variety of writers and performers to take a whack at that theme. And this week is the Chicago Bulls. Let me get some music going here for this, when I say their names. This week is the Chicago Bulls. There we go. Doesn't that give a satisfying feeling to hear it? It's just one good reason to do a show about the Bulls, that you can play this song over and over. This week, as the Chicago Bull's careen past the winningest season in basketball history, through the NBA playoffs, our theme is basketball. And let us ask the question again, what is the meaning of sports? The answer, trophies. Well, looked at it in one way, that's the answer. You know, you compete, you try to win, you make it through the regular season, through the playoffs. The further you get, the bigger the trophy-- sort of. The problem is that trophies do not age well. The further you get from the triumphant moment when you win the trophy, the uglier the trophy becomes. Until, after decades, they just look like dusty, aging clutter, carrying no glory, no numinous power. Well, one of our producers, Nancy Updike, talked to a friend of hers, a big amateur basketball player, about all this. When I met up with my friend Mary to talk about basketball, she was having some trouble with her trophies. She'd just moved to a new apartment, and her new place was small, so small that a bunch of high school trophies would just dominate any room they were in. She had the trophies in a box in the living room, and we sat on the floor pulling out fake silver statuettes of girls in coolots, reaching ever upward, hopeful and fit, like in Soviet propaganda posters. So can't you see, like, feeling really tough walking home with something this big, especially if you hold it like this? Sure. Grab that baby by the base. Then she found one that was not like the others, sort of hard to understand, actually. Picture this, a thick slice of wood, sanded and shellacked and mounted with a miniature rim and backboard, and then, leaping across the front, a stick figure made of roofing nails going in for a slam dunk. Mary identified this as her 1978 girls varsity team trophy from Cardinal Dougherty High School. And the girls, she said, had not been pleased with the trophy at all. It's ugly, isn't it? Yeah, it is truly-- It's so damned-- We were all really unhappy. We wanted, like, a traditional-- Will you give it to me? [LAUGHS] Yes. I love it. I want it. We would rather have had, like, the also ugly but much more acceptable old version of trophies than those trophies. Oh, sure. Oh, sure. I mean, if you're a 13-year-old girl, you don't want to be walking home with that. You want that. Right, right. --that's a trophy. You want something that goes up high in the sky, not something that is a slice of a tree. You don't want a tree slice. A slice of a tree with a nail stick figure soldered together, doing the one thing that you know you'll never be able to do-- dunk. Was that something that you all discussed? Oh, yeah. And we also thought that that was the only reason we'd never been in the NBA. Luckily for us, we all thought, well, you know, we're really some of the best players on the face of the Earth. You know, when you're a 16-year-old girl who's playing at a tough Catholic league school, like you think, yeah, we're good enough. I'm just as good as Maurice Cheeks. And you know, the Doctor would like to play with me, Doctor J. And we could attribute our lack of success in the NBA to the fact that we were girls, soon to be women, who would never dunk. And that's all that was keeping us from it. Mary handed me the wood-sliced trophy. And when I reached to touch the stick figure, I realized that one of its feet was on a pivot, so I could actually make it go in for the dunk. Once I discovered this, it was impossible not to do it over and over and over. The trophy was completely hypnotizing, a disturbing artifact from an artistic period best forgotten. The art of the late '70s, especially in Catholic religion textbooks and churches and stuff was so ugly. Who knew there was even a genre of late-'70s Catholic textbook art worlds. You know, that whole scene. I'm afraid I've been so influenced by it, it's like, you know-- I need to walk away. --those little ink drawings that are just a little bit off on-purpose. You know what I mean? And the on-purposeness of it is just, like-- It makes you want to grit your teeth. --oh, help me. Yeah, right, right. You can always hear a Cat Stevens song playing in the background. As a kid, Mary played basketball mostly with her older brother, Daniel. The two of them roamed around the city together looking for pickup games whenever they could, all summer, every weekend, even at night, because the court down the street had lights. It was a way to get out of the house, to escape the chaos of 11 kids in a working class Irish family in a too-small house on the edge of Northeast Philadelphia. Basketball was a place of clear rules and gestures that always made sense. And home was a place where you could get hit for no reason, or find yourself still hungry at the end of a meal. Mary remembered being hungry a lot growing up, a fact always cheerfully denied by the nuns at school. The message was, you couldn't be hungry because your parents are saints. And they especially directed it to our family and all the other families that had a lot of kids in them, that our parents were saints because they worked so hard to provide for us. So I thought that I was just extraordinarily greedy that I would want to eat when I was hungry. I think that playing basketball was a way to say, you know, if I could use my body in this way, that got me status and attention and a certain amount of prestige, then my body was OK in a way, even though it was-- I mean, I was way too skinny when I was a kid. And it was cause for concern for the school nurse a couple times. And playing basketball was a way to say, you know, you're not going to have neural damage from being malnourished. You're just going to have these other minor malnourished problems. Another good thing about basketball was that it was cheap. Mary bought the family a rim and a basketball for their backyard when she was only seven or eight, using her first communion money, $65 in $5 increments from everyone in her huge family. The only equipment she really needed and could never afford were good shoes. She always had those supermarket checkout line shoes with the hard plastic soles that were completely embarrassing, of course, but also had no grippability. So she would be running down a court and go sliding and be called for traveling. So one year, she got up the courage to ask a girl down the block for her old shoes. Her name was Karen, and she had really nice Beta Bullets, high tops, white. And I wanted her sneakers because I knew she was getting new ones. And in our neighborhood, there is the practice of throwing your old sneakers up over the telephone wires when you're done with them. And most of them were hardly worn out at all. I mean, a lot of them, you could see that there was tread missing, but it's not like you had ripped through the top of them. And I'd asked her for them, and she said, yeah, that she would give them to me when she got her new ones. I thought that it was a little bit weird that I would ask somebody for their used shoes, but we had other clothes that were used from other people. And she was tough, and she kind of had this-- she seemed like she'd be the kind of person that could keep something like that to her and would know what it meant. And she did. She never told anybody, except, of course, the most important person that she shouldn't have told, her mother. And her mother got really upset and told her that she couldn't give them to me. And there they were, hanging up on the telephone wire, my sneakers. And I'm sure that her mom did that because she was afraid that if I came home with a pair of used sneakers that it would be insulting to my mother. I'm sure that they all had this understanding of themselves, like you don't insult one of your peers by giving their kids your crappy shoes even though they're better than the crappy shoes that you bought for them. But there were always really beautiful sneakers hanging up on the wires, and there was no way to get them, no way at all. They just floated up there. And you know what? I think that's when I decided that platonic idealism was true. There really was a perfect thing that I would never experience, at least while I played in that Catholic league. And only I could see them for what they were. They only saw worn-out tread. I saw a season of unforeseen high statistics. We talked for two hours about basketball. And we kept returning to the dunk, that special thing boys can do and girls can't. And the cruelty of the dunk on that wood-sliced trophy, a dunk by a stick figure made of nails, driving home their 18-year-old sense of frustration. They could be the best ball handlers, the best guards, and it didn't matter worth a damn because they couldn't dunk. All of that captured forever in the last trophy most of them would ever receive. I think it was really kind of thoughtless in the way that thoughtless things can sometimes have a really nasty edge to them. And we had a woman on our team who was African-American who was, like 6'3, and she couldn't dunk the ball. You know what I mean? It was like there was no one that we knew who could dunk the ball, not a single woman that we knew. And we knew some tall women. We knew women who were in college. I mean, I used to have a dream, a recurring dream that I dunked the ball. What were the circumstances? I was on the baseline. I'm so glad you asked. I was in the same position all the time. And it wasn't like kinds of dunks that you see in real life, like that even the best players can do. This was a spectacular dunk, because I didn't just get my hands up over the rim, I sailed over the rim with my feet and got above the basket and just slammed the ball down through the thing. My whole body was above the rim. Wow. And stayed inbounds the whole time. Mary Conway, talking with our own Nancy Updike. You know, we were going to play the Cat Stevens here as a joke, but it sounds really good. [LAUGHS] You know, because she mentions Cat Stevens in the piece. We don't have time to actually play it, because we have another appointment. And our appointment is with-- This is a rap song by Shaquille O'Neal of the Orlando Magic, part of our continuing survey over the course of this radio program of rap stars, basketball stars. Act Four, Basketball and Commerce. OK, sure, Michael Jordan has his multimillion dollar Nike and Gatorade endorsements. Dennis Rodman has a national bestselling book, a McDonald's deal. In contrast, the Scottie Pippen Dodge store on Western Avenue in Chicago is, I will argue, the most modest product endorsement in the NBA. It's a car dealership selling Intrepids and Neons and Dodge 4x4s. And right now, during the playoffs, the showrooms are filled with balloons and basketball players made out of balloons. The windows are painted with the words "Playoff Payoff." But mostly, it looks like any other Dodge dealership, a little rundown, with posters of Scottie and Bulls insignias here and there. I figured I should have a real Bulls fan with me when I visited, so I brought Beau O'Reilly, a Chicago playwright and musician and actor who's been on our program here a few times, and a Scottie Pippen fan. He pressed the owner of the dealership, Nick Farschi, for details about Pippen. But really, what's the guy going to say? Probably one of the nicest people you ever get to meet. He seems publicly to be a very soft-spoken person, very kind of quiet person usually. That's exactly how he is. He's real soft-spoken. He hardly ever gets mad. And when he does get mad, then you'll know. What does he drive? I think he owns a Porsche, and a Mercedes, and a Land Rover. Occasionally he drives a conversion van in the summertime. Note that only the last of these, the conversion van, can actually be purchased at the Scottie Pippen Dodge store. When offered a chance to lie and push some Dodge product, owner Nick Farschi actually seemed to answer our questions honestly, to his credit. He admitted that Scottie only drops in once every couple months, that Scottie is paid a fee for the use of his name, and the business has increased a total of 10% or 15% since they put Scottie's name above the door. People do come in hoping to meet Scottie, or simply to get near the Scottie Pippen magic. And Nick Farschi said that, during 1994, when Scottie had a bad year on the court, walked out of a game with 1.8 seconds left, was arrested for carrying an illegal gun, was accused of domestic violence, well, sales did suffer. The business slowed down a little bit. People were nervous. It was almost like a disaster [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Live by the celebrity endorsement, die by the celebrity endorsement. And there is, after all, something a little strange about buying a car from a dealership whose spokesman can sometimes be a bully on the basketball court. I mean, would you want the salesman to knock you around the way that Scottie hurls himself at, say, the New York Knicks. Mr. Farschi says this question misses the point. When people come in here, they're not in competition with Scottie, so that's-- When they come in here and buy a car from him, they're on Scottie's team. And one way the Scottie Pippen Dodge store makes you feel like you are on Scottie's team is that they let you visit his private office, built specially on the premises, with glass windows looking out onto the showroom. Mr. Farschi was kind enough to open it up for Beau and I. The office is paneled with dark, expensive-looking wood. It's much more luxurious than Mr. Farschi's office, though it's clear from the moment you enter that no one does any work here. There are no papers, no clutter. On the wall are a few not-terribly significant mementos, a picture with the '93 Olympic Dream Team, a license plate with Scottie's number, 33, on it. There's a mini refrigerator, though Beau and I didn't have the nerve to look inside. Beau did take a peek at the private bathroom and saw Scottie's toilet. The most personal positions in the office are a picture of Scottie's dogs, and some amusements. What's the parrot? That's just a toy. It's just a toy that he plays with when he's here. When he's here, usually he shoots hoops on the wall, and he practices. He shoots like a little Nerf basketball? Yeah. But how does he play with the parrot? What does it do? It just repeats everything around that you say. Oh. [LAUGHS] Well, that's convenient. Can we get it to talk to us? Sure. Let's try it. Try it. You push the button? Now just say hello. Hello, here we are at the Scottie Pippen's store. Hello, here we are at Scottie Pippen-- Hello, here we are at Scottie Pippen. Ah, yep, yep. We're here in Scottie Pippen's office at the Scottie Pippen store. We're here in Scottie Pippen's office. Ha, that's great. Ha, ha, ha, ha. I can see him playing with that all day. Well, here, we'll leave a message for Scottie. Well, here, we'll leave a message for Scot-- Thanks Scottie, for letting us visit you here in your office here at the Scottie Pippen store. Mr. Farschi guesses that if Scottie does well and the Bulls win the NBA Finals, it could mean as many as 15 or 20 extra Dodge vans, trucks, and cars sold from this store. If the Scottie Pippen Dodge store is the most understated Bulls-related business, in this, our fair city, with no TV ads, barely any Bulls hype, the most garish manifestation of the merchandising of basketball is downtown on Michigan Avenue, a combination shoe store and museum called Niketown. Niketown is the size of a small department store, reportedly grosses $2.5 million in sales each week. Inside, there are statues of athletes in midair, a 20-foot banner of Michael Jordan with a quote from William Blake underneath, display cases with sports memorabilia, slogans everywhere, like "Play to Win," "Total Body Conditioning," "Test Your Faith," on long banners hung in a mock socialist, WPA style. When you go inside Niketown, there are 18 separate pavilions, each with its own kind of sight and sound environment, like a real basketball court floor, and the sounds of squeaking sneakers on hardwood in the area that sells basketball stuff, the sound of tennis balls being hit in another area where they sell tennis stuff. As the writer, Andrew Levy, points out-- it's from a piece he wrote-- "The buying of goods invokes a sequence of events and images that make the purchase itself playful. Items move from the fourth-floor storeroom to the cashier stations through clear plastic tubes rimmed with green neon that suggest, as they are meant to, the cartoon future of the Jetsons. The direct purchase of goods is designed to appear to be an afterthought. The retail areas are cramped compared to the open atriums designed for the display of art and statuary. And the store's design requires every entering customer to be distracted by considerable aesthetics before reaching any locale where Nike items can actually be purchased. There are whimsical, anarchic features everywhere in Niketown. Tropical fish swim in a 22-foot, 1,000-gallon tank behind the hiking shoe display. A bank of nine television screens embedded beneath the floor nearby flashes images of glimmering swimming pools and waterfalls. It is seductive and very effective at creating sales." [SINGING] I've been down to Niketown. I've been down to Niketown. I want to shake this angst I found when I was down in Niketown, down in Niketown. I felt so cyberpunk as I was walking down the hall. They got the [? Trial de Turin ?] in the toilet stall. I got the semiotic cross-training homesick blues. Hey buddy, is there somewhere quite where I can focus on some shoes? Now, what is that? Is that a talisman or a artifact of grammatology of some kind? Is that a subject, object, dislo-- Oh, it's a shoe? No, I'm sorry. I'm just so old that I get bewildered and stuff with all this gestalten you've got whizzing around here. Say, what-- Just, would you remind me what a shoe is again? Is it some kind of a-- Is it a phoneme? Is it a penumbra? Is that a-- Is that the shoe itself, or is that the idea of shoe? I nearly drowned in Niketown. I nearly drowned in Niketown. I just can't shake this angst I found when I was down in Niketown, down in Niketown. The song styling of Jewboy Cain, aka Mr. Jeff Dorchen. Act Five, One More Dream. This dream was probably the biggest dream in my life as far as changing the way I was. We began this hour with dreams about the Bulls. And the most intense dream that anybody came to us with about the Bulls came from a guy named Brett Grossman. In his dream, Michael Jordan appears both as Brett's dead father and as Christ, healing and taking away pain. Brett says that he's had other dreams where Michael Jordan is crucified on a cross made of baseball bats. But in this dream, the one that changed his life, there are kind of two big scenes. One is this traumatic event in Brett's life, where his father died when he was a kid, which he feels a lot of pain about. And the other is this scene where there's a huge coliseum, like a Roman coliseum, and in the middle there's a basketball court, and there's Michael Jordan on the court alone, trying to make a shot, trying to jump and lift off the ground. And I'm feeling like Michael Jordan, something is grabbing him, pulling him down. And he's just, with all his strength, he's just jumping as high as he can. And it's like there's this pressure from below that's just ripping on him, pulling him down. And he's just suspended in there, as if his will and the pressure of the world and the gravity are at complete odds and smashing against each other, and his body is just ripping apart. And the whole entire crowd erupts. Everyone's screaming, going crazy. But it's this maniacal-- It's like we're all watching someone being killed. And every time the ball dribbles, my pain becomes a little less, and Michael Jordan is just grimacing. And no one's going to help him, and I'm sitting there feeling like my pain is becoming less and then lessening. And there was all this pain that Michael Jordan had absorbed for me. And somehow, Michael Jordan, though, had, for this one second, basically neutralized a pain that I had felt my whole life, and this pain with my father, and a pain of just your existence, of being alone. And for this one second, I could feel it. It was the first time in my life that I ever-- and I woke up from the dream-- I ever realized that that's a possibility, that pain is something that you don't necessarily need to feel all the time to understand it. Why Michael Jordan? If you're going to have a dream like this, why Michael Jordan? Because there's thing, there's Michael Jordan, and you see it in his eyes. And it happened during the Miami series of this year. I don't know how it is, but his eyes turn inward. He becomes very serious and solemn. And you feel that he is taking everyone on the team and just taking all their faults, all their backaches, all their problems, all their ego trips, and he's cushioning them for them. He's saying, "Look, I'm Michael Jordan, I'm going to win the game, you know that, stop. Just let it all loose and we're going to win the game." And I mean, I'll be at home watching the game on my chair, with my bottle of water, going crazy. And I see Michael's eyes and suddenly it's like, OK, I can relax, he's going to win it for me. And that feeling, it's crazy, but that feeling is something that I think you get from a god, and you get that from, whether false or not, you get that from a religion and an idol. That here's somebody who's going to solve my problems and heal my pain. Heal my pain and take away the indecision. There's nothing to worry about, because he's going to win the game. Well, hopefully, we Chicagoans will get to see that look in Michael Jordan's eyes again soon. Our program was produced by Peter Clowney and myself, with Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and Dolores Wilber. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. If you would like a copy of this program, it is only $10. You can call us at WBEZ. That phone number, 312-832-3380, again, 312-832-3380. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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There's a gap between theory and practice, and it's an annoying gap. Michael was learning how to box. His punches had some power. He was sparring in these little matches. He was feeling pretty tough. He was feeling really tough, actually. And then, one night, he's walking home on a deserted street and somebody picks a fight with him. Which in a way is exactly what he wanted. When you're learning to fight, you kind of dream that happening. Because your moment will come. And I certainly thought that I was bad ass. And this guy wanted to mess with me. He was trying to mug me. He was trying to beat me up. I don't know what he was trying to do. And what he's saying to you? Oh, he's asking me if I have any money. He's mad at me because I'm not talking to him. He's asking me if I'm scared. And he kept grabbing me. And I was certainly getting kind of freaked out, because there wasn't anybody else around. And the street was really dark. Was he a big guy? He was bigger than I was. And I turned around, and I really kind of intended to hit him. I wanted to hit him. But I just wasn't prepared. So I slapped him. And it wasn't one of those kind of "I challenge you to a duel" slaps. It was big. It was just a big, girly slap. He looked really surprised. His eyes were really wide open like he-- I don't think that either one of us could believe that I'd actually slapped him. And I slapped him again. There was everything that his training to do in a real fight. And then there was what really happened. There was a gap between theory and practice. Heather was eight years old, on a school trip, on the bus, and she had to pee, badly. And the bus get stuck in traffic. Here's how she remembers it now that she's an adult. She says that her eight-year-old brain came up with a theory. I devised a plan because my little bladder was about to give out. And I decided that I was in the middle of the bus. I had a seat to myself. I thought I can pee really quietly, just kind of inch over my seat and go to the bathroom and no one will ever know. Inch over my seat, you mean like pee on the floor? Like pee on the floor. Like just kind of very quietly pee on the floor. No one will know. That was the theory. You may be able to guess how this worked out in practice. So I inched forward in my seat and I peed. So that's fine. Right. It's working. The kids, the obnoxious boys, they're yelling at each other. The girls are talking, gossiping, whatever. It's actually working. I even felt a little clever. But then the bus lurches forward. I hadn't realized that the pee wouldn't stay put. That when the bus lurched forward, the pee would roll backwards. And all of a sudden, in the back of the bus, I hear, "It's pee!" All hell breaks loose on the bus. Everybody started leaping around the bus, all known bus rules were off. You didn't have to sit still anymore. You didn't have to talk quietly to your neighbor. You could scream. You could leap over the seats. And the only kid that didn't move, was me, which I realize now is what incriminated me. The whole thing pretty much cemented her position at the bottom of the social hierarchy in elementary school for a few years. Kids called her the Peeer, Peezilla. They'd leave yellow crayons for her, sitting on her desk. From the time that we're very young, so much of our life is just making a guess at how things are going to come out-- making a little theory, taking our shot, and then living with the reality of what we've done. It happens in our personal lives. It happens in every kind of group decision. Somebody has a theory about what it will accomplish to invade Iraq, or to cut taxes, or to make a movie starring Ben Affleck and JLo, together as hit men. And they got their theory, they take their shot, they wait for the results. Today on our show, the annoying gap that results. The annoying gap between theory and practice. We have three case examples for you. Act One, Rock, Paper, Computer. Jack Hitt in that act explains the alarming difference between theory and practice when it comes to these new-fangled computerized voting machines. Act Two, Detroit Is in the House. An idealistic guy who's done lots of community work ends up representing for Detroit, in the state legislature, where he's witnessing the daily reality of democracy up close, for the first time. Act Three, Zero Divided by Zero Is Still Zero, What happens if you're poor and do everything right, all your budgeting, all your choices? Are you actually any better off? Stay with us. Act One, Rock, Paper, Computer. Since the Florida chad nightmares back in 2000, a lot of communities around the country have been speeding up their purchase of new computerized touch-screen voting machines. These are designed to streamline the process of counting votes. They're designed to eliminate potential human error. That's the theory anyway. Jack Hitt explains how it works out in practice. With the bright clean world of touch-screen voting booths coming to so many precincts in America these days, I felt a little nostalgic walking into my local firehouse recently to vote for my mayor. It was to say the least, quaint. I brought along my two daughters. And our local alderwoman, Alfreda Edwards, was there to say good morning. Her regular opponent, Charlie Pillsbury, shook our hands too. The poll workers, about three or four of them, made a grand fuss signing me in. There were poll watchers there as well, the folks from the opposing parties, who ensure that the process moves along honestly. We all drank coffee and chatted about the raging issue in our neighborhood, the location of a new public school. Then a precinct captain pointed me to the booth. And I let my girls plink down the tiny levers. And after fighting about just who got to pull the big red handle, I won. We said goodbye to everybody and left. But this old world is soon to pass. Sure, there will still be poll workers. But the touch-screen voting booths will eliminate a lot of what those folks did. Instead of people running around with pieces of paper, computers will talk by modem and produce the vote totals. It's madness. It's madness. That's Jim March. He's a professional lobbyist by day in California. And he's been fretting a lot about the software running on these machines. Only three companies make them. And recently the biggest one of them, Diebold, accidentally left its supposedly secure voting software sitting on its web site, for anyone to download. And when people like Jim, who knows computers, looked at it, they were alarmed at how easy it would be to hack in and cause some real trouble. Literally alter votes, alter passwords, alter every single aspect of the file without a password of your own required and without leaving an audit trail as to what you're doing. OK. Well, I have a computer in front of me. And I have the software, which I've downloaded from a public access site. So let's rig an election, Jim. Absolutely. Let's start by running-- Jim's in California. I'm in Connecticut on a friend's PC. The first thing Jim has me do is open Diebold's software called Global Election Management Systems or GEMS and go to where the password is stored. We peel the password off like a piece of scotch tape and replace it with our own. OK. It asked me for a password. Yup. Under password, put in-- well, pick one. Let's see. How about D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y? OK. OK. And hit OK. To demonstrate how this works, we don't hack into a real election. Instead, Jim gives me some old voter data that was part of the primary for the California governor's race in 2002. Essentially what I have in front of me is what a hacker would see if he got inside the system on voting day. Now go to the Slow Primary 2002. Yeah. Open it. And put in the same password that you put in for Jack, which is democracy. Wow. You're in. And then we change vote totals, which was no more difficult than just typing in different numbers over the old ones. Of course, you might think the system would track such changes and they could be discovered. But then Jim shows me how to clean up my trail and make my escape. He takes me to the audit log, a spreadsheet detailing every change made to the database, every instance when someone has logged in with the date and time, down to the very second of each command. I can see all the history of what's happened here, including my own tampering, all the keystrokes I just made. Jim has me drag the mouse down the page and highlight most of this history. All that's now black, correct? Umm, yes. Good. Hit the delete key. Yeah. There it went. Wow. Oh yeah. It's glorious. Do you understand? Even though you don't know what the proper password for the file is, you can restore it to its original condition and hide your traces. For months this software has been making the rounds on the internet, a kind of play toy for hackers. Especially since last July, when a Johns Hopkins University report on Diebold software scoffed that protections were, quote "far below the most minimal security standards." And went on to say that any insider, a poll worker, a Diebold software designer, or even, quote "a janitor" would be able to untraceably tamper with election results. In August, hackers started passing around a huge file, allegedly a collection of 13,000 pages of internal Diebold people emails written by its own employees that confirm just how easily penetrated the corporate software is. From the beginning, Diebold has been trying to stop all this. First, they issued a point-by-point rebuttal to the Johns Hopkins report. And it said that the software being passed around the internet by people like Jim is not the version they currently use in their machines. Diebold hasn't talked directly to the press much about all this and didn't return my phone calls either. Most recently, Diebold started issuing cease and desist orders to all the internet users posting these files. They claimed to own the copyright on the 13,000 emails, while at the same time insisting that the documents may not be authentic. All of this got seriously complicated on Halloween when a second touch-screen voting company, Sequoia, had to admit that they too had left an unprotected copy of their voting software on the internet. I called one of the country's foremost specialists on just such catastrophes, Rebecca Mercuri, the president of Notable Software, a computer security firm, and now a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. I wanted to find out just how much danger we're in and if there's some way to stop people from hacking in and changing votes during a real election. I don't know and quite frankly I don't care. That's not the issue. Not the issue? Hacking into voting software when step-by-step instructions to do what Jim showed me are posted on the internet? There's a lot of hullabaloo, but in my opinion that was not as big a deal as has been made out about it in the writings that I've seen. It's not. For Mercuri, the hacking angle is the least of it. The problem is far more fundamental. The problem is that current touch-screen technology, even when it works perfectly, can't do one of the most basic things the old analog machines did. It can't show you proof that your vote was counted accurately. To understand why this would be difficult for a computer, you have to remember that voting machines must accomplish two slightly opposing things. First, they have to give people a way to vote without anyone finding out who they voted for. In other words, they have to provide total anonymity. But they also have to provide what is known in the voting machine business as auditability. That means if there were to be a recount, there's got to be some kind of paper trail to ensure the votes were counted correctly. Computers are not really very good at doing anonymous things that are also accurately audited. When we do an audit in the computer, we record every single action and transaction that goes along. If someone recorded down the voters in the sequence in which they went in, that would reveal how they voted. And that becomes a problem in creating the voting system. The old voting system solved this problem in a graceful, analog way. Punch card technology literally left an anonymous paper trail, the punch card ballots. But what about those lever machines? They're just giant clicking odometers. You can't recount those votes. Are they any different in that way from the computer technology? To put it simply, it's a vast world of difference. With the lever machine, you can open it up. And you can actually see the gears and levers and you can see that they're all connected together. And then you can test it out and make sure that it works properly. And you can see whether it's working properly. You can see it visually with your eyes. When we open up these electronic voting machines, even if they have all the buttons in the right place on the front, when you open them up inside, there's nothing to see. Strangely, it was the low techness of the lever machine that made it safe. Poll workers understood how they worked. And one of the things the poll watchers, the two representatives from the different parties, typically did at the beginning of a voting day was look inside to see if there had been any tampering. And then easily test to see that a vote goes to the right candidate. Then they'd wind back the machine to zero, and the voting day would begin. Now they're not allowed to do this. They can't really check to see if the machines work because they no longer understand what the machines do. The computer companies do the checking for them, and provide them with a list of instructions explaining how to turn the machines on. The poll workers have no choice but to trust the company. The thing about these new machines is all it is, is a procedure. And all you can say is that you followed the procedure properly. What you're saying is that we have the worst of both worlds. We have no paper and no way of looking at the system that's operating it. Right. Exactly. Somehow, it gets worse. Even if we wanted to train Republican and Democratic poll workers in basic software testing so they could do what they used to do, we're no longer allowed to. The way these machines are installed, they're protected like Coca-Cola. It's a trade secret law, which says that no one's allowed to find out what's inside of them. And in fact if somebody reveals it, they'll be convicted of a felony because they're purchased under a secret agreement. It's purchased with a trade secret protection on it. They're tested in secret. And I know that all the election officials always say, well, it was tested and it was certified. Well, all that's a secret too. And so even if we want questions about how was it was tested, how it was certified, we can't find out. How did we manage to privatize the most public thing we do in this democracy? It's the United States. What do you expect? It's capitalism. Let's review. Our new and improved voting system has no way to do a recount and no way to look at the machines to see if they're working properly. So is there a solution to our streamlined, digital, paperless vote? Paper. That's it. Once again? Paper. For years, Rebecca Mercuri has been going around with her revolutionary new idea, a touch-screen that generates a piece of paper. The voter can look at it to confirm the vote was registered correctly before it drops into an old-fashioned ballot box. Then if there were a dispute, anything from a machine malfunction to a suspected hacker, we could gather up the paper and do a recount. But the industry says it can't be done. One of the things that they say is that the paper ballots will jam in the printers. And I really like that excuse since one of the companies, Diebold, makes the vast majority or a huge number of the ATMs in this country. And, in fact, none of those seem to have any problems with paper jamming. The paper is just flopping out, quite fine. Also when we come to the lottery tickets, gee, we have no problems with this jamming, even on those super lotteries where you got $100 million at stake. There might be long lines at the lottery ticket machine. But we don't hear about, oh, the paper jammed and we were unable to get our lottery ticket. I don't know anybody who's ever said that. This idea that we need to computerize everything and get away from paper is in no other place in the whole industry other than with voting machines. And in the thing that should be most critical to our democracy. Why would they not want to do that? Well, here's my theory. They looked at what happened in Florida. They saw a lot of paper. They saw a lot of people getting into a lot of hot water because of the way the election was conducted. And the last thing that an election official wants to have is a whole bunch of TV cameras and yelling people camped out on their front steps saying, count the votes, don't count the votes. And what did you do with your election? And so, if you make it impossible to recount the votes, then you're not going to have that problem, are you? Avoiding scandal has already led to some strange events, one of which Mercuri participated in. In 2002, she was asked to investigate a local election where everyone agreed that the numbers for one candidate were way off. It happened of course in Florida. This guy was a very popular former mayor who was just getting back into politics one last time. And really, everybody knew him. And even if I had any doubts before I started getting involved with this case, when you walked down the street. people would come up to this guy and come up and shake his hand. She didn't think it was vote tampering or hanging chads or anything. She just thought that maybe the machine was malfunctioning. All she wanted to do something that not so long ago was pretty commonplace. We just wanted to wind it back to where you could cast board votes and see if it was recording them all correctly. And they wouldn't let us do that. Why? Because it was proprietary. What was proprietary about just practicing the vote again? They said we weren't allowed to do that. It was proprietary. This is crazy. Tell me about it. It was proprietary. But you're not asking to look at the code. You're just asking to like-- No, I wasn't asking to look at the code. I just wanted to do a simple test of the machine. Wow. Would you accept a car if they told you that you could test drive it by only making right turns? I mean that's ridiculous. I don't think so. But one other thing further than that, even if it were possible to create the world's perfect voting machine that was a piece of equipment and it worked perfectly and it recorded every single vote and tabulated them correctly, every single time, I think that it is contrary to the spirit of democracy for us to trust that. Oh yes, the spirit of democracy, the ghost in the machine. In other words, all that busyness at the local firehouse, Alfreda and Charlie out on the sidewalk, the poll watchers inside with their chatter, trading gossip, the tallies carefully noted, or the box of paper ballots carried off under lock and key. Sure, all of that can be replaced by software modems. But it assumes that voting is really just another transaction, like buying a book off the internet, which is where we're headed. Nowadays, no one sells the old mechanical lever booths anymore, too low tech. And with the punch cards disgraced in Florida, more and more precincts are turning to touch-screen. In 2002, President Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act, which includes $700 million to replace punch card and lever voting equipment. Most recently, the city of Boston and the entire state of Maryland have become Diebold's newest customers, buying into the dream of touch-screen efficiency. So clean, so uncluttered, and free of controversy. Back when America first opened for business, Europeans were stunned that any country would center its founding on a piece of paper, the Constitution. They thought we were crazy. We had no monarchy, no direct authority from God, no divine right of kings. We put our faith in a flimsy piece of paper, because after all the noise dies down, that's all a democracy really is. Jack Hitt in New Haven. In elections this past week, there were new controversies for Diebold. Officials in California are saying that thousands of people may have cast their votes on software that hadn't been certified by the state, as required by California law. And some touch-screens failed in Maryland, prompting a lawsuit by Republicans. Coming up, more theory and practice. For instance, in theory you want to give $200 million to public radio so you donate to a very fine company, very fine news organization called National Public Radio in Washington, DC, without ever realizing that there is an equally worthy outfit called Public Radio International that also puts out some very fine programs, could use a little cash. But that was your theory. In practice, we actually won't hear about this at all in the second half of the show, which you'll hear in one minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, remember the name, when our program continues. This is 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, the annoying gap between theory and practice. We have stories of people coming face to face with that gap. And we are at act two of our program. Act Two, Detroit in the House. Ten months ago, a political newcomer was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives, not because he had any childhood dreams of being a politician or because he really loved the spotlight or because he wanted power of any sort actually. He just had some ideas about how to make things better in his community, from experience working in the community, plus a masters's degree in public policy, and a law degree. The voters agreed that his ideas were the best. They sent him off to the government to make those ideas happen. And that pretty much was when theory and practice started to diverge. Alex Blumberg spent three days with freshman state representative, Steve Tobocman. Here are other reasons Steve Tobocman shouldn't be in office. His district is 80% minority, but he's white. At the time of his campaign, he didn't have any actual experience in politics and he was up against a two-term incumbent. And he ran in the most old fashioned way possible, no radio or TV ads, no special interest money. He went out and knocked on doors, every single day for four months. And you'd spend so many hours knocking. I mean your knuckles would be raw. You knees would hurt. Your hands would hurt. It's a tremendous weight loss program. I actually to maximize, and this is a little embarassing, but to maximize the number of doors I could knock on, I would run, I would literally sprint between the houses to save time. I literally would sprint between houses. So one day I was sprinting down the street and I kind of jogged into this guy's backyard. And he's like, "Are you OK. Are you OK?" And I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, I see a white guy running in this neighborhood. I figured he was under attack or something like that." Steve's district is a poor inner city section of Detroit. A city's whose problems are legendary, of course. It has the nation's highest infant mortality rate, lost half its population since 1950. And to give you an idea of the size of its middle class, the total number of Starbucks in this the 10th largest city in the country, three. 13 fewer than at O'Hare Airport. Steve had been trying to fix Detroit's problems for years in various jobs with various neighborhood economic development groups. Mostly he fought slow, bureaucratic battles to get abandoned buildings either torn down or fixed up. He can tell you all sorts of modest specific ways that government could help improve things by streamlining the way federal block grants are distributed for example or selling condemned properties to community and church groups for a dollar or to groups to rehab and sell at a discount to low income families. But these ideas usually went nowhere. I mean Steve would come home for years and be frustrated, like you're working, you're working, you're working, and it seems like a good idea. And you can't get anything done about it. This is Steve's wife, Sharon. She says that all this changed during a dinner Steve had with a mentor of his from grad school. Basically he said, stop complaining and do more. Like if what's making it hard are a level of politicians or a level of bureaucracy, then get inside that bureaucracy and change that bureaucracy. And he came home and said, "I think I need to run for office. What do you think about that?" And I was like, oh [BLEEP]. I always thought, well you run for office and that's really about ego and it's very self-serving. And somehow that conversation was different because this was a view that spoke to me in terms of making a difference. So in other words, it made you think by becoming a politician you could actually do some good. That was the thought. And every day you try and see if that's indeed the case. If you've ever wondered what the hell politicians do all day, I can say that if Steve Tobocman's any indication, a lot more than you do, pal. His workday begins at 7:00 or 8:00 AM. And this one includes among other things, a very dull hour plus tour of a social service facility, a 15-minute phone call with an Arab American constituent who believes her teenage son is being discriminated against in school, at the end of which Steve promises to call the principal. And what would be a solution in your mind to the problem? There's a lunch meeting with a business constituent who wants a favor, a staff meeting, some fund raising calls, and then in the evening, a two-hour town meeting in a high school gymnasium on the subject of insurance redlining. I just tried to buy a brand new car. An angry crowd of 20 to 30 Detroit home and car owners complains about insurance rates that are almost 50% higher than rates right across the border in the suburbs. The lowest I could get per month for insurance was $365 a month. The insurance would have been more than my car loan. Steve offers some suggestions. And one middle-aged Hispanic man, in a black satin varsity jacket and a baseball hat, grabs Steve by the arm and says, "We've never heard anyone talk so clearly about this before. You are the one who can help us. You are the light and we will follow you." You are the light. And we follow you. Steve gets home at about 10:00 PM. You are the light to me because I think there's treasure in every single time-- And now it's 7:00 AM the next morning. And though it's still dark outside, the light is up and driving to Lansing, the state capitol, in his blue Saturn station wagon, where at least in theory he'll be helping the people he met last night. The problem of course is that Steve works with 110 other Representatives and they're all driving up from their own town meetings, where their own constituents have been demanding action on their own quite different grievances. Getting elected may give you a slightly louder voice, but it also sticks you into a much noisier crowd, the majority of whom couldn't care less about redlining or community development or frankly, the entire city of Detroit. And you don't care about their issues either. In fact, being a legislator involves spending a lot of time dealing with issues you have absolutely no interest in. Sometimes though, the issues you care least about can end up altering the course of your political career, issues with names like the Michigan Controlled Shareowner statute. In the car on the way to Lansing, Steve tells me the story. I didn't know about it. And most people didn't know about it. Basically it was adopted in the mid-'80s to prevent hostile takeovers of Michigan companies, companies based in Michigan. And-- Now as a legislator facing a bill you don't care that much about, you have two choices. You can A, assume someone in your party has looked at the issue thoroughly and vote how that person tells you to. Or B, you can do all the research yourself and come to an independent position based entirely on your own principles and convictions. No one does B. Well, except for freshman legislators. When I first got to the legislature, I think every vote, I used to sit at my desk on the floor and as every issue came up, I would study it and get as much information as possible before casting my vote. Do you think that like of the bills that the sort of people vote on, do you think that most of the people who are voting for the bill actually understand how it will impact once it's implemented? I think that you have a general gist of what the bill is trying to do. But in terms of understanding the specifics and that kind of thing and being able to articulate a detailed analysis, I think that it's virtually impossible. So just a month or two into his new job, Steve found himself reading up on the Michigan Controlled Shareowner statute. which had come before the legislature at the urging of the Todman Group, a private mall development company based in Michigan and owned by the Todman family. They were trying to fight off a takeover by an even bigger mall development company called the Simon Group and they needed a loophole closed in the law to do that. After a couple late nights of research, Steve decided the Todmans were right. And he agreed to co-sponsor a bill fixing the loophole. And that's when all hell broke loose. There were probably $2 billion at stake. The Todmans and the Simon Group had each hired their own army of lobbyists. All of a sudden there were a 100 or 200 people at committee meetings where usually they're only 20 or 30. Everyone took sides, business groups, unions, and of course, Steve's own party. The Democratic leadership approached him one day and told him to his horror that he was the only Democrat who had agreed to support the bill. Not only that, the Democrats were planning to run TV ads attacking the Todman supporters as tools of big business. And then came a pivotal caucus meeting, a closed door strategy session where the whole party discusses upcoming policies and positions. There's one point in caucus where about five or six people have just blasted this bill. And used all of the sort of hyperbolic arguments that everybody had used against this bill, that the Todman family had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republicans and why should we be doing their business in the legislature? And this was based solely on campaign contributions. And I'm sitting there as a freshman thinking, man, do I look bad right now. And I'm going to look even worse when there's one Democratic vote on the floor. I mean boy, this is going to be embarrassing. So basically, finally I'm about the seventh speaker. And at that point probably more out of fear than anything else, I get up and begin to talk about the bill. Steve's colleagues still mention that speech to him. It was the speech of his young political career. He talked about what the bill would do to protect Michigan businesses and workers. He talked about jobs. He talked about Compuware, the big company owned by Peter Karmanos, that had just built a huge high rise in downtown Detroit. I got very passionate. And I started talking about Mr. Karmanos's investment in Compuware revitalizing the city of Detroit. And should Microsoft come and take over Compuware that we knew those jobs were going to leave. And downtown Detroit would be vacant. And all these horrible things would happen. And the tone of my voice rose. The passion in my voice rose. And we went out onto the floor and had the vote. And 22 of my 47 colleagues ended up voting with me. And as a result, it overwhelmingly passed the House. And then because of that kind of support, it passed through on the Senate. And last week, the governor signed the bill into law. And that when I think about what caused that much emotion, I certainly don't think it was the Michigan Controlled Shares statute. I think it was more the fear of being the lone vote for the horrible Todman bill. The Todman bill earned Steve a reputation as something of a rainmaker on the other side of the aisle. And the Republicans who were in charge of getting the bill signed into law were so grateful, they've actually helped Steve move some of his own legislation. But what's funny is that this vote, a vote that enhanced his political standing in his own party, gained him valuable allies on the other side of the aisle, not to mention brought about a positive change in the law, is a vote that he wouldn't have cast today. Steve no longer studies every bill that crosses his desk. He uses his time talking to colleagues, enlisting support for his own issues. If the Todman bill came before him today, he would have listened to his party, not learned anything about it, and voted against it. The House will come to order. I'd ask all members to take their seats. On the huge floor of the Michigan House of Representatives, nobody is coming to order. The 110 lawmakers, 63 Republicans and 47 Democrats, continue to mill around and cluster in small groups. There's a big fight brewing today over two bills, Senate Bill 252 and Senate Bill 560, both of which do essentially the same thing, which is impose fees on anyone who discharges pollution into the water. One of the bills deals with groundwater, the other rivers and lakes. In any event, in both of them, the more pollution you discharge, the higher your fee. For small organizations like a day camp with a septic system or a small veterinary office, the fees are in the hundreds of dollars. For large entities like the Ford Motor Company or the City of Grand Rapids, they can climb into the tens of thousands of dollars. The idea is that the bills will encourage everyone to pollute less because that will lower your fees and thus lead to clean drinking water for everyone. Nearly every state has fees like these. Michigan is one of just eight states that don't. OK. One other thing you should know, today's fee bills were the idea of Michigan's Democratic governor. And earlier in the year, she'd worked out a deal with the Republicans, who control both the House and the Senate in Michigan by fairly large majorities. Each party had agreed to put up a certain number of votes to pass the bill. And as of last week, the bills come out of committee and everything seemed to be going smoothly. Today though, it seems that the deal might have fallen apart and that Senate Bill 252 and Senate Bill 560 are in trouble. Steve points to the computer terminal at his desk. As you can see from the legislative schedule, there are 10 amendments right now in the docket for 252, 13 amendments for Senate Bill 560 that are being planned. And probably an equal number from each party. And that's a lot? That's a lot. Generally speaking, all the Republican amendments do the same basic thing. They exempt certain groups from having to pay the pollution discharge fees. The Chair recognizes Representative Drolet. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Representative Leon Drolet, a Republican from the Detroit suburbs, gets up and makes the case. He says the pollution discharge fees are excessive and they've been foisted on his constituents by the Democratic governor. And I'd like to review some of who these polluters are that we're making pay and what the governor is proposing in her executive fees. For one of the polluters, the Sable Valley Nursing Home, the government proposes a $6,000 fee on them. Big polluters, like the KPEC Fellowship Christian Church, will have to pay $4,000 additionally under this proposal. The Boy Scouts of America would have to pay $2,500 in new fees and redo their-- The line between political pandering and political belief is a hazy one. As I watch Representative Drolet, it seems his opposition is sincere. People tell me he's a principled and committed libertarian. If Steve sees himself as fighting on behalf of people who just want clean drinking water, Representative Drolet sees himself as fighting on behalf of people just trying to make an honest buck, without interference from the state. Both men think that if things ran their way, the world would be a lot better. And both men think that if things run the other guy's way, the world would go to hell in a hand basket. Watching Representative Drolet, I realize sometimes democracy is not about getting your way. I don't support this amendment because-- It's making sure the other guy doesn't get his. It's the governor who's proposed these fees. It's the governor that made a deal to put them through the legislature. It's the governor that wants to charge Gene Ringley of Kleen Gene's Laundromat $2,000 additional a year. So let's let Gene Ringley, Jr. of Rosscommon, Michigan know who wants him to cough up the $2,000. Speeches like Drulet's make the Democrats on the other side of the aisle nervous, especially ones like Representative Jennifer Elkins, whose district is heavily Republican. She doesn't want Gene Ringley of Kleen Gene's Laundromat to think that she's taking $2,000 of his hard-earned money. And she sees that the Republicans are setting a political trap for her. Each of their amendments exempts some group of Michigan voters from this new government fee. If the Democrats oppose the amendments, the Republicans will use that against them at reelection time. She pulls Steve aside. We're going to get hung on this [BLEEP]. When the Republicans were meeting, our names were brought up-- She tells Steve she overheard the Republicans mentioning her name specifically as someone's target. But Steve tells her not to worry. The Democrats met earlier and agree there's no point falling into this trap the Republicans are setting. They won't challenge the Republicans on any of this. In other words, they're voting for all the exemptions. For the exemptions, we're all voting for the exemptions. They don't understand that's what we're doing. Yeah. They think we're going to fight among them on these little nonprofits and churches. And that's [BLEEP]. We're not going to take that heat. You should vote for every exemption. All in favor of the amendment will vote aye. All those opposed, nay. The Clerk will open the board. On a big light display board at the front of the chamber, member names light up as they press their vote buttons. Red means no. Green means yes. Steve is the floor manager for the Democrats today, meaning it's his job to make sure everyone else knows how to vote. Recommending green. What do you mean? Why should we let them say oh, we protected you, and we didn't? That's [BLEEP]. They're all going to pass. You might as well be on there. Why should we let them vote for this and we have to take the heat on this? Green. All members voted? The Clerk will close the board. Tally, display, announce the vote. Mr. Speaker, on the question of adoption of the Bradstreet Amendment 2D, there are 102 aye votes and 3 nay votes. The majority of the members electing and serving having voted in support of the Bradstreet Amendment 2D, it is adopted. If there are further amendments, the Clerk will read them. The debate about the fee bills drags on long after this, for four hours until 6:00 PM, well past the time session usually ends. And one of the bills ends up passing. But the other one keeps getting slammed around. Republicans continue to introduce amendments exempting various sympathetic institutions, farmers, schools, small towns. And they continue to pass with majority Democratic support. And then the Democrats turn around and introduce amendments that directly contradict the ones they just voted yes to, tightening regulations and increasing fees. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This amendment to increase fees for chronic violators of the Clean Water Act serves two important purposes. These fail, entirely along party lines. There's a highly choreographed feel to the whole thing. People don't cheer and high-five when their amendments pass. And they don't slam their briefcases on their desks when they fail. They're not trying to persuade each other or even to win. Each vote, each amendment, each speech for the record is solely about targeting the other party's positions at election time. The Republicans are trying to catch the Democrats raising taxes on the Boy Scouts. And the Democrats are trying to get the Republicans on record voting against clean drinking water. But not everything in the day goes according to script. There is exactly one time in the entire debate when someone introduces an amendment as a matter of personal conviction, and not as a matter of party strategy. The purpose of this-- A Republican representative, Jack Brandenburg, introduces an amendment that mandates surprise on-site inspections at companies that pollute. In other words, that actually strengthens the environmental provisions of the bill. And he does it for the simple reason that he's worried about all the bad stuff going into the water. Currently, there are 600 toxins that if not discharged properly, are harmful to the health of human beings. Some of the most commonly discharged toxins are the following-- Mercury, linked to immune disorders and brain damage. Barium-- Brandenburg talks for a long time before Steve and the Democrats even realize it's not the usual offering from the other side of the aisle. We should all be voting for this. Well, I'll vote for this. The Republicans are realizing the same thing. You can hear the murmuring increase as people try to figure out what's going on. Copper is the most frequently discharged toxin into the Great Lakes, but we have not yet determined if this is in any way an effect on our health. May I have a little respect here please. Mr. Speaker? You may proceed, Representative. All right. Brandenburg finishes. The Clerk opens the board. And much more slowly than on any of the other votes, names begin to appear, one after another, many of them green. Republicans voting for a fellow Republican. And the Clerk closes the board. And it looks like the measure has actually passed. But then, the Clerk doesn't tally the results. Sits quietly, watches the Republican floor leader, who's talking heatedly into the phone at his desk. Other Republican leaders circulate around their colleagues. And gradually screen names start switching to red. Representative Middaugh votes nay. Representative Palsrok votes nay. At one point, I witness a classic backroom political horse trade done right out in the open, in the most blatant way possible, in the middle of the chamber floor. Virgil Smith, a Democrat from Detroit, sees which way the wind is blowing. Sees that the Republican floor leader isn't going to close the board until he gets enough no votes from his own party to kill the amendment. And so Representative Smith decides to help them and help himself. He gets up, walks across the floor with his arm held above his head, and his thumb pointed straight up in the air, as if he were raising his hand in school and giving the thumbs sign at the same time. He walks right up to the Republican floor leader, Randy Richardville, who's huddled on the phone, surrounded by his advisers. And he stands there, with his thumb in the air. Richardville puts down the phone, looks up at him, they have a brief conversation. And then, Representative Smith walks back to his seat, still with his arm in the air, but this time with his thumb pointed down. Whatever happened, he's now voting nay. Representative Smith votes nay. He put nay. What did you get for that, Virgil? He got something. He got something for that. Because they didn't want this to pass. And it doesn't pass. After a brief digression from the day's script, Republican leaders continue turning green votes to red, until they have what they need. Tally, display, and announce the vote. Mr. Speaker, on the question of adoption of the Brandenburg Amendment 2D, there are 51 aye votes and 52 nay votes. A sufficient number of members having not voted in the affirmative, the Brandenburg Amendment 2D is not adopted. There are further amendments-- The weirdest maneuver of the day though, comes at the very end. After spending all day adding amendment after amendment, the Republicans introduce one final amendment. It comes at the very end. And it's rushed through on a procedural maneuver, without a record vote. Steve and all the Democrats scramble around to try and figure out what it says. What did they do here? What did they just do? Even the press guy for the Republican party is caught off guard, has to head out to the floor to find out what it does. He comes back and tells us with a sheepish smile, basically it takes us back in time three hours. It returns Senate Bill 560 to its original language, stripping off every amendment the Republicans had added, undoing everything Republicans had spent the past three hours doing. Then the Republicans bring this new bill, which is now the same as the old bill, to a vote and it fails. And then the Republican majority leader, Rick Johnson, holds a press conference in which he blames the Democrats, the minority party, and the only ones who actually voted for the bill, for its failure. In the process, they made Steve Tobacman waste half his day on a huge turkey shoot that helped no one in his district. On the car ride home, we discussed the day. It wasn't all bad. He did manage to get some minor amendment, something to do with fraudulent notary publics, through a committee earlier in the day. He tells me that so far the best moment of his political career was the first, election night. It was early in the evening and returns were still coming in. He was standing in front of all supporters. And for the first time, he thought to himself it doesn't matter whether I win or lose. I ran a great campaign. I took no money. I spoke about issues that I believed in. I did everything exactly according to my beliefs. Driving home tonight after a long confusing day at his new job, as the rain poured symbolically down from the sky, that night feels very far away. Do you find it like, yesterday we drive around your district. And then we go to this like redlining meeting where it's very local. And then I come into that chamber, and then there's this like elaborate political game that's going on. It's hard to see the connection sometimes. It was hard for me. Is it sometimes hard for you? Oh, absolutely. I mean today's activity was a bunch of pageantry. And it really does not in my mind impact the quality of life too greatly. And that I ask myself all the time. And I continually to ask myself. You might go out there and you find yourself advocating for the Todman bill or for pollution discharge permits fees. Or you can't really produce the results to end insurance redlining that you want to produce. And you feel, wow, I'm a total fraud up here. Here I am talking about something I truly, honestly believe in. And I'm doing everything I can. But at the end of the day, what kind of impact am I having? And is there a different thing I should be doing that my life? And is all of this worth that kind of trouble? In Steve's freezer at home in Detroit, there's two foot long pork loin. It's been there for 10 months. It was a Christmas present sent to him by some lobbying group, right after he got elected. Steve's not sure who sent it to him or what it's supposed to get him to do, let alone why anyone thought sending a huge piece of non-kosher meat to a Jew before Christmas would help with anything. Or for that matter, why they ignored the obvious negative symbolism of sending pork to a politician. In the end, so much of politics is about hope. Somewhere there's a guy at some pork council putting mailing labels on boxes of meat, thinking maybe this will help. And for Steve, making any connection between what he does on a daily basis and what he actually wants to do requires a similar leap of faith. But the compromises he makes now will reward him later. And that somewhere down the line, performances like the one today in Lansing will do some good for someone back in Detroit. Alex Blumberg. Act 3, Zero Divided by Zero Is Still Zero. This is a story of somebody trying out a new theory on how to run her life. Specifically, how to handle money. It's an excerpt from the book Random Family, in which a reporter named Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent over 10 years following some people who were living in the Bronx. One of the people is Coco, who is in her early 20s at this point in the story, in this excerpt. She has kids. She's on welfare. And at this point in Coco's story, she's living in a church-run residence called Thorpe House, trying to get her life together with the help of the nuns. Actress Liza Colon-Zayas reads the excerpt. Coco was eager to devise a plan for her future. Coco responded most enthusiastically to the workshops on money and budgeting. Every two weeks, she received $125 from welfare, by which time she was often $110 in debt. The Thorpe House covered utilities and rent. Coca hoped the budgeting workshops would teach her how to stop having to struggle-- a problem for which she blamed herself. The day checks arrived was pickup day. After she picked up, Coco immediately accounted for one top priority-- People I Owe Money To. She always owed someone something-- $8 to Thorpe for change for washing, $6 to a neighbor for food, $15 to Dayland, a drug dealer from around her mother's way, who had lent her $200 the previous Christmas when she had no money for gifts. Coco earmarked the cash by writing the names, "Dayland's" "Sheila's"-- on the actual bills. She also deducted for subway tokens to get to appointments and put money aside for a cab in case of emergency. It wasn't unusual for her to have $5 left, which she then had to stretch for the next two weeks. She usually owed someone food stamps. Luckily, Coco's girls were under five and still qualified for WIC-- Women, Infants, and Children-- a supplemental food program for specified items-- eggs, cereal, and most preciously, milk. What remained of the money went to clothes for the girls and necessary toiletries. Children's looks reflected the quality of mothering. Sloppiness and dirt were physical evidence of failure, of poverty winning its battle against you. Coco would keep the girls indoors rather than let them look busted-up outside. She spent hours on their hair, twisting and tugging, braiding and curling, liberally applying Vaseline. When she was done, she'd briskly rub her palms together and wipe down each daughter's face. Vaseline also kept their skin from getting patchy. "I want them to perfect. They are so beautiful," Coco said. Weeks ahead of time, Coco estimated the price of clothes she wanted for her girls, including the tax. As soon as she possibly could, she'd make a deposit and put them on layaway. But budgeting didn't mitigate one of Coco's greatest problems-- everyone around her also needed, and Coco didn't know how to refuse. Sometimes Coco would spend down her money just so she could be the one to use it, allowing her to maintain her integrity. That way if someone asked her for money, she could honestly tell them no, she didn't have it. The cash had to stretch further with Coco's boyfriend Cesar jailed. He needed winter boots, a coat, socks, towels, and sheets, and commissary money for his hygiene and stamps. Then he'd ask for extra things like a door-size reproduction of his favorite photograph of their daughter Mercedes with her hair in Shirley Temple curls. Coco didn't know how to tell him no. "The welfare money, that's the girls'. It belongs to the girls, not him," she would say, but only to herself. Coco's sister, Iris, however, knew how to take care of business. Her method was a stern personality. She could ward off potential borrowers with one stony look. Coco couldn't live like that. Coco was too open. Even if she avoided being a bank for near strangers, she ended up as the neighborhood grocery store. People would be knocking at all hours of the day and night, "Coco, you got this? Coco, you got that?'" Coco's Thorpe House case worker, Sister Christine, worried about Coco's generosity. You either made your way by hardening up, like Iris, or you stayed stuck. Coco didn't see a choice. Coco couldn't ignore the people she cared for, which is why everyone turned to her first for help. The word that came to Sister Christine's mind whenever she thought of Coco was enmeshed. Coco would have said she had heart. One day, Coco and Iris went shopping. Although Coco had figured out her budget, she deferred to Iris, who she considered a financial whiz. Iris was the only person Coco knew who actually survived on her welfare benefits. "I'm going to give you my list of people I owe and you have to divide it up," Coco told her. At Youngland, Iris exchanged the $12.99 jeans Coco had put on layaway for a similar style Iris found for half the price. Coco would have never had the defiance to ignore the clerk's snooty look. Iris brought her to Big R Food Warehouse and suggested Coco buy the enormous packs of chicken and pork chops. Iris divided them into smaller portions and froze them separately. Coco often forgot to defrost meat in enough time for dinner. Iris had her children's school clothes pressed and laid on a chair the night before. Coco was constantly rummaging around for a hair brush or a matching sock. Coco knew she couldn't replicate Iris's strict adherence to order, but she longed for her girls to sleep in rooms like Iris's rooms. "They for beautiful people," Coco said. In her niece's bedroom, everything matched-- curtains, and bedspreads, and sheets. But Coco's pride in her sister's way was mixed with concern. The rigidity of Iris's approach to her predicament generated its own problems. Iris lived in a housing project, where it was dangerous to take the elevators too early in the morning, or late at night, alone. She rarely ventured anywhere without her husband, Armando-- even to visit family. And the toll of their vigilance could be seen in Armando's anxious eyes or the grim set of Iris's jaw. Mainly, though, it was Iris's unhappiness that upset Coco. The family anxiety projected an unspoken, unappealing truth-- that even living right, which was what Coco called it, was just another precarious hold. Poverty pulled everybody down. Coco loosened her body to minimize the impact of the fall. Iris and Armando froze, and the chill stiffened their kids, as well. Even indoors, when Armando planted himself in his favorite chair, he gripped the arms. Liza Colon-Zayas, reading from Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's amazing book, Random Family. Our program was produced today by Starlee Kine and myself, with Alex Bloomberg, Diane Cook, and Wendy Dorr. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Stacey Tiderington. This is our last show with our intern Stacey Tiderington. She has faced down some very fierce deadlines with us. We wish her the best. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who proves that he is a true Chicagoan every November when he calls us in and declares, So let's rig an election. 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 simple story. Cain kills Abel. God comes around and asks him, where's your brother? He replies, am I my brother's keeper? Then God punishes him for what he's done. If there's a lesson in here about how we're supposed to treat each other, and look out for each other. The lesson is so broad that it's almost useless. Yes, it says, you are your brother's keeper, to the extent that you shouldn't actually murder your own brother. It's not until later in the Bible that you get into more practical, everyday kind of instructions. To lend your neighbors money in hard times. Give them a place to stay if they need it. To love your neighbor as yourself. The story of Cain and Abel is kind of a blunt instrument. A guy misjudges what he should do. And then someone dies. It's the first death in the Bible. Abel is the first person to die. And it's because his brother screwed up. But today on our program we have three stories of people trying to figure out how to treat their brothers, and their neighbors, and whether they should step in to help. Trying to figure out if stepping in would do anyone any good at all. WBEZ Chicago, this is This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today, Brother's Keeper. Biblical stories ripped from the day's headlines. Act One, Whatever Happened to Baby Cain? In that act, Jonathan Goldstein re-tells the story of Cain and Abel. Finally, we get to hear Cain's side of things. Act Two, This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land. Or Maybe Not. We hear the story of somebody trying to help all sorts of people who absolutely do not want his help. Act Three, Neighbor's Keeper. In that act, could anyone in a small farming town have done anything to prevent a brutal crime committed by one of their neighbors. Stay with us. On their first night outside the Garden of Eden, it was windy and cold, and the air was full of whistling. They scraped at the tree trunks, and dug their fingers into the earth. At the top of their voices, Adam and Eve called out to God. We get it, they screamed. You've made your point. To fend off the cold, they hugged each other with all of their might. They thought about all of the things God had said in his wrath. How a little human would one day tear his way out of Eve. How they would no longer live forever, but would one day die. These thoughts made them colder. They slept face to face, pressed so tightly together, that the bones in their noses hurt. Later, they would learn to make clothing. But just then, all they had was each other. Nine months after that first night, this would change. In the beginning, in the garden, the baby was supposed to be a surprise, appearing as suddenly as a sneeze. The way God intended it, two people in love would share a like-minded pretty thought. And there it would be, a baby nesting in a tree above their heads. But the way God intended it, did not pan out. On the night their child was born, Eve was asleep, dreaming about the ocean. She was swimming beneath it, breathing in the water like it was air. Very carefully, she climbed onto a shark, and rode him. I am actually doing it, she thought. Then the shark turned and bit off her lower body. Eve awoke suddenly. She had begun to give birth. Adam hopped from foot to foot as Eve felt the pain crush her into the earth. Yes, this was the baby, and the baby was attached to a vine. After a few days, despite their great care, the vine wore away, and baby Cain was freed into the world. At the time of her second birth, there wasn't the same stage fright. Eve knew the drill. She laid herself on the ground, and grabbed two fistfuls of grass. Six and a half hours later, Abel was born. They called Cain over to meet his new brother. They placed the baby in his arms. The baby was slippery, and Cain lost his grip. Abel fell. He lay on the ground, looking up at his brother. He did not cry. Abel could not be rattled. Back in those first days, things changed very quickly. A new person being born meant there was a giant spike in the population. For Cain, it made the planet feel lopsided. He watched Eve bounce the newborn in her lap, and as she cooed at it, he felt the earth's gravity tilt in their direction. It pulled at the insides of his stomach, and made him sea-sick. Years later, Adam and Eve would have many more children. But just then, there was only Cain and Abel. Because there was simply nobody else, the brothers became very close. They invented their own language and played each other's stomachs like snare drums. They butted their heads like goats, and cracked each other's knuckles as though they were cracking their own. They were different, though. Abel was a thinker. He thought about things. If he bit off his own pinky toe, would it grow back? Cain on the other hand was a doer. He'd reel back his fist and break a donkey's nose for the sheer thrill of it all. One day, when Adam and Eve thought the children were old enough, they sat them down and told the story of what life was like before they were born. "In those days, God was like one of the family," said Adam. Eve told Cain and Abel about the screw-up. "What does it mean to die?", asked Cain. "We're not exactly sure," said Eve. "But basically, it means that one day-- and this is not any day soon-- we will no longer be. " There was a silence. Then Abel spoke up. "If we won't be," he said, "then we won't even know that we're not being. There will be no we to see that we can no longer be." "Yes, I guess that's true," said their mother. "Well put." Abel smiled and went back to mashing a mutton liver, which he was making into pate for later. Cain on the other hand, felt like a sharp plum pit had been forcefully lodged down his throat. All his life, he had felt like himself. That his hands and fingers, that his thoughts, were his own. Now he felt like they were someone else's. Someone who could yank them away at any chosen moment. Until then, it had never crossed his mind that such a thing could be possible. The brothers continued to live their lives. But all the while, Cain felt a new sadness. It was there all the time. It ate with him, worked with him, and in the morning it raised from his bed with him. Dying. It just didn't make any sense. He knew this deep in his heart. He thought nothing was more important than making God change his mind. Nothing. He began to take his sacrifices more seriously. They became elaborate and garish. They involved richly choreographed interpretive dances, colorful oblong facial masks, and the very best of his legumes. But God never answered. Cain started to change. When he got a splinter, he cursed the heavens all out of proportion. "Back in the garden of Eden, there were no splinters," Cain said to Abel. "Instead of splinters, they had trees that sprouted [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and home fries." He even started to resent his parents. He spoke of them as though they had gambled away his inheritance. "If it hadn't have been for Ignoramus number one, tempting Ignoramus number two, we'd be living in luxury." Cain tried to get Able all worked up about the whole thing too. But Abel had an easy come, easy go, we all have to die someday attitude. That drove his brother crazy. As long as he had his sheep, as long as he could rub his naked feet through their wool, Abel felt that things were really not so bad. Cain invented a game he called, Get the Hell Out of Eden. He always insisted on playing God. "Get your naked asses out of here," yelled God. "What? But we just got here!", yelled Adam and Eve. "Maybe there's some kind of mistake." "The Lord does not make mistakes." God would then kick his brother in the ass. He would fall to the ground and, holding his ass say, "Please, please have mercy on me. Let's play something else." And God would laugh. Now that he was older, every week Abel would choose the fattest, firstborn sheep, and sacrifice them to God. Everything Abel did in life was for a reason. He ate so that he would not be hungry. He made clothes so that he would not be cold. But making sacrifices to God, he did it for reasons he could never know. He did it simply because he was told to. There was something about that, that made him feel clean and deep. Adam and Eve made the sacrifices out of fear of being further punished. And Cain was pleading for answers and changes. But Abel fulfilled his obligation, and walked away expecting nothing from God. He was glad with the way things were. And God could not have helped liking that. Meanwhile, Cain decided to test out a new approach with the Lord. He believed that God would have greater respect for him if he did not kowtow. "He's going to kill us," he thought. He wanted God to understand that he couldn't walk all over people, and then still have them come crawling back with their arms loaded up with gifts. No. They had to get tough. So Cain's sacrifices became more and more lackadaisical. He did not even check to see whether his gifts were being received or not. That would look like he was caving. Then one day, while Cain was lying in a field, Abel came running over. "God spoke to me," cried Abel. Cain shut up and looked at his brother. "What did he say?" "He said he was a great fan of my sheep. He told me to keep up the good work." "Was my name mentioned?", asked Cain. "It didn't come up." "What was it like to hear his voice?," asked Cain. "Look at me," said Abel. "I'm still shaking." There's was a certain pang that Cain started to feel a lot. It was in his stomach. He felt the pang grow sharpest when he looked upon his brother. He could hardly speak with him without having to hunch over in pain. Since the world was still new, and no one had yet felt this way, Cain did not know that it was jealousy he was feeling. Instead, he decided that his stomach no longer wanted to be his stomach. It wanted to escape his rib cage. It wanted to be Abel's stomach. This was because he wanted to be Abel. There was no shame in this. Being Abel meant being happy. Being Cain meant being wretched. Being Cain had brought him nothing. He had a plan. He approached Abel with it. He decided to just spring it on him. "I am no longer Cain," said Cain. "I am now Abel. We are both Abel." "All right," said Abel. The two Abels performed routines for the amusement of their brothers and sisters. "How's that apple, Abel?" "It's fine, Abel." "Abel, could you pass it over so that I may have a bite?" "I, Abel, don't see why not, Abel." Then one day, things became more grave. "If I am Abel," said Cain, "then I am just as much Abel as you yourself are Abel." "I suppose that's true," said Abel. "Then before God, are we not both Abel?", asked Cain. "Well, in the case of being before God, I think at that time, I would be Abel, and you would go back to being Cain." "That won't do," said Cain. His eyes lingered on his brother. He looked at this other Abel as standing in the way of who he was. He was Abel. He knew this in his heart. He simply wanted it more. This way, God would have to show himself. This way, God would have to stop playing possum and get directly involved in what was going on. These were Cain's thoughts. Abel was among his flock when Cain neared him. Slowly, Cain pulled out his stick, and slowly, he lifted it into the air. Still though, there was no sign of God. He looked at the back of Abel's head. Then he looked into the sky. Just in case God was reading his mind, he thought to himself, "I'm really, really going to do it." He brought his stick down onto his brother's head. He could hear no sound at all. Abel just toppled over. He toppled over the way he did everything, with an easygoing acceptance. He sank to the earth as though thinking, "I must fall, so I will fall. I am falling. I have fallen." Cain grabbed his brother by the shoulder and turned him over. His brother's eyes were wide open. It was like Abel was looking past him, over his shoulder and up into the sky. When they were kids, there was a game they played, where Cain would do something, something bad, and Abel would look over just behind him. As though spying their father, who had been watching. Cain, full of fear, would slowly turn to meet his father's gaze. When he'd see that there was really no one there, he would laugh. Now, it was like Abel was playing at their game, but this time, he did not move a muscle even to smile. Here it was. Death. Cain couldn't believe it. He'd been sure that at the last moment, God would step in. He would have thought that only God could have taken a person's life. But it was as simple as killing a sheep. Abel, his eyes wide and unblinking, stared directly into the mystery of life and death. And he was not saying a word about any of it. Cain sat back and weighed it. The sheep continue to graze, and the sun continued to shine. There were no bolts of lightning, no booming voice from behind the clouds. Life went on. That night, God appeared before Cain in a dream. "Where is your brother?", asked God. "It's always about my brother," said Cain. "Do you ever ask me where I am? No, that you don't think of." "What have you done?", asked God. "Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground." "Am I my brother's keeper?", asked Cain. God did not answer. He just gave him a look. It made Cain feel naked and small. He then felt the finger of God upon his forehead. It sank through his head and into his brain, where it spoke. "The earth shall scorn you," said the voice from the finger. "I shall scorn you. You will wander the earth, and death will not come. There will be no escape from your guilt. All will look upon you, and none will dare kill you. For they will know you by your mark." God withdrew his finger, leaving behind a fingerprint on Cain's forehead that was shaped like a tear drop. At first he tried to convince himself that the mark was to protect him. That he had a secret pact with God. That they understood each other. For a while, he would wake up in the morning and pretend to be immortal and famous. But he was not very good at pretending. So as the centuries passed, Cain abandoned farming and roamed the earth. He walked with a sense of purpose, just in case anyone was watching. But in his heart, he knew he had nowhere to go. He became so lonely and full of regret, that instead of fearing death, he became yearnful of it. He would chase after bears, and they would scamper away. "They haven't the balls," he'd say. "Run, you little bitches," he'd call after the tigers. "Run, you yellow turds," he'd cry into the face of an alligator, as he tried in vain to pry open its jaws. More centuries passed. And Cain's desire for death became nearly constant. He would think about Abel up in heaven, palling around with God, flying through the clouds on God's shoulders, while he was left to putz around for hundreds of years, begging his own children to drive tree branches through his heart. In life, Cain had been jealous of his brother. But it was in death, that he became more jealous than he ever thought was possible. He could feel Abel up there looking down on him. "You should see the look on your face," he would hear his brother say, trying to be all serious. "You look like a gorilla." Over time, Cain could no longer remember very much at all. 20 years after the death of his brother, it seemed like it was only yesterday. But after 200 years, it felt like something that might have happened in a dream. There were details he remembered, that now seemed improbable. Like the way he saw his brother's soul leave his body. And the way he'd waved goodbye to him, and winked. After 300 and 400 years, it all felt so long ago, that who he was back then felt like someone else. When people he met asked him questions about the old days, he just made stuff up. "We had wings," he said. After 500 years, his story was repeated so often, that he only remembered the repeating, not the events themselves. It sounded like a fable. Something that might have just as easily happened to a fox and a rabbit, as to himself and his brother. He began to doubt everything. He even began to wonder whether he had actually ever heard God's voice. Whether the mark on his forehead was the mark of God, and not just another liver spot. "Was this a part of the punishment?", he wondered. To be left so uncertain of whether God really was, or whether God was only something inside his own head. After 700 years, when he told the story to himself, or heard it told by others, he felt nothing. He was too old to feel guilt, or remorse, or anything. He didn't even miss his brother anymore. He wanted nothing from God. He wanted nothing from the world. The world was what it was. He didn't need it to change. And in this way, he'd finally got his wish-- to be just like Abel. And then God let him die. Jonathan Goldstein. He is the author of the novel Lenny Bruce Is Dead. Coming up, trying to help a bunch of people who don't really want your help, in what you really could call a biblical setting. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. This is This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week in our program of course we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Brother's Keeper. Stories of when it is hard to figure out exactly what you're supposed to do for others, exactly what your responsibility is. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land. Or Maybe Not. Nancy Updike has the story of a man who's tried to save a whole country. And how that's going. Most people are repelled by what they don't like. They avoid it. They don't want to see it, or hear it, or think about it. Dror Etkes spends all day looking at what he hates. Seeing more and more physical evidence of a future he dreads. Talking at length to people he vehemently disagrees with. This, I think this is this place, most likely. What are you seeing? Two, three containers. Three mobile homes, I mean one Subaru. A huge manure. Two black water containers. And obviously, the beginning of settlement. Dror may be the only person in the world who knows, and is willing to discuss, the name and location of every Israeli settlement. Every shack, mobile home, housing cluster, bypass, road and town in the West Bank. In his rented Mitsubishi truck, he monitors settlements for the Israeli organization Peace Now. He gets calls from the American consulate requesting briefings and statistics. Israeli parliament members use his database. He's driven, he works alone, and he is not popular. His single-minded mission is to expose a process that many people would like to keep quiet. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon told his cabinet in June that settlement building could continue, as long as it was discreet. "Don't celebrate," he said. "Just build." A settler spokesman agreed. "The less talk, and the less documentation, the better," he told an Israeli newspaper. Nearly half of the West Bank, 42%, is now controlled by Israeli settlers and the local and regional land councils the govern them. A political fact that makes any future peace agreement significantly more difficult. So several times a week, Dror gets into his truck, throws a bulletproof vest in the back, and does a reverse commute out into the West Bank to see what's going on. We go up to a construction site on a hill about nine miles southeast of Jerusalem, with some men doing work on a bunch of new houses. Dror, who's about six feet tall and solid, strides over to the deeply tanned man in wraparound sunglasses who seems to be supervising the site. Do you speak English? Inglit? [TRANSLATING] Yes, and I don't want to talk. You don't want to talk? With this. The microphone. Dror steers him away from the mike, and gets him to talk, no problem. He talked carpentry with him, he tells me as we're driving away. And in the process, found out everything he wanted to know. The information that I got is that they build 122 square meter houses. Going to build about five, six units altogether. And the buildings are for people living right now involves caravans here. But they consider it to be a neighborhood of [UNINTELLIGIBLE], which is here. A new settlement is like a new freckle. It can be hard to notice unless you're really looking for it. A mobile home appears on a hill somewhere in the West Bank. At first it's just up there, empty. Maybe it's next to a Palestinian village or city, maybe it isn't. A couple of people move in. They set up water tanks. A radio tower. Clear a rough road. Then bring in a few more mobile homes. Soon, there are enough people on the hill that they need defending. So soldiers are assigned to it. Electricity and water lines are run from the nearest, more established settlement. More people move in. Families, children. A school is started. Eventually the hills around the original hill need to be claimed in order to protect it. Dror was born in 1968, ten months after the first settlement was created. When he was 15 years old, studying in a religious school in Jerusalem, there were 23,000 settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. When he was 21, and no longer religious, and was finishing his military service in an infantry combat unit, there were 72,000. When he was 28, and just back from years abroad trying to run away from Israel, it was 148,000. When I came back to the country, I started quite soon after, to move on to the West Bank and to start to look for my own perspective. How actually things goes on there. You started driving around the West Bank in-- Two taxis. Palestinian taxis. You just on your own initiative, when you got back? What were you looking for? Oh, speaking with people. And looking at the changes. You know, the West Bank had been dramatically changed during the nine years. The years Dror was away were the early years of the Oslo peace accords. A time when many Israelis saw a peaceful solution, two states for two peoples, as inevitable, and imminent. The growth of settlements during those years was not widely publicized or discussed. When Dror tried to tell his friends what he was seeing, they'd say, well we're giving it back anyway, so who cares if a few more houses are being built. And he'd say no, no, no, you don't understand. We're not preparing to give it back. We're preparing to stay. His friends' eyes would glaze over. They'd shrug. It infuriated him. He had no interest in turning his life into a political mission to save his country. He'd spent his years abroad avoiding Israelis, trying not to think about Israel. For a long time, he thought he'd never go back. Settlements were not something he'd ever intended to take on. At first when I came back to the country, consciously, I was keeping myself detached from this place in some ways. I tried to, at least, I think. I was not really able to do it. But somehow, I was trying to convince myself that I could live everywhere in the world. And when the time goes on, and I'm here longer, and especially over the last years. I must admit that, the settlers have made me, you know, I'm a born-again patriot. I feel that the settlers pushed me, shoved me to the corner, but I have to fight for this place. You know, fighting for our home. This is the settlers', their slogan. They're fighting for their homes. This is more or less what I feel right now. Hello? Dror is calling a new settlement, pretending he wants to move there so he can get information about the place. He has an ever-changing repertoire of deceptions to get information. For a while he drove around the settlements posing as a cell phone technician, so he could ask a lot of intrusive questions. How many people live here? Oh, you'll need a couple of towers then, huh? What about that new road up there? Going to be some people up there, too? They'll need a cell tower. It worked well until a settler blew his cover by asking for ID, and then told all the others. When I drove with him, Dror told a lot of the people he talked to exactly who he was, and they spoke to him anyway. But he has no compunction about lying, elaborately, if need be, when he thinks it would help. Like with this phone call. Dror says he knows settler jargon, how to put them at ease. He grew up around settlers, in a religious family. He says he understands them, how they think and live. And on the phone, he finds out what he wants to know by playing a fully imagined alter-ego. Dror, the settler. You know, father of four or five kids. And I was in army in a specific unit, where a lot of religious people are going. And I married a woman who does a certain thing. You know, she's a teacher. And I always admire the settlers. Of course, I'm religious, and I told them I'm [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. But I'm a bit afraid, you know. I really want to do it, but I have to find the guts in me. A settler spokesman once joked about Dror. His obsession shows a deep psychic tie to the land of Israel. In his previous incarnation, he must have been a settler. One of the side effects of Dror's job is that even though he disagrees with them, he now has more in common with settler activists than with the vast majority of Israelis. Like settlers, he spends a lot of time in the West Bank, frustrated that the rest of Israel doesn't seem to know or care what's happening there. Like them, his position on the issue of settlements is at the core of his identity. He told me he can't be friends with anyone who disagrees with him about it. In fact, he said it's hard for him to relate to anyone who doesn't see the same things he does every day. We were leaving the settlement of Ariel when an orthodox man, who was asking every man who walked by whether he wanted to pray, called out to Dror. They had an exchange. Dror refused to pray, but he did it in a way that let the guy know he had a religious background. According to ancient Jewish law, minors, the deaf, and the retarded are exempt from following religious commands. So I said to him, I am those three things. I am deaf, and I'm a minor, and I'm retarded. So I don't have to do it. So he realized immediately that I know something. It's not because I don't know. I know, and I don't do it, deliberately. Do you do that to kind of needle them? Yeah, I like to provoke, like a provocation. You like to provoke them. Yeah, I like to provoke them, yeah. Those guys are fundamentalists. They think what they're doing, you know, saving the world, redeeming the world-- bother me. I don't like it. I don't like people who are trying to convert other people. You kind of are trying to convert people, though. [LAUGHTER] Am I? You're right. You're right. So I don't like people who try to convert, religiously, people. You don't like the competition. I don't like the competition! Yeah, it's a good one. [LAUGHTER] Also like settler activists, he's always on the job. And like them, he sees his job as a constant effort to correct the misguided all around him. We picked up two 18 year old settler boys who were hitchhiking. He spent the first ten minutes of the ride milking them for information. Where do you live? He asked one. Ma'ale [UNINTELLIGIBLE], the kid answered. And how are things at Ma'ale [UNINTELLIGIBLE]? Praise the Lord, things are good, the kid said. Yeah?, said Dror. How many families are there? 89, 90, the kid said. Once Dror had found out everything he wanted to know, he told them he monitored settlements for Peace Now, and one of the boys said, I'm curious about your outlook. Can you explain it to me? After saying he wasn't sure he had the energy to get into it with them, Dror began a half hour argument that got more and more heated and complicated. Until finally, one of the boy said plaintively, look, most of the country identifies with us. Forget about it, Dror said, shifting gears. He interrupted the main argument to explain to the kids, that in fact both of them, and Dror, are all in the same boat. "Forget about it. Most of the country doesn't give a dick-- pardon me, but I'm going to say this bluntly-- most of the country doesn't give a dick about what you say, or what I say. Both the settlers and Peace Now are tiny groups. The big fight between us, is who's able to capture broad public support. Not by getting people to identify with our ideology, because nobody gives a damn if God promised him some covenant with Abraham. This part of the land of Israel, or some other part. And unfortunately, no one gives a damn in this country about human rights either." Every American administration since 1967 has made some statement against settlements. Saying that they're contrary to the Geneva convention, the international law that governs occupying powers, and a serious obstacle to any peace agreement. President George Bush, in a speech that preceded the Road Map peace plan, said quote, "Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories must stop." Twice, first in 1978 and again in 1992, Israel and the US have come to explicit agreements to freeze settlement growth. Settlements have increased throughout. As they increase and multiply, it's hard to avoid certain questions. Where exactly is a Palestinian state going to fit? And if Israel really intends to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, to give up land for peace, why keep building? A few weeks ago, Dror testified before the US senate, the Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee. A senator on tour in Israel a few months back met him, and invited him to speak about settlements and settlement growth. I think Dror's probably doing work that has already been done for him. And I think the American government with its satellite services could probably do it even better. Israel Meidad grew up in Queens, and moved to the settlement of Shilo in 1981. He's debated Peace Now representatives many, many times. He's a settler spokesman. I'm sure they know exactly where the roads are, where the caravans are being placed. And for me, actually, he represents a very sort of unfortunate aspect of Zionism over the past hundred years. Where they have to run to the non-Jews in order to tell them what's going on. Its sort of an element of not accepting democracy. Democracy is, you decide. And we had a vote recently, and Mr. Sharon had over 65% of the vote. I mean what he says is, look they invited me. And my main audience is Israel, is Israelis. That I'm gathering these numbers, and trying to put them out to Israel. And the Americans just happened to ask me. But my main audience is Israel. You're making a face. He's lying. You don't think his main audience is Israel. His main audience is the United States of America. I would say to him that, his political point of view has consistently lost out in a democratic form called elections in the state of Israel. The polls that have consistently been published about dismantling communities and taking Jews back, et cetera, like that, have always been, for peace, would you do this? Israelis would do anything for peace, to tell you the truth. But once the crunch comes, they decide otherwise, usually in elections. Polls are not elections. And Dror doesn't realize that. Dror thinks that his ideological position can be moved over onto the majority of the population. Consistently, over the past 37 years, that has not happened. I don't think it will. Where are we coming up to now? We're entering a settlement, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Dror believes that settlements will be dismantled and evacuated in his lifetime. He believes this, in spite of the fact that just in the time I've been interviewing him for this story, hundreds of new permits for houses in the West Bank have been issued. Eight outposts, some of them illegal, were granted the status of permanent communities by the government. A hundred million dollars was approved by the government to build houses in the occupied territories. And a new incentive program was announced to attract young Israeli couples to settlements in the Jordan valley. Free rent for four years, plus full college tuition for one person in the couple. Over a hundred couples have signed up so far. Dror's optimism in the face of all this is especially shocking, given his personal experience. As we were driving through a block of settlements about nine miles east of Jerusalem, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] he announced suddenly-- My sister live in Elon. Your sister lives here? Not here, in the other settlement, Elon. But in this block of settlements. Right. And, I mean, what does your sister think of what you do? Well, she supports it, totally. She votes Israeli, she votes-- Come on! Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is Israeli reality right now. So what do you mean, she supports it? I mean, it seems like your whole goal is to get her to move out of her house. Right. And my sister moved to this settlement eight months ago or so. They are living in a container. They're paying $100 rent. An apartment in Israel, in Jerusalem, would have the same size of their container, would cost perhaps five times more. So, did your sister talk to you about this before doing it? And say look, I'm going to do this? Yes, we had the hardest conversations before. We had very, very hard conversations about it. She just, I guess, concluded by saying that she would never build a house there at the settlement. And that she doesn't consider herself as an obstacle to peace. And if Israeli government would decide to evacuate those areas, of course she would never do anything against it. And nobody is living on this land anyhow. We headed up a rough dirt road near [UNINTELLIGIBLE] where two empty trailer homes sat on top of a hill, placeholders for an upcoming settlement to add to the block his sister lives in. We went inside one. So this is two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a sort of living room kitchen area. It's exactly the type of trailer which my sister has, where she live, I told you about before. This is the kind of trailer your sister lives in. Quite, quite, quite similar. It's enough for young parents with one baby. I guess why my sister is refusing to see, this is what I told her is that, she is benefiting from extreme unjust political agenda. And this is what she's, just, closing her eyes to see. You know, claiming that she's going to Peace Now demonstration, one every four years, she's completing her duty. And if she votes the right party, once every four years, she's completing with her political responsibility. I think it's a very, very ignorant thing to say. I'm living with a consciousness. What you are doing privately in your life, how you live, where you shop, how you consume. Who you speak with, how do speak with. This is politics. It sounds exhausting. I look exhausted. You don't look exhausted. On the contrary, you seem full of energy and pep. No, I'm very exhausted. You feel exhausted? Yes, exhausted. I feel exhausted, I don't feel that I'm as exhausted, that I'm ready to give up. And I don't. This is not what I'm saying. But living here in this country is an extremely exhausting thing. Living here consciously? If you are politically conscious and aware? It's an extremely exhausting thing. I have many friends who are living abroad, mostly in Europe. And I must admit that I'm envying them once in a while. They have much better life than I have. Much, much better. Patriotism is a kind of love. And like any other love, it can be unrequited. There's the patriot, Dror. He feels responsible to his country. Worries about it, has plans for it, feels devoted to it. And then there's the country itself. The patriot's fellow citizens. Who usually don't even notice what he's doing. And when they do notice, find it pathetic, or enraging, or unpatriotic. Nancy Updike lives in Jerusalem. Her story's part of the Hearing Voices project, which gets funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and is online at hearingvoices.com. A new deputy was on duty in the town. A deputy named Adam Streicher, 23 year old guy, who was very new to the force. And wanted to do something useful. He's looking for something to do. He's looking for something to do. And so he rummaged around in the courthouse and in the station for any outstanding warrants that might need to be served. On this night he did find an outstanding warrant. One that was five months old, and that was to be served on a local resident named Curt Thompson. He didn't know Curt Thompson, and it was just for failure to pay some court costs and fines from a previous case. So he took the warrant, got in the deputy's squad car, and started to drive the short distance to Curt Thompson's house. Curt Thompson came to the door, and was informed by Deputy Streicher that he had a warrant for Curtis Thompson. Thompson went back into his house, and came out with a shotgun. Lifted it up, and blew away Deputy Streicher's face and shoulder. Probably killed him instantly. Then, Thompson took the deputy's pistol, jumped in the squad car, lights flashing, and set off to settle some scores. Just around the corner, he visits two neighbors that he'd been feuding with for years. And shoots them, right in front of their ten year old daughter. Maybe a half-minute drive from there, Thompson rams into another neighbor on the street that he doesn't like, but the guy gets away. Thompson goes looking for yet another neighbor he has a grudge against, but that guy's not home. What Robert Kurson found, digging into old court records, talking to all sorts of people in Toulon, was that this man, Curt Thompson, had been getting into all sorts of angry episodes and disputes with various neighbors for 30 years. You could get too close to him at the grocery. You could drive too close to him. Very, very minor, petty things that third or fourth graders might complain about in grade school. In one case, I think someone's laundry blew on to his property. And that marked the offender for vendetta for years. Well, Curt began, as we say, casing my house. This is Rick Collins, of Toulon. Driving by slowly, and watching what I would be doing at my home. And checking on my dog, and that sort of stuff. And giving me the eye, glaring at me. Was it intimidating, the glaring? To a degree. Because Curt had a reputation for swinging first and asking questions later, that sort of thing. It was well known that he had a very bad temper. Yeah. That he could become violently angry. Rick Collins got on Curt Thompson's bad side when Curt's dog bit a child who lived nearby. At the time, Rick was the mayor of Toulon. And he sent out the city marshall, the policeman who is on the city payroll, to do a routine call about the incident. Check that the dog was vaccinated, and properly registered. It led to some fines and a little bit of trouble for Curt Thompson. Somewhere in this period, there was a retirement party nearby. About seven miles from town, just over the county line in the next county. And I had stopped by to wish the retiree a happy retirement. Curt and his wife were there. And in the process of walking past their table, I stopped and said hello Curt, and hello Virginia, just as I've said it to you. And as it came to pass, Curt followed me out. And began shouting and yelling obscenities at me, and when we reached a staircase, he basically hit me from behind, pushing me down a flight of stairs. And I wasn't injured, I caught myself without tumbling. And got to the bottom, and I thought, boy, this is not good. I got outside and drove home. And at that point, I think I did turn it in. I called the sheriff and reported what had happened. And they were not interested. They said well, it happened in another county, so, not to worry. So I called the district attorney of that county, because, I thought well, this isn't really good, pushing public officials down a flight of stairs. And that state's attorney wasn't too interested in pursuing it, and that's kind of where it lay. In fact, this was the pattern around town for decades. People would try to get the police and courts to take action. But either they wouldn't pick up the case, or if they did, Curt Thompson would just get a slap on the wrist. Some of his actions were shocking. He threatened the sheriff, repeatedly. Told him he'd bury him. Ran him off the road. And only ended up with $111 fine, and 100 hours of community service. The couple that he eventually murdered, Jim and Janet Giesenhagen, he'd been feuding with for over a decade. He'd circle around their house in his truck at 8:00 in the morning, when their daughter was just leaving for school. They started driving her, even though the school was just a few blocks away. One day Thompson told them that he'd kill them. They got a judge to issue an order of protection, ordering him to stay away. He didn't. In the next days, there was Thompson in his truck, glaring. Again, reporter Robert Kurson. And so Giesenhagen, believing that all he needed was evidence of this violation of the order of protection, and that would finally, hopefully, put Thompson away, attaches a video camera to his home and tapes Thompson breaking, repeatedly, these orders of protection. According to what I was told, these tapes were turned over to authorities, and nothing happened. I watched every minute, every second of those videotapes. There was nothing on there that you could use as evidence to substantiate bringing in a criminal charge. Richard Schwind is with the Illinois attorney general's office, and worked on the murder case against Curt Thompson. The tapes that we were given did not show a violation. It showed that Mr. Thompson would drive on the public way behind the Giesenhagen home. But there was nothing to show that would substantiate any violation. So if he was just driving through this alley, that wouldn't constitute a violation. No. He had a right to be on a public way. If he went on to the Giesenhagen property, that would be a different story. Mr. Thompson knew how far to push the envelope, and how far to go before violating the law. Sure enough, says the former mayor, Rick Collins. But he believes that when he was mayor, there were clear opportunities for Toulon to do more to stop Curt Thompson. And especially for the town policemen, to enforce rules against Curt Thompson. But the policemen, he says, wouldn't take action. There had been complaints previously about Curt's wood pile, and the trash around his house, and abandoned cars. That sort of thing. And our city marshall wasn't too interested in pursuing anything with Curt. Why? Well, you know. I think that I should preface this by saying, we've all got blood on our hands. All of us should have pressed the issue. Do you remember having conversations with the marshall, with the sheriff, with the police? Where you'd say, you know, we've got to enforce this? Yes. I did say, we have to do something about this, it's only going to get worse. And what'd they say? They said, don't worry about it. It's our problem. Hm. There was no appetite for enforcing any ordinances in regard to Curt. This was one of the reasons I resigned. If you can't control your city employees and the city council is not willing to back you up, then you really have no business being the mayor. See I wonder, even if you all had enforced all these things-- the level of punishment that Curt Thompson would have gotten would have been pretty minimal. Oh yeah. And so in the end, would it have actually forestalled a big tragedy happening like what happened? Yes I believe it would have, Ira. It's been my observation that whether one is a schoolteacher, or a policeman, or regardless of your position, even in the unemployer. When you have rules, and the rules are enforced unequivocally, when people know that certain actions bring certain results. They tend not to violate the rules. And Curt is no different than the rest of us. And when an individual feels that they are above or immune, or can violate law with impunity, they will do so. And they'll continue to do it with increasing severity until something happens. It's interesting to hear. Like you feel very confident that if lines had been drawn early on, it would never have gotten to this point. Without a doubt. Absolutely without a doubt. There's no question in my mind whatsoever. Rick Collins says that he tried to get the six members of the Toulon city council to act, to force the town policemen to go after Curt Thompson, there was so little interest, they never even came to a vote. The Toulon policeman that he wanted to take action is named Bob Taylor. He's still the marshall in Toulon. And he says that he has no regrets about how he handled Curt Thompson. Curt Thompson was not like other people. Or at least most people in a small town. He was very anti-social. He was just a guy that I think aggressive action may have just sped things up, not headed them off. You think aggressive action would have had the opposite effect from what the mayor is saying? That would be my belief, yes. You think aggressive action actually would have set him off? Right. He'd have probably been as defiant as he normally was. Probably would have pushed things to the limit. Normally, when somebody's in trouble in Toulon, people step in to help. When Dean Greave got sick a few weeks ago, some neighbors harvested his corn and beans. When a big wind storm knocked out power for a few days this summer, people showered in each other's houses, helped out as they could. Every few weeks, there are all sorts of benefit suppers, and dances, and auctions for people who are sick or doing badly. Where usually 100 to 300 people show up. This, remember, in a town of 1,400. With Curt Thompson, the community collectively decided to avoid the problem. Jim Nowlan edits the town paper, the Stark County News. He says maybe a half dozen people were being harassed by Curt Thompson at any given time. But it just wasn't the sort of thing you could hold a benefit for. It wasn't clear exactly what to do. I think if you were to do a movie about a story like this, there would probably be some Jimmy Stewart type who would become so aroused, maybe at the lack of action taken by others, that he would simply, you know, carrying a torch, gather the townsfolk in the square and march on Curt Thomson's house. And simply demand that he come out and apologize, and commit never to do anything like that again. But that didn't happen. Though Jim Nowlan sounds a little bit like Jimmy Stewart as he says all this, there was no Jimmy Stewart in town to end the story that way. And if anything, the scenario that people in Toulon sometimes talked about for Curt Thompson is a much darker one. Here's Robert Kurson, the reporter. Many people in the aftermath, thought that someone should have gone and taken care of him physically. Wow, people actually said this to you? Yes. That vigilante justice was the only option remaining. In the story that you wrote, you tell the story at one point of the town of Skidmore, Missouri in 1981. And they faced a similar kind of figure, a guy named Ken McElroy, who got into all sorts of feuds. Talk about what happened in that case. It was a very similar set-up. The town, like Toulon, watched out for each other. They took care of each other. This guy rode into town and started terrorizing, in much the same way that Curt Thompson did. He kept vendettas going. He was violent. And he seemed above the law. The reaction of the people in Skidmore was different than it was in Toulon. They surrounded his truck in broad daylight, 30 or 40 of them, and murdered him. Someone shot him. 30 or 40 witnesses. The police came in to solve the murder. Nobody would say who fired the shots. Nobody would talk. Everybody knew who did it. To this day, that case in Missouri remains open and unsolved. Nobody will speak. It's funny, the idea of, you know, we should look out for each other, we should be each other's keeper. We usually think of it as driving us towards acts of kindness. You know when somebody's sick, when somebody's in trouble. It's odd to think of it as being an impulse that would actually drive a group of people to kill somebody. Well everybody in this town agreed on one thing. They could either hope that nothing bad happened, and just continue to live with the problem. Or, blank. The town of Skidmore, Missouri filled in the blank. The town of Toulon was not able to fill in that blank. Of course, if you're in a situation where your only choices are, do nothing, or vigilante murder, things can't get much worse. Chris Thompson went to trial for his three murders. These days he sits on death row, where, if Illinois lifts its moratorium on the death penalty someday, the people of Illinois will finally fill in that blank. PRI, Public Radio International.
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In Danielle's house, ever since she was a girl, when holiday dinners come, they serve a meal that will probably look familiar to you. Picture main course, big platter, drum sticks, white breast meat, golden brown skin, stuffing, and gravy, and cranberry relish on the side. And in Danielle's family they have a name for this meal that she told me on the phone recently. 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 a fourth of all the turkey consumed in this country every year. 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 this hour, Act One: Duki. The story of a typical American family and imaginary poultry. Act Two: what poultry-positive program would be complete without-- Chickenman! He's everywhere, he's everywhere! Yes, indeed. In the late 1960s, the winged warrior struck terror in the hearts of evildoers on radios all across this great nation. Today, my friends, he flies again. Act Three: Chicken Diva. In that act, an opera about Chicken Little sung in Italian, and-- no kidding-- able to make a grown man cry. Act Four: Trying To Respect The Chicken. The story of one woman's quest to try to give chickens the honor and the dignity that they are rarely accorded, even though the chickens resist her efforts. Stay with us. 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 8 and I was about 10. And when he first arrived, he was really fluffy. And he was this beautiful, fluffy, white duck. 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. 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 is 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 has this total, like, 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-- yeah-- indomitable spirit. All right. I've been at Daniels 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. These are adult-- Danielle is an editor at a big New York magazine. I adore Duki. I really love Duki. And sometimes I think 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. I feel like-- it sounds crazy. It really makes me sad to think about a world without Duki. And that it would be a big empty hole 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 lost at an airport or run over by a car, it would really be heartbreaking. 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 were to 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, and 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. Yona Lu. I think that's-- 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's a pretty-- 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. Yona Lu. [LAUGHING] Yeah, you would need to do that. And that I needed to do that through you. Yeah. Who is Yona Lu. Yona Lu is-- she's a hedgehog. She's basically taken charge of Duki's financial affairs. And 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 gonna' 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. She says OK, it's OK. Would 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? Yeah. Should I wait? Yeah. All right, I'll wait. Ira? Yeah. This is just radio? Yeah. Not TV? It's just radio. And nobody is going to get to be on TV? No, no one's going to be on TV. No, it's strictly radio. OK. Yona Lu doesn't care what happens then. What if it were TV? I think she'd want to be on, too. [IRA LAUGHING] Even though she doesn't-- I mean, radio doesn't do much for her because 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? Mm-hm. [AFFIRMATIVE] I mean, for a while there, we had two daughters that only communicated through a duck. Yeah. That period that you're describing, when do you mean? I would say they maybe were 10 and 12 or 9 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. And how long did this last? 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 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 nights. All right. Well, could you get him? Uh, sure. He's upstairs-- just a sec. Here he is. Hey, Duki? Yeah? Hey, Ira, how ya' doin'? 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. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] 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? Kind of sticks out and you just want to squeak it. You know, like, over Thanksgiving we were watching The Muppet Show. And Miss Piggy was on, and she reminded me a lot of Niellie. Of Danielle? Mm-hm. [AFFIRMATIVE] Yeah. And Kermit told Miss Piggy, "move the pork." And so I was telling Niellie 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 Niellie. 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 kind of feel like you're about the size of a pea. Yeah. 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? 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, yeah. When I had time, I used to migrate once in a while because I have some friends who are ducks. And I try to keep in touch with them, but lately I just started spending more time with people and doing my own thing. And I just don't have time to do those kind of duck things anymore. I just wanted more in my life than that. Duki, a stuffed hand puppet, now lives in New York City. Well, the story of a 27 year old graduate student who talks like a duck naturally brings us to the story of Chickenman. Chickenman first soared the radio airwaves from 1966 to 1969. Nearly every day there would be a new episode. These were these short little things, each one two minutes long or so. Starting on WCFL here in Chicago, but spreading to over 1,500 radio stations. Three times, by the way, that's three times the number in the public radio network. According to the people who syndicate Chickenman, it has been translated into German, into Dutch, into Swedish. It is still on the air, they say, in several dozen markets. Chickenman. Chickenman existed years before National Public Radio existed as a national network. Chickenman will continue probably years after we're all gone. Like the mighty cockroach. Like-- I don't know. Like the bagel. Like [? Haleva. ?] Chickenman endures, will endure. Well, let's hear what all the fuss was about. Now another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crime fighter the world has ever known. Bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk! Chickenman! He's everywhere, he's everywhere! Benton Harper, employed as a shoe salesman for a large downtown department store, spends his weekends, his only two days off, striking terror into the hearts of criminals everywhere as the white winged warrior called Chickenman. How did it come about that Benton Harper, weekend winged warrior, selected the visage of the chicken in his crusade against the forces of evil? Now it can be told. Yes, may I help you? How do you do? I'm looking for a costume. What did you have in mind? Something that will strike terror into the hearts of criminals everywhere. I see. Well, how about this? Hmm. No, I don't think so. Why not try it on? Very well. Here, I'll help you. Thank you. There you are. Now take a look in the mirror. Mm. Not bad. I wonder if you would permit me to conduct a quick experiment outside this store. Certainly. Pardon me, sir. Yeah? Are you by chance a vicious criminal? Uh-huh. [AFFIRMATIVE] Fine. Would you take a look at this costume I'm wearing? Yeah. Do you feel anything strange? Anything at all? Uh, yeah. And what is that? I'd like to kiss ya'. Kiss me? Yeah. How do you account for that? Because you look like an adorable bunny rabbit. Well, how did it go? What else do you have? A teddy bear and a chicken. A teddy bear? Wouldn't it be cute? Wrap up the chicken, please. Be listening tomorrow for another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crime fighter the world has ever known. Bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk! Chickenman! He's everywhere, he's everywhere! I love these. You want to hear another? We have time for another. You want to hear another? The thing I love is how completely low key the performances are. It's like they're not even trying. It's a complete aesthetic. All right. Let's hear one more before we continue with the next act. Now another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crime fighter the world has ever known. Bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk! Chickenman! He's everywhere, he's everywhere! The office of the police commissioner of Midland City. Hello, this is the commissioner-- Ms. Helfinger, this is the Winged Warrior. Yes, what is it? Please inform the commissioner that I'm now all set for test sequence number one. What? It's all primed and ready to go. What are you talking about? The Chicken Missile, Ms. Helfinger. The Chicken Missile? Yes. So tell the commissioner I'm ready for test sequence number one. Yes, Ms. Helfinger? Commissioner, the Chicken Missile is ready to go. Huh? The Chicken Missile. Oh, yes, of course, the-- And it's ready for test sequence number one. Test sequence number one. Number one. Well, that's very nice. Very nice, yes. Hello, Winger Warrior? Right right, Ms. Helfinger. The commissioner said that's very nice. Oh, fine. In that case, Ms. Helfinger, have the commissioner standby with the Chicken Missile receiver. What? I'm going to countdown-- Listen-- [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. We'll see you at 1400 hours. Hello? Wait-- Yes, Ms. Helfinger? Commissioner? Yes. If I would say to you, "prepare the Chicken Missile receiver," would you know-- No, I wouldn't. I didn't think you would. Commissioner? Yes? I would suggest that you crouch under your desk. Crouch under my desk? Yes, it should provide some protection. From-- What? Chicken Missile. Oh. Well, say, that Chicken Missile really works nifty. Will the Midland City Fire Department recommend that a Chicken Missile receiver be installed in what's left of Midland City Hall? Be listening tomorrow for another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crime fighter the world has ever known. Bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk! Chickenman! He's everywhere, he's everywhere! Well, thank you very much to the creator and voice of Chickenman, Mr. Dick Orkin. Always very strange to talk to him on the phone to get permission to put these things on the radio because he sounds just like Chickenman. A collection of all the Chickenman episodes is for sale at radio-ranch.com, that's radio hyphen ranch dot com. Coming up, it ain't over till the fat chicken sings. 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 and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, during this period of greatest poultry consumption in our nation-- the two weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas-- we bring you stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, fowl of all kind real and imagined. We've done this poultry show so many times year after year in November that today's show is basically a greatest hits of chicken stories from many, many years past. 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, Siamo del Teatro Repertorio delle Mollette. 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 to-- Yeah, would she sit on your lap for this? Yeah, no, yeah. Let's see what we can do. 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. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. As soon as it's in Italian, it gives us enough distance that we can come in. You know, it makes us-- 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 tracks 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, daring-do. Like Venus, she arrives from some other world, transported on a scallop shell. But the triumphs of her life began 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 of 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 ship wrecked, 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've 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 forties cartoon figure would clamp to his nose around a chunk of Limburger cheese. And I could go on. Susan has written, or 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 Clothes Lines, the official fan club newsletter of the opera. Love's Fowl has a strange effect on people. I didn't understand until Susan loaned me a videotape of one performance. To be honest, I thought I would be annoyed at the intentional irony and hokiness 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 as 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, has 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-- 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 costs 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 is a writer who lives in New Haven. Act Four-- Trying To Respect The Chicken. Sure, it's one thing to take a fictional character like Chicken Little and make her into a star. Try doing that with a real chicken. Just try. Well, these are photographs of chickens. The first one here is a Silver Laced Wyandotte. It's a black and white bird, essentially, but the tail feathers have a lot of iridescent green coloring. In a world where chickens get no respect, Tamara Staples treats them the way the humans treat those we revere most. She takes their portraits lovingly. Her shots are like fashion photographs, beautifully-lit, color backdrops. They're beautiful. The first one looked regal, but now you've just turned to one where it almost looks like-- it's like a clown. it looks comic. Mm-hm. [AFFIRMATIVE] It's a modeled Houdan, which I always sort of call the Phyllis Diller chicken, which is-- Oh, my God. That chicken does look like Phyllis Diller. It does. It's the hat. It looks like it's got this huge feathered hat sort of thing, and a strange body shape. In a way, it's like Tamara Staples is running an odd little cross-species science experiment, one that asks this question: what happens when you try to treat a chicken the way we treat humans? Even if it's just for the length of a photo shoot. What happens, it turns out, is that you learn just where the thin line is that divides human beings from birds. All right. Maybe it's not such a thin line, but it's definitely a line, and, like most city people, I had never thought about it. About where it lays, about what it might be, what it might consist of, until Tamara and I headed out to a farm. I think that is the best one. Yeah, we've got to get him. We don't want him to get dirty or anything, do we? Or does it matter? She runs loose every day. Can you find her? Yeah, we can take her out. We're going to get him to-- we're going to have to wrangle them, you know. We're at the Davidson's Dairy Farm, about an hour and a half northwest of Chicago. Family members present-- Paul, who's helping Tamara choose a bird to photograph, his sister Laura, who's studying photography at a nearby university, the grandfather, George Cairns, a veteran breeder, their father, Dick, who seems the most skeptical of this whole project, but who patiently shows Tamara and her assistant, Dennis, the milking barn as a possible place to set up and shoot. What kind of an area are you looking for? Well, maybe-- it could be a little wider, don't you think? And if it could be from here to there, and know that pole to that pole. For what? Well, we are set-- maybe this is a good time to pull out the portfolio. You want to grab it? I'm actually-- it's a study of the birds. But it's an isolated study, so it doesn't-- people aren't necessarily associating it with the farm and something to eat. Tamara takes us all outside the barn-- so dust won't get on her photos-- and shows them her shots, name dropping the names of some big chicken people, people whose birds she's photographed. Including Bob Wulff, editor of The Poultry Press. Dick notices that a bird in one photo has crooked toes. Probably on a hard surface you turn-- What do you guys think of the pictures? Well, the pictures are nice and sharp. I mean, there's nothing wrong with the pictures. If there's anything to find fault with, it's the birds. You know, they aren't posing the way they should, some of them. Fact is, while city people usually go nuts when they see Tamara's pictures, a lot of chicken breeders don't like them. And to understand why, to fully comprehend this little culture clash here in America, we have to leave the barnyard for a minute and flash back to something that happened back at Tamara's apartment in the city. Tamara showed me this old red book from the turn of the century. This is a book the seal of the American Poultry Association in gold on the front. And then, right there in gold letters-- Standard of Perfection. The Standard of Perfection is really the bible of poultry standards. You know, what birds are-- Tamara flipped past the engravings and illustrations of chickens of all types and breeds. These were show chickens, standing the way that chickens stand in competitions. Then Tamara pulled out one of her own photos to compare, to show me how her poses do not meet the standard in the book. The tail needs to be higher. Her feet are not erect, standing. Chest isn't out. Head, it needs to be up more. And it shows-- I mean, you can see the shape of the chicken much better in the Standard of Perfection pose. See, to me, what's so interesting, though, is that the Standard of Perfection doesn't include a personality. Right. Because it's not about personality. It's about breeding. And so is that a pose that the owners would want to own a photo of? They are very particular about this-- they want to see their bird in the Standard of Perfection pose. Definitely. Because that's what they've been taught from 4-H, when they were kids, to do. That's for them. For herself, for her city customers, she uses the others. OK, back to the barnyard. Tamara and the Davidsons decide to set up the photo session in a room that's usually used to store feed for the cows. It takes about 45 minutes to set this up. That 45 minutes includes dismantling and moving a wall of hay that is probably 10 feet high and 15 feet long. This takes five people. Then in comes the power and the fancy lights and the cloth backdrop that gets hung from the steel pole. The backdrop is ironed first with an iron and ironing board brought from the city just for that purpose. 11 and 1/2, 11, and an 8 and 1/2? Yeah. 11 and 1/2-- your test is going to be at 11 and 1/2, 11, and 8 and 1/2. We're going to shoot your film at 11. It was cold. Well below freezing. So cold that the Polaroid film that Tamara uses for lighting tests would not fully develop. You ready for the bird? We're close. Just want to commune with the bird. We just want to make you pretty. Look how sweet, aren't you? You know what, I'm going to photograph you. My name is Tamara, I'll be your photographer for today. Our first bird is a white Cornish, a show bird who belongs to George. His show bird is used to being picked up and handled. Part of preparing chickens for shows involves handling them a lot so they'll be calm with the judges. If you could just nudge his head up a little bit, he's perfect. He's got his chest out. Now he's got his face in-- OK. Yeah, you know what we want. Yeah, you're-- great, George. He's got a feather on his back here. Tamara has the Cornish stand up on a stack of little red antique books-- kind of unsteady. Things go well for a while. She gets a half dozen good shots of the bird. Expressive shots. More personality than Standard of Perfection, George tells me. The bird's chest isn't high enough, it's body is not turned correctly to the camera. And then the bird stops cooperating. He gets tired. Paul has a suggestion. Bring in a pull-it. You know what? You know that works. Maybe we should explain what that is. What does that mean to bring a pull-it? Thinks maybe a female will perk him up. Laura grabs a hen and waves it at the flaccid cock. The cock does not rise. I can say that on the radio, right? Well, it probably would have been better to get the one from the other pen that he's not used to. Fresh blood. Bring him around a little bit so his back-- For real? The chicken-- the rooster will show off more for a hen that it doesn't know? Yes. If you put a new hen in with him, or him in with a group a new hens, he will really show off. They try this and that, nothing with much success. Finally, with one shot left, Paul suggests putting a hen into the picture with the rooster. Get the girl to-- she looks like her feet are so far apart, she's really struggling to stand. That's the way they stand, though. That's all right, that's all right. Ah-- [CAMERA CLICKS] Oh, did you see that? Yeah. All right, we got it. Why? What did she just do? Describe-- She looked up at him very sweetly. Like that. With her head cocked. The male bird was posing, and she was posing also, but had a personality of just being like the sweet, doting mother, you now? But not Standard of Perfection. But not Standard of Perfection. So we're done with this background, and-- Not Standard of Perfection. Even these perfectly bred Cornishes could not achieve the Standard of Perfection today. And even in this goofy, un-bird-like situation, an hour of watching them makes clear just how hard it is to ever get birds to hit the standard. Which is to say not only do we completely dominate every aspect of the lives of chickens-- their births, their feed, their eggs, their slaughter-- not only have we bred them to human specifications to meet human needs, but we have created a standard for what it means to be a chicken that most chickens can never meet. That's what the standard means. We judge them as chickens, and we find them lacking. If they had brains to understand this, they would be right to feel indignant. But of course, this is a city person's perspective, and that means it is completely wrong-headed from the point of view of anybody who actually raises birds. Standing in the cold feed room, I had a long, long talk with George about this. George is 80 years old. He's been raising birds since the-- I guess the Calvin Coolidge administration. And he says the whole fun of raising birds is raising them to the standard. Well, like, for instance, if your birds lack bone, OK, you go out and buy a bird as near to like them as you can with better bone. But when you mate them together, you might get long-legged birds, or too short. I mean, you don't get what you want just by mating. It takes four or five years to gradually get it out, and by that time, they're inbred and you need new ones. George tells me that when he's breeding a new batch of birds, he'll hatch 65 of them, and only one or two will be anywhere near the Standard of Perfection. That's how hard it is. Do you get frustrated with the Standard Of Protection sometimes? No, we get frustrated with the judges. Because every judge has his own idea of what the standard should be. I thought that's the whole point of a standard, is that-- That is. But one judge will want it this way, and another another. Today, if you bred your birds to the standard of perfection-- weight and everything-- and took them to the show, you probably wouldn't get anywhere. You've got to breed to the fads. That's right. The fads. Like Cornishes these days are supposed to have shorter legs than the real Standard of Perfection. Vertical tail feathers are out in all sorts of breeds that really should have them. In the country, among the chicken breeders, they think about a lot of things you never get to in the city. And when you're raising these birds, with any of these birds, do you have a close relationship with a bird the way some do [UNINTELLIGIBLE] with a pet? I don't have time. Yeah, I got too many things to do. See, a few years ago, I almost died of cancer, and the Good Lord told me how to cure myself. And so I've been working with that a lot the last three years. I've been helping people, and put in papers. Now it's getting all over the United States. What did you do? What do you do? It's you use the root of a dandelion. Simple as can be. But there's something in that that builds up your blood and your immune system. Wait a second. You're saying that you were diagnosed with cancer, and this is the only treatment you've had, and it cured you? Yeah. And I've given it to other people when the medical world has told them that there's nothing more they can do, and they've gotten well, too. But not all of them. If they're too far gone, it won't help them. And you make it into tea or something like that? We just put it in a little water, a little milk, Kool-Aide. You can put it on a sandwich. Anything that isn't hot. George gives me a pamphlet that he's written up. No doctor has actually checked him out to prove the cancer is gone from his body. He's actually got no hard scientific proof that this really works, but he says God told him that this is the way he should be spending his time. And it has cut into his bird breeding a bit. George leaves, off on other business. Tamara is finished hanging and lighting the next backdrop. And the rest of us begin with the second bird, a bird called a Brahma, with elaborately patterned brown and white feathers. Got her. She is big. This is a chicken like the size of a dog. Not that big. A small dog. Our second bird demonstrates the great distance between bird, instinct, and intelligence. And the demands of modern fashion photography, which is to say, of civilization. Called upon to do human tasks, even rather passive ones, a bird remains a bird. Paul carries the huge hen onto the fragile little set Tamara has built. He's a beauty. What ya eating there, buddy? Whew, it slapped me. "I'm scared of this one," she says, quietly, as she adjusts her camera. The chicken is so big-- nine pounds, the size of a small consumer turkey-- that she has to pull the camera back. the Davidsons are looking at her skeptically. Paul asked pointedly if she's ever shot a bird this big. We've got to figure out where the-- Whoa. Hello, bird. Are you going to slap me in the face again? I hope not. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] jump right in your face. You know why you're here? Let's talk. We need you to be beautiful. Here's your moment. OK? There are more where you came from, buddy. You better act up here. This combination of coddling and threats might motivate an aspiring supermodel, or an eager puppy. But this, after all, is a chicken. Laura tries to lure it up with a handful of corn. She standing-- She can get corn, or she's trying to get it, but she has to stand up high for it. Is that where you want her to stand? Someone during this ordeal, a funny thing happens. All the Davidsons, who all started off skeptical, they are completely engaged. Dick suggests a pose that is pure art concept, a pose that could not be further from Standard of Perfection. Laura lures the bird with corn, Paul smooths feathers, and when the bird quivers or moves a wing, three people jump in to fix it back up. There's some feathers on the breast a little bit. A little bit fluffy. You know, it's like she's not real cleaned on there-- OK. She's a little farther. You guys are a great team. I'm going to hire you to come with me. Oops, I got a hand in there. Move the hand, move the hand. Move the hand. OK, great. It wasn't until this point that I realized that I came into this sort of expecting the bird to be more, well, more human. Partly, I think, because I had never really thought about this one way or the other. But partly because Tamara's photos make chicken seem so thoughtful. Over here. Look at the camera, look at the camera. Right there. No, she's completely out of frame. Those photos are a lie. Hello? I think you're going to have a one shot opportunity here. It's going to be when I let go. Whoa. Geez, I didn't even let go. I just started to let up and he yanked it right out of my hand. Fact is, you can try to give chickens respect. You can try to treat them dignity, and photograph them the way you'd photograph anything or anyone that's serious, but the chickens will not care. You can make them look dignified, but it is a brainless, bird-like dignity, and it is ephemeral. Do you feel like your relationship with chicken has changed because of this? No. Not at all. How could that not be so? Um, I order the chicken when I'm at the show. I eat it right in front of the chickens. You eat chicken while you're standing there with a chicken? Yes. [LAUGHING] Is it wrong? I don't know. I'm hungry. Well, no wonder they won't sit still. Yeah. We pack up our gear and move the massive wall of hay back into place. As we do this, chickens hop by. Brahmas, Americanas, mixed breeds. They seem utterly uninterested in us. They cluck at each other, there's feed to eat, hay to nestle in-- they have better things to do with their time. And you know, there's nothing that makes you realize just how inhuman chickens are than spending a day trying to make them seem human. Well, the stories in today's program were produced by Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, Julie Snyder, Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Musical help from Mr. John Connors. Thanks also to Larry Josephson and Jay Hedblade. Elizabeth Meister runs our web site. Tamara Staples' photographs of chickens are now in a book called Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens. Susan Vitucci's opera about Chicken Little is available on CD at www.pulcina.org. That is Pulcina spelled, of course, P-U-L-C-I-N-A. Our website: www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for free-- the ones with chickens or the ones without. Or now you can buy CDs, yes, CDs of any of our programs. Get those Christmas orders in now. Or you know, you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, best-selling books, even the New York Times, all at audible.com. 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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He grew up near San Francisco, playing football and video games. Hyder Akbar is his name. His family's from Afghanistan. And after the Taliban were defeated in 2001, his father's old friend, Hamid Karzai, now the president of Afghanistan, asked his dad to come back and help out. His dad and his uncles had all been part of the resistance that had kicked out the Soviets from Afghanistan, back in the 1980s. So, when Hyder was 17, he went to Afghanistan. This place that he'd been hearing about his whole life. And he took a tape recorder with him. You may have heard the audio diary that he put together for our radio show, with producer Susan Burton, back in 2003. Then the next summer he went back. His father was now the governor of Kunar province, which is this remote area along the border with Pakistan. One of those contested areas where the Taliban and Al-Qaida and local warlords are all still fighting with the new Afghan government and the United States military. The fate of Afghanistan, we're sometimes told, is being decided in places like Kunar. And in Kunar, Hyder saw amazing things. Things real reporters almost never get to see. He traveled with the US military. He saw them interact with the Afghans. He translated for them sometimes. He saw behind the scenes in the new government. He was 18 years old. Today on our radio show, Teenage Embed. WBEZ Chicago, this is This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. This is really one of the most special hours we have ever put together on the radio. And it is with pleasure that I turn things over to Hyder Akbar. I was met at the airport by Sartore, who is our driver. But he's almost become part of the family, because he's been with us for so long. Sartore! Sartore! And Sartore was my very good friend last summer. He was the person that was closest to my age. So we became really close. Kabul has changed tremendously. Right now, there's like three girls in front of me. All they have is like a loose chador, but I see their jeans underneath their [? cloak. ?] Last year, burkas were probably about 95%. This year, I'd say they've dropped to under a quarter, one out of four. Apparently there's a new game show in Kabul. It's like a trivia show, asking like geographical questions, et cetera. You can hear it. I guess the trivia part's over, now they have a Coke drinking contest. Whoever can drink the most Coke, whoever finishes a one and a half liter bottle of Coke I guess wins. OK, it starts. But the funniest thing is the prizes. They're like, six containers of oil. That's one of the prizes. Two cases of soap was another prize. One of the guys gave up. That guy won a box of detergent. The one who won the Coke drinking contest won a box of detergent, and some shoes. Hello, hello. The road to Kunar is really bad. Sartore says, you can't really get a sense of the road unless you come and drive on it yourself. Hearing it on the microphone doesn't cut it. We're probably about three, four hours away from Kunar. We're going about 20 kilometers an hour, so 15 miles an hour, I'd say. We can't go any faster than that on these roads. Bump after bump after bump. And then finally, we got to the American base. And he's like, the Americans are over there. And we went further in to the main part of the city. It was like a little market in the middle of town. And I think everybody was looking at the car. Because everybody recognize white pickup trucks belong to my father, and they're like, ahh, governor's son's here. And as I entered I saw that there was a bunch of people in there waiting. And they were like, standing in a line. And so I was greeting everybody, and giving everyone a hug. Then my father came. And my mom was like, you better kiss your father's hand, don't forget to kiss it. Don't just go up there and hug him. You know people are going to be watching you, his son. And he's like the governor's there, so don't go and give him a hug and just like lift him up or anything. Just give him a kiss on the hand as a sign of respect. And then when you go inside you guys can talk and stuff. And so I remembered that. And I was like, I kissed his hand. And it was weird to finally see him in Kunar, sort of where he's grown up and everybody knows him. And it was weird to be in that kind of place where he belonged so much. Hello, hello. It's about 10:30 at night. I'm actually using a special flashlight that Americans gave to Sartore. He really likes it. It's a really cool-looking flashlight. It's a long tube thing. It's like those kinds you see and use them in the movies. Like The Fugitive, or stuff like that, where they look around in rooms. So we're outside. It's pretty dark, because Kunar doesn't have electricity. The landscape's incredible. Mountains after mountains, and then rivers flowing underneath, and trees. It's a beautiful place. [SIGHS] There's still a lot of problems. It just seems like such a daunting task. These border areas, these tribal areas, all the history. I talked to my dad today about it. It seems like it's never been tamed. From the British, to the Russians, to everybody. To Alexander the Great. They've all struggled. And now my dad is trying. Like any of the people in the government right now, I read somewhere in an article, they joked. They said they wouldn't be good life insurance policy candidates. And it's true. [SIGHS] It's really weird to take walks with my dad and have armed guards walking around with me. I'm just talking to my dad right now. We're walking by the river. This is usually where we take our walks. There's a little stairway down to the riverside from the house. We're walking alongside there with my dad. It's been interesting to talk to my dad about some of the problems he's facing in Kunar. There's the obvious ones, like interference from Taliban, or Al-Qaida. There's the opium. But one of the problems that's not being reported much about, but is becoming somewhat of a serious problem, is the re-emergence of the Afghan communists. They are not ideologically communists. They were just people that fought on the Soviet side during the resistance. These people have become police chiefs, have gotten high positions in the interior ministry, the defense ministry, and this has brought back former tormentors over the people that they tormented. And this is creating problems. Especially in Kunar. My dad has told me about this mass grave right next to us here. This was actually done, I think, during let's say around 1978. What they did, the communists, what they did was they called all the tribal elders in this area. So about 1,200 men were called up. And once the 1,200 people came, the communists they started gunning down basically everybody. And so it's a really huge blow to these people, to see these people back in the government after the massacres like that. And so anyway, I'll probably discuss it more when I'm there with the people that were there. There's some people that survived it. OK, I'm walking to it now. The person that was here actually survived. So he's going to come and tell us exactly what happened. It's usually locked, so he has to open it. Turning the door. OK, I'm inside the place. You can hear me walking over the leaves. I didn't want to get too close with the mic. As soon as he walked in he burst into tears. You see huge bumps in the middle, rising up. I'd say four feet high. That's where the people were piled up on, buried. I see a really old hat. It's probably one of the people's hats that were killed here. Because they left the place just like it was. So he's basically telling me what happened. He came by this bridge that's about 30 yards away from here. And he said, I saw like a fire in here. And I saw this cloud of smoke, and a lot of red. I saw a lot of red, so I knew there was something going on, people being shot. He said when he got closer, he saw bulldozers. Right in this place where we're standing right now, he saw bulldozers climbing on top of the people. He says he saw some of the people, they were pretending like they were killed. And they were just lying still because they thought that maybe, if we lie still here and pretend we're dead, they're just going to walk away. But then they started pulling the bulldozers ahead. And then they realized what was going on. And before they could do anything, they were just-- piles of dirt was piled upon them with the bulldozers. And they were buried in there alive. Another man's saying, to the right of me, he remembers it too. Because his grandmother had died and there was a funeral. So most people from his family were here. They grabbed his father, and they took him. And he said, I was only in fifth grade at that time, so I say, why are they grabbing my father? He said, I ran after my father and I grabbed him by the hand to try to bring him back. And he said, the soldier just grabbed me by the shoulder, and threw me out in front of the house. And people, they just started gunning all of them down. And 63 other people were killed in this house in front of him. He says he remembers it like it was just a couple moments ago, because it was just done in front of his eyes. And he says, there's no elders in his family left. No fathers, no uncles, none of the fathers of his cousins, none of them are alive. So he says, I'm the oldest person left in the family. And that was his hat. It's amazing. At first, they were all tentative to talk. But when the elder came to me and told me about his story of surviving, all these young, not young guys, but like guys in their 30s, are coming up to me now. And everybody has a story. Everybody wants to pour their heart out. And if I could, I'd dedicate the whole hour to them on the radio. So they could just get their story out. It's so tragic that like, nobody even knows their story. I mean, there's lines dedicated to the massacre here and there in certain books. Like, on April 20, 1979, in a village outside of Islamabad called Kerala, 1,147 people were killed. Have you ever read the Revelations in the Holy Bible? It's like judgment day, or the day the world ends. It must have been like that for them. The sky becoming red, and the ground shaking, because there's people trapped alive that want to get out. I mean, imagine going through that. Being a little boy or a little girl watching all of that happen. Or a woman watching her husband and all her sons die like that. And like how can you even expect this person to want to go on, and want to rebuild and reconstruct. You just wish you had a trillion dollars and you could just build everything for them. And just tell them to sit home and just relax. Tomorrow should be interesting. I am going with the Americans to an area called Korengal. There's a problem. One of the communists have gone to Korengal, and he's done a lot of bad things there. There's been a lot of complaints from there. So the Americans want to take that guy. His name is Shah Wali. They want to take Shah Wali to Korengal in Kunar and face his accusers. And it's going to be pretty exciting to see how the Americans work and how they talk with people. One of the problems is, the Americans like professional people. Professional people here are the communists. Those are the only professional people left here that were trained by the Russians in military or police work. And the Americans like working with them, because they're organized. It's been really interesting with the Americans. I've met the Americans now. They know I'm here. And when I talk to Americans it feels like, oh, there's my countrymen. The other people tease me like that too, the people around here. Like the security guards, and like Sartore and them tease me about it. You know, like, your tribe, there's your tribe, when they see the Americans. Good, how are you? You know how long it's going to take to Korengal? About two and a half hours. Two and a half hours? So around 5:30 in the morning I went over to the American base with my uncle. We're on our way. My uncle's name is Abdul Rauf but people usually refer to him as either Mullah Rauf or Commander Rauf. I usually just refer to him as mama, which means uncle. Mullah Rauf is really respected. He was probably one of the biggest commanders fighting against the Soviets. He's lost an eye. He's been injured severely two, three times. He doesn't really have any formal relationship with the Americans. He's basically there helping out my dad, almost as his unofficial deputy. I'm traveling now with the Americans. I'm in a car with Dave from Indiana, Keith, and John, and Rauf mama. And then we finally got there. I guess that you could call it the equivalent of a town hall. It was just like a really small room. Mattresses on the floor, a couple of chairs inside. The reason we came up here was two-fold. His father represents President Karzai. President Karzai has imposed a-- what you call it, it's a moratorium. Anyway, he's preventing people from cutting down all the trees. Kunar obviously doesn't have much of an economy. But one of the few things that Kunar has is really rare in Afghanistan, and that's timber. His reason is, unless you have a program to regrow the trees, it's going to have a bad effect. And so many people going into the mountains, cutting down wood, and there's a lot of money involved. And it's supporting Al-Qaida, or Taliban, or people that are against the government. My uncle had never heard of it. But he said there's this weird thing, it's called [? a chinsa ?] And I was like, [? a chinsa ?]. What is a [? chinsa? ?] And he was like, it's a really weird equipment that can cut down trees really fast. And he's like, it's called a [? chinsa. He's like, we went into the mountains one time to look for these people, to see if they really were cutting down trees. And he's like, I heard a motor in the background. I thought somebody was on a motorcycle somewhere off in the distance. And one of the soldiers told me, oh no, that's a [? chinsa. ?] And I obviously realized, it's a chainsaw. And maybe somebody brought it over from China to Pakistan, and then they sold it to people there. And by the time it goes into Afghanistan, it turns into a [? chinsa. [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] What was the third one? At first, the translator was doing an all right job. But then I had to interrupt him several times. So around this time, I took over the translation. The second reason is that there was a problem that was up here a few months ago. So then he started talking about the second reason why they were there, and that was because of the ex-communist, Shah Wali. We brought Shah Wali up here, we have the elders here, so that we don't have a repeat of this problem in the future. Just because people don't like other people, there's a personality conflict, OK? It doesn't mean that you can't follow the duly appointed people in those positions. They're really trying to establish authority there, the Americans are. And Shah Wali was a person of authority. But, this is just a corrupt official that takes bribes, steals money. And that's what the problem came down to. They refused to make the payments of him asking for bribes. And the Americans saw it as a refusal to pay tax. And not accepting authority, or not obeying authority. What I was going to say, for instance, in the United States, if I get fined from a policeman for driving too fast. But I think I was driving the speed limit, OK. I don't shoot the policeman, OK. Yeah, OK. I don't run him over and say, I'm not going to listen to you, because I was right and you were wrong. I go through the official system. This policeman analogy, if you really want to use it. Now imagine that this policeman had come into your house, and had robbed you like a year ago, and maybe killed a couple kids or two for you. And just walked out of your house, and then you started fighting him for like six months. And then, like the ninth one he comes and gives you a speeding ticket for going 55 in a 60 mile an hour. That would be more an accurate analogy about what happened. He says, we understand that we have to obey the central government, the provincial government. And we do obey them. But he said, if there's some guys coming here, like thuggery, or you know sort of running it like a mafia, then that you know, I can't be responsible for that. Let's bring out the people. So Shah Wali comes in and starts talking also. And when he starts talking, it's really super fast. So you can tell, he's a little worried. It's not really resolved at all. When he got there, he was with the Americans. And so most of the people that had been robbed by him, or that had been beaten by him, or that had their money stolen, or whatever, were too afraid to say anything. And Americans thought everything was OK. And OK, let's take a picture now. So we decided to take a picture. I want to get a picture of him shaking Shah Wali's hand. [LAUGHTER] There you go, they hugged right there. Most of the mujahideen are like the Mullah Rauf. They're proud people. Not the kind of people that will go right away and kiss somebody's ass for a job. But the communists are willing to do that. They've worked for foreigners before, they'll do it again. And that really, in Kunar, it's gotten to a serious point. Where it's the same communist people now, it's just a different group of white people with them. It was just exactly what they would say, you know. And so it's important for the Americans to see who they befriend. It's causing serious damage to them. Everybody's calm downed, you see. Let's talk now about some of the problems, and I'm going to let some of the other people speak in the room now. Major Doug will talk about the projects we can do to bring peace and stability. Next we started talking about school projects, or clinics, maybe a bridge. And I think Shah Wali was just like, one incident, where this could mean a lot of permanent changes for them. So I think the school and bridges were more important for them. I'm going to tell you that I cannot promise you we're going to build you a clinic, a school, a road or a bridge. I will not promise you that. And if another soldier promised you that, I can't guarantee that those things are going to happen. I can tell you that we have submitted the paperwork to try and build a school here. But I am waiting on approval from my generals to see if we can do that. Seems like nobody could make a decision. Or nobody can make a promise, except for Bush or somebody. Because everybody else has somebody higher up above them who has the real authority, who they're going to have to wait for what they decide. So it does kind of disappoint people at times. And they do not seem like the strongest of allies when they can't even promise a bridge to them. Coming up, things get more dangerous. A lot more dangerous. Plus, a kitten. When Hyder Akbar's story continues in the second half of our program. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. This is This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. If you're just tuning in, we're devoting our entire program today to Hyder Akbar's audio diaries from Afghanistan. Hyder was 18 years old when he recorded these, in the summer of 2003, in Kunar Province, where his dad was governor. And we pick up where we left off. Hyder is out with US forces. We're on our way back, and I guess they've seen like a wire on the road. And they think it's a mine, so we've stopped. They're all getting out of the car, to make sure everything's OK. They've seen a wire, so they want to make sure they're not going to get ambushed or anything. Is there something going on? Yeah, there's a wire across the road down there. Sure. An old man and old woman, they were walking together. We passed them coming down. We can hike up to them, but-- They saw a man up above us, higher on the road. And he was just sitting there with his wife. Anyone want to ask that [BEEP]-er if he's got a phone on him, or a radio? Does he have a radio, because they thought maybe, he might have something with him. Or maybe he's the signal guy. And they were just being extra careful to make sure there's not two men sitting there with just another man in the burka, or something like that. Yeah, he's got his wife with him. I don't think-- Can we call them over here? It's his wife. You're not going to disturb his wife, right? Yeah. You could tell he was a poor guy, just, you know, had like a shawl around him, but a really beat up shawl. And he was absolutely terrified. He was like, who are these people walking up towards me? You know he's just a man on the side of the road sitting down. They asked him, what are you doing here? He said we're taking a break, we got tired, we're sitting down here. Maybe if a car comes down, we'll hitch a ride. His wife is just sitting in the corner like a ghost. Please forgive us, as we've disturbed your rest. No, we don't have a problem. This is our country. We want peace and security, so we don't mind you guys taking measures. I'm always glad when I hear a humble man express that. If you see something in the road that looks like an explosive, or a wire, don't do anything about it yourself. Contact an official. After they're done, it almost sounds like the forest ranger at your local national park after he stops you when he thinks you have like a lighter in your hand. And you don't have a lighter in your hand. And then he gives you the little speech about, yeah, just in case, remember never to smoke. We're heading back. They either got it cleared or realized it wasn't a danger. Have a good day, man. So I guess they've either de-mined it, or it wasn't anything to begin with. So, you know. Every trip in Kunar is an adventure. Just got ambushed. We just got ambushed. You can hear the shots fired. You can hear the shots fired at us. We're being fired at. There was just a mine that blew up in front of us. I better get down. I better get down. We've been ambushed. I can't get down. Get down. I'm trying to get, how can I get down more than this? I can't duck down, I'm totally exposed. I'm totally exposed. Reloading! Where they at? I can't see [BEEP]. Wow. Just stay down over there. Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to stay down as much as I can. Just stay low. [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Mama is fine. [LAUGHTER] Mama is joking, he's like, I'm fine. I've been through this a lot of times. But for me it's-- [GUNSHOTS] Welcome to Kunar. Phew. There's a rush of blood. OK, John, check our 3:00. Somebody's pointing to our 3. No, no, I was pointing at him, telling him-- Terry was pointing to our 3:00. So let me explain what happened. A mine just blew up in front of us, so there was an ambush. They were trying to ambush us. There's a truck to the left of us. We're in the middle of a valley, mountains both side of us. We need to be moving, we need to be moving. Let's go! Get in! Get in! Getting in, we're leaving. You can see a pick-up from here. I guess they were killed. [GUNSHOTS] So we're moving pretty quickly, we're getting out of here. Stop, stop! We're stopping, we're stopping, they're coming out again. We're fighting again. There's more people, there's more people. Get down, get down. 9:00! The general's running over here. You're going to have to relay commands from these guys, who are going to be on the radio. You're going to yell at me, I'm going to be on that hilltop with those AMF guys, OK? All right, do you want me to get down? No, you just, you stay in here, you stay safe. But if he has something that comes over the radio, you yell it to me, I'll hear you. All right, all right, sure, I got it. Tell him to pull up his glass, so he doesn't get a bullet. Tell him he don't need to lose the other eye. They joked with my uncle, they said tell him to put the window back up, we don't need him to lose the other eye. So they want me to-- he's going to run to that hill. He doesn't want me to get out of the car. I wouldn't mind getting out of the car. I kind of want to see what's going on. I'm surprisingly calm I guess you could say. Hey, hey, yell to the chief, we're going to move. Get everybody back over here. Chief, we're going to move! Get everybody out of here! Back in the cars! I don't think he heard me. He was way down. Chief! All right, he's coming. Load it up! Here's what's happening. We're going to bound through, our two vehicles. We'll take the lead, establish another support position. Then we're going to bound through and keep on going. You give me a [BEEPING]-ing thumbs up, let's go! Roger that! Let's go! Get in the vehicle! Goddammit let's go! Let's go! Wow. [GUNSHOTS] We're driving fast out of here. OK, we're out of here. Watch the civilians, guys! Once again, I really like mama's calmness. Real calm. He doesn't even have any-- He doesn't have a weapon. He doesn't have any, like armored vests or anything like the Americans. And I mean he's like the calmest out of all of them. It was a good experience, overall, a good experience. That might sound insane, but I'll explain later. OK, guys. We'll see you guys soon. See you, soon. All right, buddy, we'll catch you later. Watch movies, do something. Yeah, watch movies. All right, man. OK, bye guys. All right, take care. I like [? how we went through ?] that baptism for Kunar. It almost helped me with a little bit of legitimacy now. All the security guards wanted to hear it. And they're like oh, he's not scared. So everybody was really happy. And then my dad was sitting by the river, and he was sitting there with the people talking. I was like, I have to tell you something. He's like, all right, just wait until I'm done. I was like, no, no you have to get up for just a minute and talk. And he got up for a minute, and I told him what happened. I said, we got ambushed. He's like, did anybody get killed? I was like, no. Did anybody get injured? I said, no. And he's like, you really interrupted my meeting for that, Hyder? I was like, I got ambushed. And it was really funny to see that nobody else thought it was that exciting or it was that incredible. Compared to what they had been through, it's relatively exciting but not as serious as, you know, interrupting a meeting. So that was really weird. And then it all of a sudden hit me, I was like whoa yeah, that's true. Maybe it isn't such a big deal for my dad, or maybe for my uncle, who's seen a lot of that. There's a helicopter above us who's patrolling because [INAUDIBLE] have been hit. I guess they're trying to deter the missile attacks that have been happening lately. There are missile attacks, that's been happening. It's about every night I've been here. It's not the most helpful thing when you're trying to go to sleep. It's really rude of Al-Qaida. It'd be much more convenient if they would launch them at like 12:00 or 11:00 in the afternoon. Like 12:00 noon. Because it doesn't last, it's not dangerous. It's basically used to scare donors from coming in. To scare NGOs from coming in. And to scare foreign aid money from coming in. And then that, it works, because they launch totally randomly, and it lands in some random ass field. But you know, reports go back to Kabul, border trouble area of Kunar got three rockets launched at it last night. And no overnight stay in Kunar for UN, and blah, blah, blah. I've been talking about the missile attacks that have been happening a lot lately. And then there was one night where three rockets were launched within about a minute of each other, all towards the American base. And names started coming up. And one of the names was Abdul Wali, who is from our valley here. And Abdul Wali's brother got in contact with my dad. And we were really worried. They've heard all kinds of horror stories about what the Americans do. And my dad talked to them and said, don't worry. I'll send my son personally with you to the American [UNINTELLIGIBLE] who will be there with you to translate, and talk to them. So I took him to the Americans. And like, they're asking him where he was 14 days ago, on the night of the three rockets. And this guy like, they don't have calendars, you know. Somebody asks you where you were 14 days ago, you're not going to, especially if you didn't do anything, you're not going to be able to tell. And they're like, oh no, you fired three rockets, how can you not know the night? Three rockets fired where you were. And like, we already think you're lying. And your situation is getting worse by the minute. It was hard to watch. I just put my hand on his shoulder, and I let him know. Just say the truth. Nothing is going to happen if you just say the truth. And he was absolutely petrified, and he could barely whisper the OK. And that was like my last words to him, and then I walked out. And maybe, maybe I am wrong. Maybe they do have very concrete evidence. Or maybe, like last time, let me tell you about the last time, what happened. There's a guy named Saleh Mohammed, OK. This guy's house had been attacked a couple times by the Americans. Weapons, caches, everything looked for a couple times. His women searched, his kids harassed. This guy was absolutely ashamed. He was ready to flee to Pakistan, just because the kind of shame that had been brought upon his family. It's a big deal here, to have that happen to you. And my dad sent him a letter, saying, if you're innocent, prove your innocence and come down to the capitol. He was so grateful, and he came down to the capitol right away. And surely enough, three days later, Americans handed him back to my dad and said, do whatever you want to do with him. He's not a threat to us. And so the Americans had completely put him to shame. Had him ready to flee into the Punjab, Pakistan, and become a later recruit for Al-Qaida. All because of some bad information. So you'd think maybe after something like that happens, they might hold their horses a little bit. I just hope everything goes OK, but in due time, we'll find out. Probably in about three days. I'm going to go to the American base to check up on him. Today, it's been a hectic day, to say the least. Around I'd say, 5:30 or 6:00, a translator from the Americans come over. And said that Steve wants to talk, and he wants to talk now. And he was wondering if you could come to the base. So we got kind of worried, like, what could it be. Because usually they come to the palace, and say that they're waiting outside and if they could talk for a couple minutes. So this was the first time they wanted my dad to actually come there. So we arrived there. And we're waiting in the chair, me and my dad. Steve and Dave arrive, they come in, exchange greetings, they sit down. And then they go, unfortunately, we have some bad news. So I'm thinking, oh man, what happened. You know, is Abdul Wali not cooperating? Or did he admit to having a part in the missile attacks? What happened? And they're like, unfortunately, Abdul Wali passed away. My jaw dropped. I said, oh my God. And my dad was like, what? They said that, 3:30, 4:00, he just collapsed. And they tried to make him stand again. He stood for second, but then he fell again. And then they did the whole routine, with the CPR, and they said no expenses were held. And just like they would have treated an American life. And then we went into like, the torture, and anything like that, and nothing like that was done. He was being treated right, and given like power bars, and stuff like that. He would put rocks in his mouth, but then they thought, maybe it's because he's used to chewing tobacco. He had tried to-- with the shackles that had binded his feet together-- try to break those. And he hit his head against the wall a couple times, trying to work with that. And just for our sake, they wanted us to see the body to make sure nothing had happened to it. So we go see his body. His body was kept in his cell, or whatever it was. And the cell was pretty bad condition, I have to be honest. And inside, lay him with a sheet over his body. It was extremely hot and damp. And my dad took the towel off his face. One of his eyes was open, the other was closed. No marks on him. I touched his face. I touched his chest. And he was dead. And it's like, this is extremely good propaganda for Al-Qaida, Taliban. Hey, guys. Don't go to Americans. Don't listen to Said Fazel Akbar, or you'll end up like Abdul Wali. Remember Abdul Wali. You are going to die like him, if you go to him. So, so bad for us. But aside from politics, it just feels so personal for me. This guy was saying bye to me, like, make sure nothing happens to me. Like, the day before yesterday. And it's hard not to feel responsible. Poor guy was only 28. He was just so scared. How did he die? That was not how it's supposed to happen. After his death, they were ready to do an autopsy to investigate. The people there of course, they don't know what an autopsy is. It would probably be the worst thing you can do, if they brought him back and he had cuts opened up in him, then sewn back together. They're like, oh wow yeah, this is how he died, they just cut him up right through the middle. But there was even a lawyer from Washington there. And that's when I realized that it was a much bigger deal than I had thought of before. And I'm probably one of very few civilians to have witnessed an interrogation of a suspected terrorist by US forces. His death has barely been reported in the Western press. [TRANSLATING] What has been your most difficult day being the governor of Kunar so far? [TRANSLATING] If I had to choose one day as being my most difficult day, it would have to be the day that Abdul Wali died. American forces were ready to use military force to capture this person. And I told them to please hold on and let me try and get a hold of him myself. And since this man trusted me, and since they trusted our family name, the man did arrive to Kunar, and did turn himself into us. He claimed his innocence, but he was incredibly fearful of what the Americans might do to him. And since he was so fearful, I sent you along to prove to him that there's no trouble. And that I'll send my own son with you as a sign of trust. And so, his family told us later on, and his brother told us, also, that he did have heart problems. But this was such a difficult day to me, because of all the backup I have received, of all of the support I have received from the people of Kunar, this did leave a dent in it. Because people were more hesitant now to come to me. What you hear in the background is actually a tap dancer. It's a tradition in Kunar. They tap dance. And you can hear it off in the distance, tap dancing in the cement outside. [LAUGHTER] I'm totally kidding. That's the fan rattling above me. It just sounds like somebody's tap dancing [UNINTELLIGIBLE] off in the distance. But it's actually the fan. There's no tap dancing experts in Kunar yet. I'll be going to Bajaur tomorrow. Bajaur is on Pakistan's side of the border. I'm going there tomorrow because that's actually where my uncle lives. Like that's where his home is. He has a 35 room basically fort, along with his five brothers. I'll be going there tomorrow, probably spend a couple nights there. I'm at my uncle's guest house. And he's going to get out in about a minute, and we're going to have a quick tour of his house. OK, mama's out. We're about to leave the guest house, and enter like the main house. It's a huge room. Tall ceilings, basically like the garage. This is where they store all the foods in like huge sacks. And they actually have our old bags here, too. When we went to America, in '87, we gave them some things to keep. And they still have them in here. And you come out here. Let me just count how many kids are around me right now. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 walked out of that corner. 17. I just counted 17 of them. Like little, little kids. Basically this is where they get their water from, they store it in a tank, and then pour it into buckets and stuff and carry it around. OK, we're going to enter another place now. This is the first time I met mama's wife, she's sitting here. This is mama's room. This is his personal room, this is where he sleeps. My uncle is just about the toughest person you'll ever meet. I mean, I don't want to speculate the number of people he's probably killed. Or the number of times he's almost been killed. Or the number of times he's been, you know, wounded during the war. Like there's really small pieces of shrapnel like, they almost look like crumbs, that are just some places in his body. The other day, one of them was coming out of his forehead. He was like, hey Hyder, can you help me here. I'm like yeah, sure. There's like something coming out here. Check it out. I checked it out and pulled, it was like a little metal piece. He said, oh, I think it's shrapnel, can you help me pull it out? I've been working on it for three days, it's slowly coming out of my skin. A funny story, the other day, there was a kitten. And my uncle saw it. And he's like, oh, look at that kitten. It's ran away from home or something. He's like, I think we should go get it some milk. And the soldiers are like looking around, like giggling with each other, like what the hell. Is this Mullah Rauf? And he told his soldiers, go get some milk, man! Hurry up! And so they ran to go get some milk. He brought the milk, and he brought this like little plate. And he poured it himself. And he was like, [KISSING NOISES] towards the kitten to have some of the milk. And it was the absolutely funniest thing to watch this guy with this big ass beard, and one eye, and metal coming out of his forehead, like, asking this kitten to get some milk. Now I'm going to go ahead and interview my uncle. Because he's really had a life that's pretty much unimaginable. And now-- whoop. You just heard the light go out. You didn't hear the lights go out, we heard the electricity break down. The fence turned off. It's going to be really hot now. So I just want to give a little history of why he came here, and why he became a refugee in Pakistan. [TRANSLATING] This is probably around 1980. These Russians came with these bulletproof vests on. And at that time, we didn't know what they were. I started shooting at them, emptied like all 30 of my bullets into him. And all they'd do is just make a scream, like odd noise, and push back a little. He says it wouldn't penetrate them at all. And he said, it totally spooked me out. And so he said we went home and we decided that these new kinds of Soviets, they are going to create problems for us. Not even bullets can penetrate them. So we decided to come to Pakistan, and become refugees in Pakistan. And at first, he said, we came here in tents. And we lived in tents for a while. Then slowly, slowly, we started building these houses. My uncle started writing with himself, I'm like what are you writing? And he told me this last year, too. He's like, I have a really hard time writing this number. He can't write five in English, so he was practicing that with himself right now, when I was translating this in English. He said, I have a hard time writing down five and four in English. These fives seem fine. I think I'm going to keep this. The fan turned back on. So one more question I'm going to ask is, I think between the resistance and the Taliban times and everything, what was one of the hardest moments of his life? And he said, when one of our guys was shot on the road and died right there. I picked him up on my back. And it was bitter, bitter cold in the mountains. And finally, he said, I managed to find a really small mosque in the middle of nowhere. He says, I went in there with him. And there was a really small bed. He said, I laid the dead body there. And I was laying on the floor next to him, trying to get an hour or two sleep, because it had been my third night without sleep. And boom, right there, a big hole in the ceiling cracked. Because it was hailing really bad. And he said soon the mosque started filling up. And it got to the point where it was up to my thighs. Eventually, I had to go. And I laid down next to the dead body. My clothes got bloodied, and I started to smell. But I had no choice. It was my third night without sleep. And he was a good friend of mine, he says. Same age. We were fighting and just hours ago, he was with me. He says that was his hardest day. [WHISPERING] This is probably going to be my last recording. It's probably about 1:00 at night right now. I couldn't sleep tonight. It's because, I couldn't say anything at that time because, you know, it's my uncle, but that interview was so emotional. When I asked him what was the hardest part ever, of everything you've been through, he mentioned having to sleep next to his friend just hours after he was killed. And the hail pouring down on him, and him trembling in that cold. One of the reasons I wanted to interview my uncle before I left was because I knew it was going to really have a lasting impression on me. And just in case I ever get soft, and I get like, you know, maybe I should just stay in America, or maybe, you know. That image of him having to do that will at least keep me going for another five years. We have a really close relationship. I mean it's to the point where sometimes I accidentally call him dad. That's how close we are. And he really has high hopes for me. And he tells me all the time that he thinks I'm so smart, and that I'm going to do so much for this country. And, it's just, he's been through so much. I can't let all that just go in vain. I want him to see an Afghanistan moving forward. Because of anybody, he deserves to see it. And I can't even begin to explain how much respect and how much I admire him. Despite all he's been through, he's just about the nicest guy you'll ever meet. He still can't walk past a kitten, you know. That's incredible. To have that big of a heart. Because it does make you rough. And it does harden you. But this guy hasn't been hardened at all. One of my dreams is somehow to get my uncle a visa, and take him on a trip to America. You know, take him to Vegas. That's one of the things. If anybody deserves to just lose himself for a weekend in Vegas, it's my uncle. To have some fun, to relax. Hopefully, by next year I'll be able to take him. Despite everything, I'm going to be pulled back here, I know it. I just can't-- I just can't do it any other way. I can't let my uncle down. Hyder Akbar. He's now 20 years old, a junior at Yale University. His recordings were produced for radio by Susan Burton, with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Susan and Hyder have also just published a book, based in part on the two radio documentaries they did for our program. It's called, Come Back to Afghanistan. It's funny, it's charming, it is unnerving and eye-opening and completely unlike anything else on the subject. One footnote to Hyder's story. About six months after we first broadcast today's program, back in 2003, that man that Hyder took to be interrogated, Abdul Wali, the one who died while being interrogated by US forces, he became international news. It turns out the US government concluded that he may not have died of a heart attack, as Hyder was told. The American, who Hyder refers to as Dave in the story, was in fact a CIA contractor named David Passaro, and was indicted by the US Justice Department on charges of assault in the case. Passaro allegedly beat Wali with a large flashlight. He claims his innocence. Pictures of Abdul Wali's corpse showed bruises on his back that Hyder and his dad never saw. Passaro's trial is scheduled to begin in federal court in Raleigh, North Carolina, in December. He is the first civilian charged with prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq. Three members of the 82nd Airborne saw the whole thing and are reportedly willing to testify against Passaro. Hyder's been told that he might be called to testify as well. In March of this past year, the military said that its own investigations indicated that 26 prisoners have died of criminal homicide while in US captivity, including Abdul Wali. Special thanks today to Hyder's parents and brother, Nadera Akbar, Said Fazel Akbar, and Omar Akbar. And to Sartore, and his uncle Rauf. Also thanks to [? Dmitry Shub. ?] Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to the first of the two documentaries that Hyder did for our program a few years back. Or to this show, or to any of our shows, for absolutely free. Or you can buy CDs. 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 explains why it is so hard getting objective journalism on to the public radio station that he manages. Professional people here are the communists that were trained by the Russians. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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One week before Christmas, the Target store on Chicago's West Side. Middle of the day. People are rolling shopping carts full of toys and games through the aisles. Teenagers and single people. Parents from every income. And I don't really understand this, but if you talk to them, this incredibly diverse group, there's one question that always seems to get exactly the same answer. Of all these things that you have in this basket, what do you think is the most likely to get returned? Actually, none of it. Not my stuff. No. I'd say, no, not mine. Well, actually, I'm not worried at all. Actually, I did a pretty good job. The majority of the the stuff that I'm buying is really for my kids. So they definitely ain't going to be returning anything. So, not my stuff. I made a list of what I was getting everyone. And I'm pretty confident in it. When I report their bravado, their confidence, to the store manager Lee Crumb, this is his response. [LAUGHTER] Well, the day after Christmas is the busiest day in refunds. So I don't know how true that statement is, nobody ever returns my gifts. Of course, everybody has sunglasses and rubber noses on that day when they're returning stuff so nobody sees them. It's really funny when the media's here the day after Christmas and they're filming the return center. Everybody's kind of like-- He hides his face behind his arm. Nobody wants their picture taken. Like criminals. If you haven't had at least one drama, one stumper, one gift that has been so difficult to figure out this year that you want to cry, then you are a very unusual person leading a very charmed life, my friend. And as proof, we offer you three stories today of Christmas and Christmas presents. From WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our show in three gift-wrapped little acts for you today, all tied up pretty with a bow. Act one, Make a Joyful Noise Unto Your Mom, in which two sons try, once and for all, to give their mother a gift that she will actually enjoy. Act two, A Christmas Memory. In that act, Mr. Truman Capote, recorded in 1959, sounding eerily reminiscent of our own David Sedaris. Act three, Secret Santa. A Very, Very Secret Santa. Stay with us. Act one, Make a Joyful Noise Unto Your Mom. There was one other thing that everyone at the Target store I talked to agreed on. And that is that parents are usually the hardest people to shop for. They have everything already, they want nothing, they're used to doing the giving themselves. In Toronto, Ian Brown has had it. I know, I know. Deck the halls with bows of holly, 'tis the season to be jolly. Unfortunately, I keep having a certain conversation at this time of year with my 88 year old mother. For a Christmas present, would you like a new pressure cooker? No, no. I've got a pressure cooker. What about a sweater? I've got at least 20 sweaters. What about some jewelry? I have more jewelry than I shall never wear. I don't like jewelry. The whole spirit of Christmas is gone. I hate Christmas. Do you know that more people commit suicide at Christmas than any other time of the year? I didn't know that. Well, that's the truth. I don't have this problem with everyone. I like to think I'm actually quite good at giving gifts. I am. I put a lot of effort into it. I remember what so and so said, or he or she wanted last October. I write it down in a notebook. I buy things my chosen recipients will like but wouldn't buy for themselves. But with my mother, all bets are off. She's what's known as hard to buy for. I'm not sure why. There are a million possible reasons. Maybe it's generational, all those depression raised mothers not wanting to be dependent on the kindness of others. Maybe it's a power play. As long as she doesn't like what you give her, you remain properly beholden. I realize a lot of mothers are like this. But my mother is an especially hard case. She might say in October, this Christmas, all I want is a tablecloth. Then, when she unwraps said tablecloth Christmas day, she'll look at it, without even taking it out of the package, say, "very nice," and roll her eyes as if no one can see her. Then when you point out that she said she wanted a tablecloth, she'll say matter of factly, "I never said anything of the sort." And if, by some miracle, she manages not to totally despise what you've given her, you're still not off the hook. Because then she likes the gift too much and feels embarrassed. My brother and I long ago decided we'd buy one gift between us. That way, at least you split the pain. We bought her a fur coat. She opened the box, sat there with her hands in the fur, and started to cry. "This is too much," she said, through her tears in a strangled voice, then ran upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom for four hours on Christmas day. The last thing my brother-- his name is Tim-- bought my mother-- that she liked, that is-- was a wooden napkin ring. It was hand painted, with flowers. Very pretty. That was 40 years ago. He was six years old. It cost him a nickel at a fair. Sometimes I think the whole gift giving experience has scarred him for life. I heard-- I don't know who told me, but-- you're not giving gifts this year, right? You, yourself. I'm not giving gifts, except to children. I think that giving gifts to parents in this sort of desperate search for approval, you know. Is that what you think it's for? Absolutely. Really? Absolutely. Yeah. You think we're seeking approval? Yes. It's a bit late. I mean, and her disdain for gifts, when you give them, is pretty bad, don't you think? Here, Mom. Here's a beautiful new spring hat. I hate this. What sort of a gift-- Where do you expect me to wear that? It's really horrible. But do you think she's a good gift giver? I mean, here we are, sort of trying to get-- Yes, I think she is. She is a very good gifter, very generous. I mean, she's almost blind. She's got cataracts, she's knitting socks for people. I told her I wanted a pair of argyle socks last year, she made a pair. That's very difficult, argyle socks. You asked her for argyle socks? Yeah. Well, I like the hand-knit socks. I like the hand-knit socks. Well, I'm sure you do. That was on the sixth of December, and still, we had no clue what to give Mom for Christmas this year. But then, I had this idea. A potentially brilliant idea. Maybe, after all this time, the perfect Christmas present. When my brother and I were kids in school, we sang in the choir. Tim was talented. He was a treble and then a tenor. I was a tenor, then a bass. And when we came home from school for the holidays, and were doing the dishes after Christmas dinner, say, we'd sing Christmas carols. We get my sisters, Maude and Daisy, to sing the melodies. And we'd sing the harmonies. We liked doing it. Better still, our mother liked it. She started to ask us to do it every time we came home. We were pretty good, too. Our choir had even cut a record, which my mother owned about 17 copies of and played all the time. And that's what gave me the idea. Instead of buying her something she'll hate, my brother and I will drive out to our parents' place-- something neither of us does enough-- and, as grown men, we will sing her some carols in harmony. The sheer sound of our soaring voices will, as they say in the Anglican hymn book, lift up her heart and transport her back to those days when we were her boys. Neither my brother or I have sung in a choir in years. But we harmonize now and then. We even make harmonies up. And I've always been very impressed. And how do you think the singing is going to sound? I think that it might be fairly putrid. Putrid? Yeah. Really? I've had this impression that we sound great singing the harmonies. Yeah. I hear my brother, and I think, it's all up to me. Oh my God. That is hideous. Was it hideous? Does it sound bad? Bad? We sounded like people who'd been lost in the woods. But how could we fix it? 24 hour emergency carol-singing repair isn't a service listed in the Yellow Pages where I live. So I did the only thing I could think of. I called Eric Hanbury. Hanbury had been at boarding school with my brother and me. He was in the choir, too. He was an eccentric character even then. Very serious and strict, almost terrifying. He knew how to play the organ, for starters. And that was an unusual skill for a teenager to have back in the days when Led Zeppelin were releasing their first album. Hanbury's musical taste stopped at Gershwin and favored Bach. Plus, he was six foot two, even then, and had full mutton chop sideburns at the age of 12. I hadn't seen him in nearly 35 years. Hello? Eric Hanbury? Yeah, Ian. Come up, 1204. All right. But by 10:30 on Saturday morning, the very day we're to sing for our mother, we are in Eric Hanbury's two bedroom apartment on the 16th floor of a high rise in the Northwest end of the city. The spare bedroom-- the one we're all packed into-- is mostly taken up by a church organ the size of a Ford Taurus, complete with foot pedals. Now. Terrible. Let's do verse three. And I'll just play really loudly. It doesn't take long for Eric to lose hope, which is more depressing than I anticipated. No, no, no. How silently, how silently means that you don't yell. We're so desperate, we consult three other experts. The only helpful advice we get is from the greatest of them, John Tuttle, the choir master at Saint Thomas's Anglican Church, which everyone around here knows is one of the two or three best choirs in the city. He's famous for his high standards, his hours of practice. He gives us a few phrasing tips to make it sound like we actually mean the words we're singing. You wouldn't say, and heaven, and heaven, and nature sing. And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing. And it works. Much better. Yeah, that's better. But it doesn't last, because just as this thin ray of hope peeps forth, just as we feel good for the first time all day, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant, and my brother checks his cell phone for messages. And there is one from my father. He sounds pretty frosty. And this is when I find out that my brother has had a fight with my mother. They haven't spoken in three weeks, which is why my father is making the call for my mother. I mean, it's really bad. You can hear my mother in the background telling my old man what to say. "Timmy," my dad says. And I can hear the edge of displeasure in his voice. "I understand you're coming out here. We have to go out in 15 minutes. We don't know where you are, so there is no use you coming out. We're not going to be here. We're not going to wait around for Ian. And incidentally, incidentally, we will not be coming to your Christmas dinner party next Sunday night." And then he hangs up. He doesn't even bother to say goodbye, but then, he never does. It's a 40 minute drive to my parents'. They live in a small house in the country beside a river. All the way out, we practice trying to hone the edge we picked up from John Tuttle. [SINGING] There is no gas station over here. [SINGING] I apologize. You must turn left-- --[SINGING] to get into it. Would let me go ahead? Thank you very much. What a nice guy. We finally pull up to my parents' house. It's cold outside, around zero Fahrenheit. It's one of those filing cabinet gray Canadian days that feels colder than it would if there was snow on the ground. We walk up to the front door. OK, wait. Where's the doorbell? There is no doorbell. They'll know we're here. They'll know we're here. How will they know? OK. Ready? Wait. OK. Ready? As we sang, I thought to myself, so, it has come to this. The bottom of the barrel. Two grown men in their 40s, standing outside in the sub-freezing winter, singing to a closed door. Begging, essentially. Thank you very much. That was very nice. Shall we come in? Can we come in? It's freezing outside. Can we come in? Don't breathe your germs on me. What's that? Don't bring your germs in here. Don't bring your germs in here. That's nice. All right, here we go. My mother moves from the doorway to a dining room chair and sits down. She's looking at the floor, but I think she's ever so slightly crying. My brother can see it, too. I don't want her to cry. But then, it doesn't seem to last. This is your Christmas present. Thank you very much. That was very nice. Reminded me of when you were nice boys who went to school and sang in the choir. And? You're implying that we're not like that anymore? I don't know. You don't even come to see me unless you want something, so. Do you want a cup of tea? Yes, that would be nice. Yes, a cup of tea. We go into the kitchen. So how does that compare with other presents we've given you? Very nice. Very exceptional. Thank you very much. What's the best present we've ever given you? I'd ask for help. What? Help? Do you know what I would really like? I would like you all to come in the spring, help me clean up the garden, help me clean up the house, re-paper the house. That would be lovely. Re-paper the house? Re-paper. Re-paper the living room? The living room, the bath, anywhere. So this has been my problem, gift-wise, all along. Here I was trying to satisfy my mother with some $60 blouse, when what she really wanted was an $8,000 wallpapering job. I am so distracted by this revelation that I don't notice her trying to reverse the gift giving polarity in her favor. Even before the carol is over-- before we finish giving her our gift-- she starts reciprocating, giving us items she has harvested from all over the house. Not just our Christmas presents-- two envelopes of cash-- but other stuff. A calendar of coupons, half a round of Swiss cheese. And what's this? A beautiful cashmere scarf. The same one I had given to my brother at Christmas last year. Oh my God. Where did you get that? It's been up in the cupboard. For how long? That's a cashmere scarf. I gave you that for Christmas last year. And you left it here? You haven't even-- why do I bother? So much for my famous gift giving abilities. No one in my family appreciates my effort. And this was true, it suddenly became clear, of this gift of song as well. Shall we do one more? Yeah. No, I haven't got time. You hear that? She hasn't got time. Go in there and do it. We're doing it for you. It's your Christmas present. That's enough. You've done enough. You don't want to hear "Blest Are The Pure in Heart"? No. She was not interested in "The Pure In Heart." And you know why? Because she was about to miss her favorite TV program. She was giving us the bum's rush. Very nice. Thank you both very much indeed. You're missing your TV program. Lovely seeing you. Yes, lovely to see you. What's the name of the program? Pie in the Sky. Pie in the Sky. Goodbye. See you, Dad. Goodbye, Ma. Love you. So we drove the 40 miles right back to the city. We devoted a whole day to giving our mother the perfect gift, only to get kicked out of her house after 26 minutes in favor of Pie in the Sky, an English TV series about a country detective who makes the best steak and kidney pie in the world. Actually, my mother used to make excellent steak and kidney pie herself, and give it away as Christmas presents. Of course, no Christmas story is complete without a grand, final realization. And on the way home, I had mine. We'd been going about it all wrong. We'd been trying to find the perfect Christmas present. But the perfect gift was a terrible idea, because the perfect gift upsets the delicate truce of failure and imperfection that holds every family together like a trussed bridge. You move one timber, the whole thing can come crashing down. Whereas if you leave that rickety old span as it has always been-- with a little too much need over here, and a little too much eagerness to please over there, all offset by an overhang of standoffishness-- then everyone is happy. The secret, obviously, is to give an imperfect gift, that lavishes enough attention on your old mom that she knows you still care, but that's also fundamentally flawed, so that no one goes home feeling indebted or beholden or lonely. Instead, they can go home reassured. Nothing changes. And that's a Christmas present even a mother could love. Ian Brown, normally broadcast on the CBC. Act Two, A Christmas Memory. We heard about this next recording because the in-laws of one of our producers play it every Christmas when the family gets together. And every Christmas they all cry. It's Truman Capote's story, "A Christmas Memory," about his own childhood growing up in rural Alabama in the 1920s and '30s. This is an abridged version of the story, shortened a bit for the radio. Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than 20 years ago. A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. "Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the window pane. "It's fruitcake weather." The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven. She is sixty something. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together, well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives. And though they have power over us and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other's best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880s when she was still a child. She is still a child. "I knew it before I got out of bed," she says, turning away from the window with a purposeful excitement in her eyes. "Help me find my hat. We have 30 cakes to bake." In addition to never having seen a movie, she has never eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry. Of the ingredients that go into our fruitcakes, whiskey is the most expensive, as well as the hardest to obtain. State laws forbid its sale. But everybody knows you can buy a bottle from Mr. Haha Jones. And the next day, having completed our more prosaic shopping, we set out for Mr. Haha's business address. A sinful, to quote public opinion, fish fry and dancing cafe down by the river. We've been there before, and on the same errand. But in previous years, our dealings have been with Haha's wife, an iodine-dark Indian woman with brassy, peroxided hair and a dead tired disposition. Actually, we've never laid eyes on her husband, but we've heard that he's an Indian, too, a giant with razor scars across his cheeks. They call him Haha because he's so gloomy, a man who never laughs. As we approach his cafe-- a large log cabin festooned inside and out with chains of garish, gay naked light bulbs, and standing by the river's muddy edge under the shade of river trees, where moss drifts through the branches like gray mist-- our steps slow down. Even Queenie stops prancing and sticks close by. People have been murdered in Haha's cafe, cut to pieces, hit on the head. There's a case coming up in court next month. I knock at the door, Queenie barks, my friend calls, "Mrs. Haha, ma'am? Anyone to home?" Footsteps. The door opens. Our hearts overturn. It's Mr. Haha Jones himself, and he is a giant, he does have scars, he doesn't smile. No, he glowers at us through Satan-tilted eyes and demands to know, "What you want with Haha?" For a moment, we are too paralyzed to tell. Presently, my friend half-finds her voice, a whispery voice at best. If you please, Mr. Haha, we'd like a quart of your finest whiskey. His eyes tilt more. Would you believe it? Haha is smiling, laughing too. "Which one of you is a drinking man?" "It's for making fruitcakes, Mr. Haha. Cooking." This sobers him. He frowns. "That's no way to waste good whiskey." We pay him with nickels, and dimes, and pennies. Suddenly, jangling the coins in his hand like a fist full of dice, his face softens. "Tell you what," he proposes, pouring the money back into our bead purse, "just send me one of them fruitcakes instead." "Well," my friend remarks on our way home, "there's a lovely man. We'll put an extra cup of raisins in his cake." The black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted pumpkin. Egg beaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it. Melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days, our work is done. 31 cakes, dampened with whiskey, bask on window sills and shelves. Who are they for? Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends. Indeed, the larger share are intended for persons we've met maybe once, perhaps not at all, people who have struck our fancy, like President Roosevelt, like the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year. Or the young Wistons, a California couple whose car, one afternoon, broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant hour chatting with us on the porch. Young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture, the only one we've ever had taken. Now a new December fig branch grates against the window. The kitchen is empty, the cakes are gone. Yesterday we carted the last of them to the post office, where the cost of stamps turned our purse inside out. We're broke. That rather depresses me, but my friend insists on celebrating with two inches of whisky left in Haha's bottle. Queenie has a spoonful in a bowl of coffee. She likes her coffee chicory-flavored and strong. The rest we divide between a pair of jelly glasses. We're both quite awed at the prospect of drinking straight whiskey. The taste of it brings screwed up expressions and sour shudders. But by and by, we begin to sing, the two of us singing different songs simultaneously. I don't know the words to mine, just, "Come on along, come on along, to the dark-town strutter's ball." But I can dance. That's what I mean to be, a tap dancer in the movies. My dancing shadow rollicks on the walls. Our voices rock the chinaware. We giggle, as if unseen hands were tickling us. Queenie rolls on her back, her paws plow the air. Something like a grin stretches her black lips. Inside myself, I feel warm and sparky as those crumbling logs, carefree as the wind in the chimney. My friend waltzes around the stove, the hem of her poor calico skirt pinched between her fingers as though it were a party dress. "Show me the way to go home," she sings, her tennis shoes squeaking on the floor. "Show me the way to go home." Enter two relatives. Very angry. Potent with eyes that scold, tongues that scald. Listen to what they have to say, the words tumbling together into a wrathful tune. "A child of seven, whiskey on his breath. Are you out of your mind? Feeding a child of seven, must be loony. Road to ruination. Remember cousin Kate, Uncle Charlie, Uncle Charlie's brother in law? Shame. Scandal. Humiliation. Pray. Beg the Lord." Queenie sneaks under the stove. My friend gazes at her shoes. Her chin quivers. She lifts her skirt, and blows her nose, and runs to her room. Long after the town has gone to sleep, and the house is silent except for the chimings of clocks and the sputter of fading fires, she is weeping into a pillow, already as wet as a widow's handkerchief. "Don't cry," I say, sitting at the bottom of her bed and shivering, despite my flannel night gown that smells of last winter's cough syrup. "Don't cry," I beg, teasing her toes, tickling her feet. "You're too old for that." "It's because," she hiccups, "I am too old. Old and funny." "Not funny, fun. More fun than anybody. Listen, if you don't stop crying, you'll be so tired tomorrow we can't go cut a tree." She straightens up. Queenie jumps on the bed, where Queenie is not allowed, to lick her cheeks. "I know where we'll find real pretty trees, Buddy, and holly too, with berries big as your eyes. It's way off in the woods, farther than we've ever been. Papa used to bring us Christmas trees from there and carry them on his shoulder. That's 50 years ago. Well, now I can't wait for morning." Morning. Scented acres of holiday trees, prickly-leafed holly, red berries, shiny as Chinese bells. Black crows swoop upon them, screaming. Having stuffed our burlap sacks with enough greenery and crimson to garland a dozen windows, we set about choosing a tree. "It should be," muses my friend, "twice as tall as a boy, so a boy can't steal the star." The one we pick is twice as tall as me. A brave, handsome brute that survives 30 hatchet strokes before it keels with a creaking, rending cry. After weaving and ribboning holly wreaths for all the front windows, our next project is the fashioning of family gifts. Tie dye scarves for the ladies. For the men, a home-brewed lemon, and licorice, and aspirin syrup to be taken at the first symptoms of a cold and after hunting. But when it comes time for making each other's gifts, my friend and I separate to work secretly. I would like to buy her a pearl handle knife, a radio, a whole pound of chocolate covered cherries. We tasted some once, and she always swears, "I could live on them, Buddy. Lord, yes I could, and that's not taking his name in vain." Instead, I am building her a kite. She would like to give me a bicycle. She has said so on several million occasions. "If only I could, Buddy. It's bad enough in life to do without something you want. But confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want them to have. Only one of these days, I will, Buddy. Locate you a bike. Don't ask how. Steal it, maybe." Instead, I am fairly certain that she is building me a kite. The same as last year and the year before. The year before that we exchanged slingshots. All of which is fine by me, for we are champion kite flyers who study the wind like sailors. My friend, more accomplished than I, can get a kite aloft when there isn't enough breeze to carry clouds. Christmas Eve afternoon, we scrape together a nickel and go to the butcher's to buy Queenie's traditional gift, a good, gnawable beef bone. The bone, wrapped in funny paper, is placed high in the tree near the silver star. Queenie knows it's there. She squats at the foot of the tree, staring up in a trance of greed. When bedtime arrives, she refuses to budge. Her excitement is equalled by my own. I kick the covers and turn my pillow as though it were a scorching summer's night. Somewhere a rooster crows, falsely, for the sun is still on the other side of the world. "Buddy, are you awake?" It is my friend, calling from her room, which is next to mine. And an instant later, she is sitting on my bed, holding a candle. "Well, I can't sleep a hoot," she declares. "My mind's jumping like a jack rabbit. Buddy, do you think Mrs. Roosevelt will serve our cake at dinner?" We huddle in the bed, and she squeezes my hand I love you. "Seems like your hand used to be so much smaller. I guess I hate to see you grow up. When you're grown up, will we still be friends?" I say always. "But I feel so bad, Buddy. I wanted so bad to give you a bike. I tried to sell my cameo Papa gave me. Buddy," she hesitates, as though embarrassed, "I made you another kite." Then I confess that I made her one, too, and we laugh. The candle burns too short to hold. Out it goes, exposing the starlight. The star spinning at the window like a visible carolling that slowly, slowly, daybreak silences. Possibly, we doze. But the beginnings of dawn splash us like cold water. We're up, wide-eyed and wandering, while we wait for others to awaken. Quite deliberately, my friend drops a kettle on the kitchen floor. I tap dance in front of closed doors. One by one, the household emerges, looking as though they'd like to kill us both, but it's Christmas, so they can't. First, a gorgeous breakfast, just everything you can imagine, from flapjacks and fried squirrel to hominy grits and honey in the comb, which puts everyone in a good humor, except my friend and I. Frankly, we're so impatient to get at the presents we can't eat a mouthful. Well, I'm disappointed. Who wouldn't be? With socks, a Sunday school shirt, some handkerchiefs, a hand-me-down sweater, and a year's subscription to a religious magazine for children, The Little Shepherd. It makes me boil, it really does. "Buddy, the wind is blowing." The wind is blowing, and nothing will do till we've run to a pasture below the house, where Queenie has scooted to bury her bone. And where, a winter hence, Queenie will be buried too. There, plunging through the healthy waist-high grass, we unreel our kites, feel them twitching at the string like sky fish as they swim into the wind. Satisfied, sun warmed, we sprawl in the grass and peel Satsumas and watch our kites cavort. Soon I forget the socks and hand-me-down sweater. I'm as happy as if we had already won the $50,000 grand prize in that coffee naming contest. "My, how foolish I am," my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. "You know what I've always thought," she asked, in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but a point beyond. "I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagine that when he came, it would be like looking at the Baptist window. Pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through. Such a shine, you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I'll wager it never happens. I'll wager, at the very end, a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are--" Her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds, and kites, and grass, and Queenie pawing earth over her bone-- "Just what they've always seen was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes." This is our last Christmas together. Life separates us. Those who know best decide that I belong in a military school. And so follows a miserable succession of bugle blowing prisons, grim, revelry-ridden summer camps. I have a new home, too, but it doesn't count. Home is where my friend is, and there I never go. And there she remains, puttering around the kitchen, alone with Queenie, then alone. "Buddy dear," she writes in her wild, hard to read script, "yesterday, Jim Macy's horse kicked Queenie bad. Be thankful she didn't feel much. I wrapped her in a fine linen sheet and rode her in the buggy down to Simpson's pasture, where she can be with all her bones." For a few Novembers, she continues to bake her fruitcakes single handed. Not as many, but some. And of course, she always sends me the best of the batch. But gradually in her letters, she tends to confuse me with her other friend. The Buddy who died in the 1880s. A morning arrives in November, a leafless, birdless, coming of winter morning, when she can not rouse herself to exclaim, "Oh my, it's fruitcake weather." And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across the school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky, as if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven. Truman Capote, recorded in 1959. "A Christmas Memory" was broadcast with permission of the Truman Capote Literary Trust. Alan U. Schwartz, trustee. This version of the story was abridged for radio. Coming up, more proof that the perfect gift, like the perfect crime, is an elusive thing. In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. It's our guide to holiday gift giving in which we guarantee you will find no practical advice for your last minute shopping. Instead, we have stories of holiday presents. We're at act three of our show. Act Three, Secret Santa. Caitlin Shetterly has this story about one gift leading to another, leading to another, leading to another, and then stopping. I grew up in a small town called Surry on the coast of down-east Maine. At Christmas, most everyone in our town bought their trees at Jordan's Tree Farm. $5 per tree, cut at your own risk. Thinking back, it seems funny to me now, since after all, this is rural Maine, the pine tree state. And you'd think everyone could cut their own trees on their own land. And it's not like the trees at the Jordan farm were so special. Pretty much everyone called them Charlie Brown trees. People came because of Robert Jordan. They were loyal to him, and they figured he could use the money. Every year the drill was the same. You'd get out of your car with your family, trudge for what seemed like miles in sub-zero wind, searching for the perfect tree. Drag your prize back through the snow, and then, finally, you'd go find Robert. This was one of the only times of year most of us saw Robert. He seemed to live an entirely reclusive life in his ramshackle house, perched above the road and bordering the thick trees that fanned out behind his barn. Many of us know someone like Robert, our own Boo Radley, a poor old man who has lived with his parents his entire life until one, and then the other, died. Here is what we knew about Robert from these short, yearly transactions. He had a very strange voice. He wore Coke bottle glasses, an orange hunting cap, and in my memory, a red and black Buffalo plaid jacket. But somehow Ron Hamilton and his wife Brenda came to know Robert better than most people did. Here's Ron. A lot of people thought Robert was retarded because his father was hard of hearing, and he kind of talked like this. You know. I kind of mimic him a little bit, but every now and then he'd say something like, "Well, how are you today?" And I'd say, "Pretty good, Robert." "Well, what are we going to do today?" And it kind of reminded me of, Katharine Hepburn is it, that's got that same kind of broken spot in her voice. But he never knew he done that until later in life. Because his father was almost deaf, Clyde. He'd have to look at you and went, "What? What?" And Robert would belt it right out. The farmhouse and the Jordan's lifestyle on the farm was primitive. The house had no hot water. Clyde and Robert ate canned cold beans for breakfast. Their porch was overflowing with junk and cats and smelled like cat food and urine. Robert slept in a chair in the living room, and Clyde slept on a small cot next to the wood stove in the kitchen. Robert's mother Bessie had passed away in 1987, in one of the small bedrooms upstairs. Since then the two men were on their own. About 15 years ago, Ronnie Hamilton and his wife Brenda met Robert and Clyde. Brenda was making and selling Christmas wreaths. And when Robert saw them, he invited the Hamilton's first to get brush from the farm to make their wreaths and later, to sell them at the farm. They ended up spending a lot of time together. Despite the Christmas tree farm, Robert and his late mother were Jehovah's Witnesses. And so the family didn't actually celebrate Christmas. But Ronnie and Brenda wanted to include them into their holiday. One day Ron noticed Clyde was wearing two different boots and that on the coldest days, they weren't keeping his feet warm. So I went and bought him a pair of boots. And we bought Robert a pair of sneakers, because I knew Robert liked the ones that you didn't have to lace up, that just had the Velcro. Anyway, we got several little things in a Christmas stocking. Well, day before Christmas, I had come over and knocked on the door and I says, "Santa's here." And they had come in. And he says, "What did you do that for?" I said, "Because I want to." And I said, just because you like to do things for people. And I asked what did you do that for. And he says because he wanted to. So I kind of put it right back to him that way. He liked Christmas. After that first Christmas, Robert began exchanging gifts each year with Ron and Brenda. As Clyde got older and started to rely on Robert, Robert started to rely on the Hamiltons. Late one night, Clyde got so sick, Robert called Ron for help. And he says, "Father's sick. Can you come get him?" This was like 11:30, 12 o'clock at night, and snowy and stuff. I went over and got him, picked him up, and put him in the truck, and took him to Blue Hill Hospital. Well, needless to say, he had cancer. And that went on for about a year. And finally, Robert's father was in the hospital real bad there. And Robert called me up. And he said, would you take me over to see Dad. I says, yeah. Went in and the doctor said, it's just a matter of time. And I said to Robert, if you want to say something to your father, you want to say it now. We got a kick out of this, because we chuckled about it afterwards. He said, but I can't get him awake. I said, I can get him awake. He said, you can? And he said, how? And I said, you watch. And I said, Clyde, there's somebody in your Christmas trees. He opened up one eye. And he looked at me, and said, I'm not dead yet. I said to Robert, you want to say something to your father, you want to talk to him now. So they talked for a few minutes, then Clyde dozed off. And Robert called me the next morning and told me his father had died. Robert asked Ron to take care of the burial arrangements. So Ron dug the hole for Clyde's remains, gathered some friends, and said a few final words. Then Robert asked Ron if, when it came time, he would do the same for him. Ron said yes. Robert was 65 when his father died. He had struggled with diabetes for most of his life. He had had heart problems. And he was in and out of the hospital. He stayed with Ron and Brenda for a couple of months in the winter of 2000 because he couldn't take care of himself. He loved the hot showers and the television with a remote control they had at their house. Eventually, Robert went back to the farm and to his independence. He started walking four miles a day and lost some weight. Then in mid April of 2001, Ron went over early one morning to pick Robert up to take him into town. He found Robert lying on the floor. He was dead. Ron kept his promise to Robert, and held a small ceremony on a sunny April afternoon. He scattered Robert's ashes out back at the farm among the Christmas trees. A few days later, the Hamiltons were contacted to come to a reading of Robert's will, along with representatives from five local nonprofit organizations. As the lawyers started to read out the will, people were stunned. It turns out Robert Jordan was a millionaire. Robert had inherited a couple hundred thousand in AT&T stock from three neighbors. Wealthy sisters who had a summer place across the road. When Robert was growing up, he had mowed lawns and run errands for the sisters. And when they got older he had taken care of them. When the last sister, Betty, died in 1984, she left Robert the stock and her house. Robert sold the house, and as for the stock, his timing was perfect. It boomed. Robert had divided up his money between local organizations he was interested in or had been kind to him. But the largest gift was left to Ron and Brenda Hampton. Robert Jordan had left them the farm. Well, I was flabbergasted. I couldn't believe it. To this day I don't believe it, because I didn't look for nothing from nobody. We were so excited. So we packed up our stuff, and started cleaning on the farm, and fixed the farm up a little bit, and the barn and stuff. Moved in, and it was just a lovely spot. The tree farm Robert left to Ronnie and Brenda sits on top of a hill looking over Route 172. It has 66 acres of trees and a natural spring. The house is white, and from the road it looks bigger than it really is. The only sink was in the kitchen. And the house had no heat besides the wood stove. In August of 2001, Ronnie and Brenda moved in. They were excited, not daunted, by the task that lay ahead of them. A year later, I went to visit Ronnie and Brenda. It was the first time I'd actually been able to walk onto the porch. The clutter was gone, a small gray kitten lay curled on a couch, and three dogs met me at the door. It was as if Ronnie and Brenda's world had opened up. Ron told me that Robert's gift had completely changed his life. I don't have so much tension on me, you know, thinking that, what am I going to do. Now I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to work on these Christmas trees most of the rest of my life and enjoy it like he did. When I left that night, Ron walked me to my car. That's great. Thank you so much. Well, thank you dear. I think I'll come back at Christmas. OK. Are you going to get your tree? Yeah, I'm definitely going to come get a tree. For sure. Thank you. Thank you dear. Test, test. Four months later, it's Christmas Eve, and I'm back at the tree farm. Hi. Come on in, dear. How are you? Boy, your house looks great. It's coming together. Oh, look at the tree. Is it going well, though, living here? Are you feeling good about it? I had nothing but trouble over here all summer long. Tell me why. Some people broke into my pickup truck and had taken my pills. And come in here. After the Hamiltons moved in, things got complicated. The house and the barn needed a lot of work. And the Hamiltons needed money they didn't have to do that work. Tending to 66 acres of farm that stretched over a mile back from the road was hard for Ron. One day he fell while surveying the land, and he pulled the muscles and tendons in his neck. Ron went to the hospital and was given painkillers, which he brought home. And a day later, some kids broke into his truck and stole his medicine. Then, believe it or not, things took a turn for the worse. They tried to arrest me and charge me with growing marijuana, which wasn't mine. Where was the marijuana? Somebody had planted it out back in the Christmas trees, two or three different plots of it. The police came? Oh, helicopter, the whole nine yards. Who planted that, do you think? I don't know. I have no idea. Ron had to hire a lawyer to prove that the plants weren't his, putting him into even more debt. And on top of all that, Ron had a heart attack. This all happened within four months. Finally, Ron and Brenda decided to sell the farm. With the money they got from selling the farm to their neighbor, Bill [? Kidue, ?] they built a small, one level house on seven acres of land, over closer to Ellsworth on a busy road. Ron has been back a few times to cut brush for Brenda's wreaths. But when I asked Ronnie to take me back to the farm, he refused, saying it was just too painful. Well yeah, it kind of bothers you. Why does it bother you? I don't know. Just thinking it was mine. I wish that I could have kept it. This is Brenda, Ronnie's wife. It was nice and sunny. You'd go out and sit on the porch there. And we'd watch traffic go by. It was [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. It was [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. It was all screened in. It was nice out there. Nice porch. When we first moved to the farm it was just like we remarried. Everything was just cozy, and the colder it got, the more we snuggled. It was different. It was better. It was more-- it's a country life. Every morning she'd get up and have a coffee pot going, and take a cup of coffee with her and the dogs. And she'd walk out back. And she'd say, well, we've got several deer crossings out there, or you ought to see the turkey tracks, or there's coyote droppings out there. And we had visions. We talked about, we wanted to take this little pond, and it would make a beautiful ice skating pond. We thought, well, we could have the kids come over. And they could ice skate over there, get them off the streets, you know. And then eventually, that we could have a horse and a sleigh and give sleigh rides over there. But it didn't turn out that way. But we dreamt of it. Didn't we, dear? Later, Brenda tells me that she doesn't like the new house they've built. She says it doesn't feel like a home and she doesn't want to decorate for Christmas this year. Their whole idea of Christmas is still tied up in the dreams they had for the farm. In the Dylan Thomas poem, "A Child's Christmas in Wales," there is a point toward the end where the narrator and his childhood friends go carolling in the dark. They walk up a long driveway to a large house, and although they are afraid, they soldier on. And as they begin to sing, a voice joins theirs from behind the dark door. Thomas writes, "A small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time joined our singing. A small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door. A small dry voice through the keyhole." The boys run, and never finish their song. When I was little, I used to go with the Surry Elementary School to sing carols outside Robert Jordan's house. And I always confused the voice in the poem with the real life Robert Jordan, someone isolated, someone people don't stick around for. But that wasn't really who he was. He reached out to people. He helped out his neighbors across the street without asking for anything. In return, they made him a millionaire. And when Ronnie and Brenda helped him without asking for anything, in return, he gave them the farm. So much of his life was about a kind of selfless giving. And sometimes it didn't work out, sure. Ronnie and Brenda are definitely going to miss the farm this Christmas. But Ron still has hope for the holidays. He thinks their house won't feel so much like a motel once they get the tree up, put some lights outside, and have some family over. Already, Brenda has nearly sold all her wreaths. And when I called this week, Ron was already ahead of the game. His shopping is all done. And he was busy wrapping presents for his wife. Caitlin Shetterly is the artistic director of the Winter Harbor Theater Company in Portland, Maine. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Golombisky and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, and Starlee Kine. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Kelsey Dilts. You know you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, best-selling books, even the New York Times, all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, or as he likes to be known-- I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Recently, I was talking to this guy who told me how years ago, because of a medical condition, he had to give up beer. He had only been a casual beer drinker before this. He'd never really given beer much thought. But now that he couldn't have a beer, he was thinking of beer all the time. He had a fantasy. It went like this. He goes into a bar, and he orders a beer. That was the whole thing. It's hard giving things up. Walter was three, and it was time for him to give up the pacifier. The pacifier was impairing his speech, and so it was time to give it up. And his mom and dad weaned him from it slowly. At first, he could only use the pacifier upstairs, then only upstairs in his room, then only upstairs in his room in the bed, though enforcement on the whole bed thing was actually kind of spotty. Anyway, finally came the big day. Walter announced he was ready to get rid of the pacifier. And he threw it into the trash himself. And everybody clapped, and everybody hugged him. And then the drove to a toy store, and they got him some special presents, a toy treehouse, a teddy bear. And that first night, when it was time to sleep, Walter was brave. He was stoic. He went right to bed. And maybe, I don't know, five minutes passed before he was out of the bedroom and downstairs crying. "I'm really sad," he said. His mom and dad asked him if he wanted to play with his new toys for a while. And he tried that, and then went back to bed. More sobbing. An hour passes, two hours. It breaks his parents' hearts. Frankly, if they still had had the pacifier in the house, they would have caved and given it to him, it was so upsetting. But he had thrown into the trash at his grandparents' house. It was gone. And that night, for the first time in his life, Walter slept in his parents' bed. It was the only way that he could actually get to sleep. The next night was a little easier, next a little easier than that. Anyway, after a couple of days, Walter announced the special request that he had for all the grown-ups in his life, grandmas, grandpas, uncles and aunts, the lady next door. He wanted to hear their stories about when they gave up their pacifiers. I told this to a friend of mine who gave up drinking a decade ago, how this little boy, Walter, wanted to hear these stories. And she said, man, that's just like AA. Though the problem for Walter, of course, was that no adult really remembers giving up their own pacifier. It's just too long ago, right? So everybody either talked about giving up other stuff that the did remember, like giving up their blankets as little kids. One auntie offered to talk to him about how she quit smoking, but she was warned off that. Or they just made up stories, dramatic stories about giving up their pacifiers to tell Walter. It's comforting to hear other people's stories of kicking the habit. It's just comforting at any age. It makes it feel like it's possible. And so, this week we bring you four stories of people giving things up, living without, some of them voluntarily, some not. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our program today, Do You Hear What I Hear? In that act, one man, one teenage daughter, and many, many fish. Act Two, The Journalism of Deprivation, Sarah Vowell introduces you to a magazine that, if you're lucky, you have never had to read. Act Three, The Call of the Great Indoors, in which we hear a defense of living inside from somebody who can speak authoritatively about the pros and cons. Act Four, Tin Man. In that act, life without a heart. Stay with us. You know, I didn't talk about it for a long time, because it's so abstract. It's like people can't imagine it. But then, I'll be in a restaurant. There's a loud din of people talking, and dishes, and all that stuff going on in a restaurant, and somebody will ask me, well, how loud is it right now? And I'll often say, it's the loudest thing in the room. And people can't-- it's just incomprehensible to people that you could get used to a tone like that in your head all the time. See, as I'm talking about it right now, it's really loud. The very first doctor I saw was this young ear, nose, and throat guy. And he examined me. But he was examining me as if he were just going through the motions. He already knew what he was going to tell me. so after all the examinations, he said, well, you have tinnitus. And there's no cure for it. You're just going to have to learn to live with it. And I thought, well, what are you talking about? I can't learn to live with this. And I went through 10 years of-- five other doctors-- going to the high priests at Boston Hospital, to every alternative psychic-- thing you can possibly imagine. There's an-- four or five different acupuncturists. This one dentist said, well, I'm going to make you a mouth guard. He said, well, I'm sure this will work. It's going to cost you $19,000. And I did some muscle body work and some homeopathic remedies. I had my entire jaw realigned by a dentist over a two-year period. And we had things like this guy come in who spread these Petri dishes all over our house. So we had to install all these filtering systems in our house, and fans, and air cleaners and dehumidifiers. So I've spent probably over 10 years, $70,000. I'm a photographer. And the first tone appeared around the same time that I started working on this book about musicians called Where Music Comes From. And I traveled around the world with 25 different musicians. And all of a sudden, I had to stop. The first tone appeared at the beginning of the project. And then the second tone came. The whole thing got so bad that my career just came to a stop. I just couldn't travel. I was completely disabled by these tones. I'm going to try on the piano. I think what I have in my right ear is a D-flat. And in my left ear, a C one octave lower. The right ear is a D-flat, and the left ear is a C. The most maddening part of this was when I was with this friend of mine, this jazz musician. And I described it to him. And he threw his head down on his hands on the table. We were having lunch. And I could see in him that he completely understood how maddening it was. Because he understood that the D-flat was always trying to resolve itself into the C. So can you play both of them at the same time? I might be able to. Let's see. Let me try this for a second. Dad? Test. OK, what were you saying? That, well, as we've been doing this piece, I've been thinking, it must-- I can't imagine having a tone in my ear, especially like a pure tone, tones that don't stop like that. So I can not even imagine what it must be like to have it all the time. So what is it about having the tone? Like you're trapped inside your own head. You're in a room with no doors and no windows, and just a speaker of that sound driving you literally up the walls. I swear I would cut my head off or something. I'd follow van Gogh's path and cut my ears off. This is an odd thing to say, I think. I'm somewhat grateful for the tone. Of course, I don't feel grateful on bad days. But before you were born, I used to travel constantly on assignment all over the world. And on good days, when I think about it, I think about the tone being a warning that I needed to slow down. And then you were born, and I thought, not only did I need to slow down, but I wanted to slow down. And on bad days, I feel like oh, OK, I've learned this lesson. I've slowed down. Now the tone can go away. But it doesn't go away. I'm reading through this outline of all the tapes that we have, and you say, I could not imagine losing my hearing. And I was like, well, wait a minute, it's not that bad. And then, I realize it's sort of the reverse. I haven't really lived with perfect hearing ever, so I can't compare. But I just thought it was interesting that you couldn't imagine losing your hearing, and I could not imagine having tinnitus. Do you remember when you got your hearing aid? No. Do you want to hear what happened? Because for Mom and I, it was a huge event. Because you'd gone through all the tests. And we discovered that you indeed had a hearing loss, and that they were going to fit you with a hearing aid. And before that, you kept saying "what" all the time. And there were certain words that you couldn't pronounce, or certain sounds that you obviously were missing. And that's what the audiologist and the doctors described to us. So we went down to the Beverly Hospital. Your mom and I were sitting in the room. And she put the hearing aid in your ear and turned it on and made all the adjustments. And then you slid off the chair and said, oh my God. I can hear. Well, sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to hear everything perfectly. You know? To have that entire sound, every aspect of someone's voice, or music, every note, to hear every single one, would be incredible to me. And I don't know what that would be like. I've never known what that would be like. Let's just talk about, you transcribed my hearing test, where you got to actually hear the sound that's in my ear. I can't hear one of the tones that you ear. So you didn't hear the tone in my right ear? No, I couldn't hear the high one, because I'm missing that. That's part of my hearing loss. I'm missing that particular frequency in both my ears. So you can't hear the sound-- I can't hear the sound that you hear all the time. At all. At all. That's incredible, though, don't you think? I don't know. It's too much of a coincidence. I can't be in quiet places. It can be really maddening to be in quite places. It's the thing, though, that I think is responsible for me taking up fly-fishing, because it's the closest I can get to quiet. I'm out there. It's early morning. It's dark. I'm in my boat. I push off into the current, don't start the engine. The river is waking up, and there are little sounds of birds and stuff going on. And then there's me with my fly line going back and forth and back and forth. And I'm focusing on the fly line, trying to get it out 100 feet. And there's a sound that it makes that I can attach to. And so I'm really focused on that. And it takes me away from the sound in my head. And that's what quiet is to me. That's the most quiet that I can have. Anything else you want to say about it? Just that I think, maybe it's taught you patience. Because I didn't know you before you had this, so I wouldn't know. But I would think that it might have taught you something about settling or acceptance. Because I remember you told us a story about how you went to all these doctors. But the first doctor you went to told you there was no cure. You couldn't do anything. And so you spent tons of money seeing a whole bunch of other doctors who tried a whole bunch of other things. And finally, you just realized that the first doctor was right. And I guess that was probably your acceptance part of it. And it's also that you were working so frantically before. And then you got tinnitus, and you had to stop. And I got more of you. Because I do remember you traveling a lot. And I remember how much you were gone. And I remember asking Mom when you'd come home. But then you came home, and you stayed home. And you played with me. You took me to school every day. And I think that was really good for the family. Nubar and Abby Alexonian. They put together that story with Jay Allison for the website transom.org. If you want to learn how to put together a radio story, they explain how to do it at transom.org. Their story got funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The names of certain magazines are supposed to cheer a person up, Glamour, Lucky, Gourmet, Allure. Life, these titles suggest, is full of possibilities. Then, there's the magazine I read. This magazine has the most downbeat name of any magazine since DownBeat. It is called Living Without. Living Without bills itself as a lifestyle guide for people with allergies and food sensitivities, which sounds straightforward enough. But the name Living Without is so depressing, so forlorn, such a belligerent refusal to accentuate the positive, that I don't know why its publishers don't just come clean and call it Loser. I read Living Without because I actually do live without. I'm allergic to wheat. On the one hand, this is a fairly serious problem. I'm always one bagel away from this panicky feeling of drowning. My throat closes up, and I'm hit with nausea that seems to affect every part of me, as if my fingers and ears want to throw up. On the other hand, nobody wants to hear about a disease whose treatment consists of scrutinizing food labels and never leaving the house without a fruit snack. Living Without is a magazine that revels in the mundane details of my condition. My favorite regular feature in Living Without is the column "Perils in the Pantry," which reads like a particularly over-the-top episode of The Munsters. Just as in the Munsters' upside-down world, in which the pretty, blonde cousin is pitied for her ugliness, in "Perils in the Pantry," supposedly cheerful events like parties and picnics are treated like the death traps they are. Beware of summertime salads, the column warns. Lurking under seemingly innocent lettuce, deadly croutons. "Perils at the Party" tells the horror story of one German-themed dinner party in which the entire meal consisted of wiener schnitzel, caraway noodles, and bread, or, as the wheat-sensitive might look upon the table, meat dusted with wheat, rectangular glops of wheat, and baked wheat. The author's advice? Before going out to a dinner party, eat first. Living Without featured one article about a family who had switched religions in search of a house of worship that provided a gluten-free communion wafer. And the greatest election story in recent times? Not the Florida recount, in Living Without. In Living Without the juiciest event in recent electoral politics was the 1998 race for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, in which both the Republican and Democratic candidates were allergic to wheat. Living Without makes me feel less alone, less of an oddball. I don't have any wheat-free friends. And since I hope to hang on to the friends I do have, I try and spare them the nitty-gritty details. Not to mention that most of them have an underwhelming grasp of the pros and cons of various brands of soy flour. My friend, Nick, was perplexed when the last time we had breakfast together, I asked the waitress if I could have a banana instead of toast. When I asked Nick about it later, he said, "A banana instead of toast? Why not ask for anything, then, anything of a similar monetary value to toast, like a cassette tape?" At least I didn't find out I was sensitive to wheat gluten until I was over 30. The real heartbreakers in Living Without involve allergic kids and the terrified parents who love them. Mostly, it's one sob story after another, the boy who accidentally bit into a peanut butter cookie and died, the family of a first grader who spent part of their summer vacation at diabetes camp, mothers who write sentences such as, "My heart sank," or "I was standing right next to him when he ate that cookie, and I couldn't save him." Still, one of my favorite things I've read in Living Without was written by the mother of a gluten-allergic son. Once a week, family night in their household was called pizza night. And they would all go out for pizza, until young Alec was diagnosed. They thought pizza night was history, until the mother finally figured out that she could just bring gluten-free dough to the pizzeria. All happy endings in Living Without are like this. Even the triumphs involve minor indignities like schlepping your own crust in tinfoil when going out for dinner. The earnestness of this story, of everything in Living Without, is the main reason I find it so reassuring. There are headlines that would seem ridiculous in any other magazine, an article on gluten-free weddings called "Have Your Cake," a guide to international cuisine called, "The World is Your Rice Noodle," that concludes with the thought, "Bye-bye, American pie, hello, pad Thai." It's corny, but that's kind of what I like about it. If the information in Living Without were conveyed more clinically in the dignified style of, say, the New York Times, the information would feel less welcoming. And it would also feel less true. There's nothing dignified about being allergic to wheat. It's the kind of annoying, specific, picky food nuisance you can only really talk about with the one person on earth who truly gives a hoot what kind of cracker you'd prefer, your mom. The corniness of Living Without is so comforting because it feels so maternal, as if it's written by a gaggle of friendly, Midwestern mothers, whose warm, cheerful kitchens smell like fresh-baked bread, fresh-baked bread made out of rice flour and potato starch. Sarah Vowell is the author of a number of books, most recently Assassination Vacation. Her story is part of a project at hearingvoices.com, which gets funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The first thing I noticed about Matthew were his fingernails. They're so clean, much cleaner than mine. And I am humbled. I have no excuse. Unlike Matthew, I have not been living on the streets for seven years. Every Saturday, we meet for lunch at Bertucci's, which is this family-style Italian restaurant. Every week, we sit at the same table. And every time, our waitress assures us that we've made it in time for the lunch special. We will get free refills on soft drinks, a complimentary garden salad, and a basket of rolls. One time, Matthew showed up 20 minutes late, and the manager was giving him a hard time. He was saying, you better make it up to her and buy lunch today. And when we got to our table, Matthew was laughing. And he said, he doesn't know I'm homeless. He has no idea. And even though Matthew is carrying a large cardboard box, a messenger bag, and two book bags, he looks more like a college professor. He's clean. He's tidy. He's organized. He's incredibly polite. Every week, Matthew tells these stories. So every week, I record him. There was this time it rained nonstop. When that happens, the shelters just fill up. And there were 10 of us waiting for two hours. Eventually, people start talking. Oh, where were you yesterday when it started raining? Oh, I was over here. Did you get in somewhere last night? No, I was outside, or I went under a bridge, or I, you know. So everybody's talking about these things. And one guy in the room was very quiet. Someone started talking. What'd you do? What'd you do yesterday? With this very thick Spanish accent, doesn't speak English very well, he told us he didn't know Boston at all. He had just arrived from New York. Didn't know the streets, didn't know where to go. And when it came time, what about you, where did you stay? Alley. Alley? Where were you? The alley? Oh, just right, right, the next block. Yeah, one block, one block. You only got as far as one block, and you went into the alley. Si, si. Oh, wow. So where'd you sleep in the alley? Was there any place you could sleep underneath or something? He said something like box. Box? You slept in a box? Si, si. What, a cardboard box? Wouldn't it be soaking wet? No, not cardboard. Metal, metal. Metal? You slept in a metal box? What are you-- and someone said, oh, a dumpster. You slept in a dumpster. No, no. Did you get any sleep? No, no, no sleep, because of afraid. Afraid? You were afraid? Si, senor. What were you afraid of? Somebody might come and beat you up or mug you? No, button. I said, button? And all the sudden, it occurred to me. Oh, you didn't sleep in a dumpster, you slept in a trash compactor. Si, si. You were afraid somebody was going to come and maybe push a button. Si, si. When I heard that, it was like at a new level in my feelings and understanding of this whole thing. And you're afraid somebody might come to push the button and die a horrible death. Once or twice a year, he gets to house-sit for an old friend. Around Christmas, he got an offer to house-sit for more than two weeks. I met him for lunch the day that ended, and he was back on the street. I wanted to know what it was for him to have a comfortable place to sleep for a change. Usually, he can't count on any of his regular spots. And sometimes, he has to stay up all night in a Kinko's or Dunkin' Donuts. Sleep is such a large part of the whole experience of being homeless. I should say sleeplessness. You never get enough sleep. You're so tired so much of the time. So what was it like your first night indoors? What was it like to sleep? The first night is the best, because you know you've got 16 consecutive nights of uninterrupted living indoors again, of being able to come over to this apartment, open the door, unlock it with a key, open the door, go over to the sofa, this nice, huge, comfortable, soft sofa with eight large pillows in front of the TV set, with a remote control and everything. It's like what Jean Valjean experienced in the 1935 version of the film Les Miserables with Fredric March as Jean Valjean. After all those years in the prison, or the galley slave prison system, whatever, he's released finally. I think it's 14 years or something in which he was sleeping on hard surfaces. And when he's finally shown the room where he's going to get to stay when it's time for him to go to sleep, he looks at the bed. And in the years before I was homeless, whenever I'd see this film, I never noticed this. He's looking at the bed. And that bed, it's like it's a soft surface, a soft mattress. It's a bed. He hasn't slept in a bed for like 14 years. And when he plops down in it, he leans back, and he stretches out. If I remember correctly, his eyes close, as he's savoring the comfort. That's what it's like. That's what it feels like. That's what it felt like the first night I was in there for these 16 nights in a row. Matthew has been on the streets of Boston for seven years. This was an excerpt from an ongoing radio project Chelsea Merz and Matthew are working on. Coming up, which is more dangerous to your health-- heart disease, or your own family? Answers in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. "What kind of son are you," asks Aunt Fran. Aunt Nina says, "Your own flesh and blood. What your mother wouldn't do for you." Aunt Fran goes on, "She'd do anything for you, anything in the world. And now you won't give just a little back." "For shame," says Aunt Nina. The heat is stifling, but she pulls her sweater closer. We're sitting in the hospital waiting room, Aunt Fran and Aunt Nina and I. My mother suffered a heart attack this morning. We're waiting to see her, the aunts and I. The doctor told us her heart won't last much longer. "We can't fix it," the doctor said. "She needs a new one, a transplant." "Well then, give her one," the aunts cried. "It's not that easy," said the doctors. "We need a doctor." The doctors went away. The aunts looked at me. "Arnie," Nina said. "What about your heart?" "My heart," I shouted. "Are you crazy?" That started them both off on what a bad son I was. It's impossible to argue with Nina, especially with Fran to back her up. I sit in the middle. Aunt Fran clutches one arm, Aunt Nina the other. They wept at first, but now they sit grimly. A Styrofoam cup of coffee steams next to my foot, but I can't reach for it. The aunts don't care. They're amazed that I bought it, amazed that I could even think of coffee at a time like this. Aunt Fran wears a bally sweater and sensible shoes. Her lips are pressed tight. She taps her feet nervously. On my other side, Nina licks her lips, again and again. "I saw it on 60 Minutes," Aunt Fran announces. "They put the heart in a cooler, a regular Igloo cooler like we have at home. And they rush it in a helicopter to the hospital. And they put it in, connect up the pipes. It's just like plumbing." "You must be your mother's tissue type, too. I'm sure you are," Aunt Nina puts in. "You're young. You're strong. You have a college education. Your heart is exactly what she needs." "You shouldn't have started smoking, though," Aunt Fran goes on. "It's so bad for the heart. You should have thought of that when you started." "But what about me," I blurt out finally. "That's what we're talking about. We're talking about your heart," Nina says. "But what happens to me?" I say again. "I can't believe he's thinking of himself at a time like this," Aunt Fran sniffs. "I need my heart. You want me to die so my mother can live?" "Of course we don't want that," says Aunt Fran. "Sylvie loves you so much. She'd want to die herself if you died." "We can't both have my heart," I say. "Of course not," says Nina. "You can get one of those monkey hearts, or that artificial heart they made such a fuss about in the news a while back." "Why can't mother get one of those, or a transplant from someone else?" "Do you want your mother should have a stranger's heart, or a monkey's heart? Your poor mother. Do you remember how she never used to take you to the zoo, because she couldn't stand to see the filthy monkeys? And you want her to have a monkey's heart? It would kill her," Fran cries. "She's so weak. She needs a heart that will agree with her," Aunt Nina adds. "Any heart but yours wouldn't, just wouldn't do. But you, you can handle anything. You're young. You're strong. You--" "--have a college education," I finish for her. Aunt Nina glares and says, "Your mother worked herself to the bone for you, so you could go to college and make something of yourself. And now what do you do? Out of college four years already, all you do is sit in front of a typewriter all day, call yourself a writer, smoking those cigarettes, never get a haircut." "And the first time your mother needs you," Aunt Fran finishes, "you turn your back on her." They both tighten their grips on my arm. "I do things for Mother all the time," I begin. One of the doctors appears at the end of the hall. As he approaches, my aunts rise, pulling me with them. "Is she all right?" Demands Fran when he's still 20 feet away. "We've found a donor," Nina announces. The doctor greets us. He's a small man, completely bald. The eyes behind thick glasses are sad. He strokes his scalp as he talks, savoring the feel of it. "She's all right. She's being monitored," he says. "We will look for a donor, but there's a long waiting list." "We've got a donor, Sylvie's son. He's in the prime of health," Aunt Nina says. "This is Arnie," Fran explains. The doctor studies me carefully. "Surely you don't do that sort of thing," I say incredulously. He gazes at me. "It's very rare, very rare indeed that a son will be so good as to donate his heart. In a few cases, it has been done, but it's so rare to find such a son, a rare and beautiful thing." He takes off his glasses and polishes them on his sleeve. Without them, his eyes are small, piggish. He puts them back on, and his eyes are sad and soulful once more. "You must love your mother very much," he says. "Oh, he does," Fran says. I shift my feet and knock over the cup of coffee, and it spills on the floor, the sudden ugly brownness spreading over the empty white. A nurse leads us to the intensive care unit where my mother is lying attached to machines and bags of fluid. Aunt Fran rushes to one side of the bed, Aunt Nina the other. I shuffle awkwardly at the foot of the bed. I touch my mother's feet. "Sylvie, are you all right?" the aunts cry. My mother opens her eyes. There are purple circles around them. She looks pale, but not so different from usual, hardly on the verge of death. She smiles dully at her sisters. "Oh, Sylvie, you look wonderful, just the same," they say. Then she raises her eyes to me. "Oh, Arnie, you look terrible," she says. "That jacket, I told you to throw it away. I'll find you another. There's no reason to go around looking like a mess." "Arnie has some good news," Nina says. "Then why does he look like a thundercloud?" says my mother. "Arnie, is something bothering you?" Fran says, "Arnie wants to give you his heart." "I never said that," I cry. There's a pause. "Of course, Arnie, you shouldn't. You don't need to do that for me. Really, you don't," my mother says. She looks terribly sad. The aunts' faces have gone stony. "I never expected anything from you, you know, of course, nothing like this." I look down at her feet, two motionless humps under the blanket. "I'm considering it, Mother. Really, I am. I want to find out more about it before I decide, that's all. It's not as simple as changing a car battery or something." I force out a laugh. No one else laughs. But the aunts' faces melt a little. My heart is pounding. My mother closes her eyes. "You're a good boy, Arnie," she says. "Your father would be proud." A nurse comes in and tells us that we should let my mother rest for a while. Aunt Fran and Aunt Nina head back to the waiting room. I walk up and down the halls of dull white, where patients shuffle in slow motion, wheeling their IVs along beside them. I can feel on the floor the buzzing vibration of motors churning away somewhere in the heart of the building. I take the elevator and wander until I find a pay phone. I call up Mandy. She picks up on the first ring. "Hi," she says. "Where have you been?" "My mother had a heart attack this morning," I say. "I'm at the hospital." "Oh, I knew this would happen," Mandy says. "I burned my hand on the radiator this morning, and right away, I thought, uh-oh, an omen. Something bad's going to happen. How old's your mother?" "57," I say. "Oh, that's young for a heart attack. And she wasn't fat or anything. I feel like it's my fault. I should have warned you or something." Finally, I ask her to come to the hospital, and she says, all right, and hangs up. I don't need to tell her where to go. Mandy never gets lost. She never has to wait in line. Strangers on the street talk to her. Jobs fall in her lap. She's nice-looking, freckles on her nose, good, straight teeth. She keeps telling me that my signs indicate my life will be on a big upswing soon, and that I'm just in a transition period right now. I hope she's right. I finally reach the lobby. And just as I do, Mandy comes bursting in the doors, beaming at me. She doesn't smile. She beams. "I knew I'd find you," she says. "How's your mother? Have you seen her?" Her breath in my face is like pine trees and toothpaste. "Yeah, she's all right for now. Come on. Let's go outside for a minute. I want to ask you something." Outside, the afternoon is darkening to early evening. We wander in the parking lot among the cars, talking softly, like we're afraid we'll wake them. It's cold. I keep looking back to see if anyone's following us. "They say my mother's heart is bad, I tell Mandy. She needs a new one. They want me to donate my heart. What do you think of that?" Mandy stops, her eyes and mouth open. Wind whips her frizzy hair around her face. She looks shocked. I breathe a sigh of relief at last, someone who can see reason. But then she says, "Oh, Arnie, how wonderful. Can they really do that? That's so wonderful, congratulations." "You mean you think I should do it?" "Isn't technology incredible?" Mandy says. "These days, doctors can do anything. Now you can share yourself, really give yourself to someone in ways you never even thought were possible before. Your mother must be thrilled." "But it's crazy," I say. She takes my hand in hers and looks up into my eyes. "Frankly, Arnie, I didn't think you had it in you. I'm really impressed, really, I am." "Mandy, I thought you could be realistic about this. What about me? Do you want me dead? What am I supposed to do without a heart?" "Oh, I'm sure they could fix you up. The important thing right now is to help your mother." She unzips my jacket and presses her hand against my chest. My heart twitches, flutters like a baby bird in her hands. "Arnie, you know what the right thing to do is. You should get back to your mother now." I watched her go. brisk, determined steps like a schoolteacher. I find my way back to the waiting room. Someone's mopped up the coffee. "Feel better?" Nina asks. "Made a decision yet?" Fran says. "Yes. No. I don't know," I say. They are both quiet. Fran turns to me. "Arnie, think about this. The heart's a little thing, really, less than a pound. It's just a muscle. You've got muscles all over the place. Can't you spare one?" She looks earnestly into my face. "Can't you spare a little bit of flesh?" And then they are crying, both of them, drops sliding down the wrinkles in their faces. Later, we go visit my mother again. She looks worse, but perhaps it's the fluorescent lights. I stand again at the foot of her bed. I can see the veins and tendons on her neck, so delicate, so close to the surface you could snip them with scissors. "Arnie," she says softly, "you should go home and get some sleep. And shave, you look terrible, so tired. Go. I'll be here tomorrow. I'm not going anywhere." I drive home in the dark. I go up to my apartment and turn on the lights. I want to call Mandy. Then I realize I don't want to call her at all. Usually, my mother calls in the evening and tells me about TV programs and weather changes. I turn off the lights and sit in the dark. I look at the ceiling, at the smoke detector. It has a blue light that pulses with a regular beat, like the blip on a cardiograph. Early the next morning at the hospital, I tell the doctor, "I want to do it. Give her my heart." He gives me a long, steady look, eyes huge behind the glasses. "I think you've made the right decision. I do," he says. His eyes drop to my chest. "We can get started right away." "But what about the transplant for me?" I say. "Don't you need to arrange that first?" "Oh, we'll take care of that when the time comes. I want to get your heart into your mother right away, before, before--" "Before I change my mind?" I say. He hardly hears. He's already deep in his plans. He claps me on the back. "Have you told your mother yet? Well, go tell her. Then we'll get your chest shaved and get started." This is what I've realized. All along, I thought I'd publish a book, lots of books, get recognition, earn lots of money, support my mother in style in her old age, give her gorgeous grandchildren. I thought that was the way to pay her back for everything I owe her. But now, it looks like I have to pay my debts with my heart instead. Under these circumstances, I don't have a choice. I'm almost glad. It seems easier this way. I'll just give her a piece of muscle, and then I'll be free of her forever, all my debts paid. One quick operation will be so much easier than struggling for the rest of my life to do back to her all the things she thinks she's done for me. It seems like a good bargain. When I tell my mother the news, she cries a little and smiles and says, "Oh, I didn't expect it. Oh, not for a minute. I wouldn't expect such a sacrifice from you, Arnie. I wouldn't dare to even mention such a thing. It's more than any mother could expect of her son. I'm so proud of you. I guess I did a good job of raising you after all. You've turned into such a fine, good person. I worried that I may have made mistakes when I was bringing you up, but now I know I didn't." On and on she goes. And the aunts, they cry and clutch my arms, not so tight as before. And they say they doubted me, but they never will again. What a good son, they keep saying. Looking at them now, they seem smaller than they did before, shriveled. I call Mandy, and she dashes over to the hospital. She kisses all over my face with her cherry-flavored Chapstick. She hugs me and presses her ear against my chest. She tells me she knew I'd do the right thing. I'm feeling pretty good now. I light up a cigarette. She takes it away from and mashes it beneath her heel. "That belongs to your mother now," she says. They all give me flowers. I feel like a hero. I kiss my mother's cheek. I hop on a stretcher. They wheel me out. They sedate me slightly, strip me, shave me. And then they put the mask on and knock me out good. It's like I'm falling, falling down a deep well. And the circle of daylight above me grows smaller and smaller and smaller, until it is a tiny white bird swooping and fluttering against a vast night sky. How does it feel to have no heart? It feels light, hollow, rattly. Something huge is missing. It leaves an ache, like the ghost of a severed limb. I'm so light inside, but so heavy on the outside, like gravity increased a hundredfold, gravity holding me to the bed like the ropes and pegs of a thousand Lilliputians. I lie at the bottom of a pool. Up above, I see the light on the surface. It wavers, ripples, breaks, and comes together again. I can see the people moving about far above in the light. I am down here in the dark, cradled in the algae. Curious fish nibble my eyelashes. After a while, I see a smooth, pink face above me. The doctor? "Arnie," he says, "the operation went very well. Your mother's doing wonderfully. She loves the new heart." His words begin far away and drift closer, growing louder and louder until they plunk down next to me like pebbles. "Arnie," he calls. The pool's surface shivers. His face balloons, shrinks to a dot, then unfolds itself. "Arnie, about you. We're having a little trouble. There's a shortage of spare hearts in the country right now. We're looking for some kind of replacement. But don't worry. You'll be fine." Later, I see Aunt Fran and Aunt Nina. They lean close. They're huge. Their faces bleed and run together like wet watercolors. "Your mother's doing so well," they call. "She loves you. Oh, she's so excited. She'll be in to see you soon." And later, it's my mother gliding in, her face pink, her hair curled. "Arnie, Arnie, you good boy," she calls. And then they wheel her out. They leave me alone for a long time. I lie in the deep. It sways me like a hammock. There is a deep, low humming all around, like whales moaning. My mother does not visit again. Alone in the dark, no footsteps, no click of the light switch. Then a doctor looms above me. "Your mother," he says, "is not doing well. The heart does not fit as well as we thought. It's a bit too small." He turns away and leans over again. "As for you, we're working on it. There's nothing available at the moment. But don't you worry." And then Fran and Nina are back. "How could you?" they scream, their voices shattering the surface into fragments. "Giving your mother a bad heart. How could you? What kind of son are you? She's dying. Your mother's dying, all because of you." They weep together. For a long time, no one comes. I know without anyone telling me that my mother is dead. It is my heart. When it ceases to beat, I know. The doctor comes to tell me how sorry he is. "She was doing so well at first, but then it turned out the heart just wasn't enough. I tell you, though, she was thinking of you when she died. She asked for you." He sits quietly for a moment. "we haven't managed to find a heart for you. But you'll be fine. We've shot you up full of preservatives. You'll stay fresh for a while yet." He goes away. Aunt Fran and Aunt Nina no longer visit. Mandy? Gone. I lie listening to the emptiness in my chest like wind wailing through canyons. These days, the doctor comes in often to chat with me. One day, he tells me a story. "You know, when your mother died, we managed to save your heart. It was still healthy. We thought about giving it back to you, but there was this little girl here, about eight years old. She needed a new heart, too. Cute little blonde girl. One time a basketball star came in here to visit, and there were TV cameras and photographers and everything. She was in the papers a lot. Kids were always sending her cards. "Anyway, we decided to give her your heart. She's only a kid, after all. She's got her whole life ahead of her. Why should we deny her that? I'm sure your mother would have wanted it that way. She was such a caring, selfless woman. I'm sure, deep down, you want her to have it too, don't you?" "Of course I do." Judy Budnitz's short story, "Guilt," from her third collection of short stories called Flying Leap. Her third book, Nice Big American Baby, was published last year. Her story was read for us by actor Matt Malloy, who is in too many movies to possibly named here. We've shot you up full of preservatives. You'll stay fresh for a while yet. I'm I'ra Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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About a year and a half ago, when my mom was dying, I had this experience that I bring up here because I think it's so common. She and I were in different cities, and I would go see her most weekends when she got sick. It was pretty clear she didn't have a lot of time left. And I kept thinking, we should be having these really big conversations. And I don't even know what it is that I wanted to talk about. It just seemed like anything that we needed to say to each other, we'd better say now before it was too late. But truthfully, it wasn't like we had big issues that needed to be resolving or anything like that. All that stuff had been done years ago. And so I would go. And mostly what she wanted was just company. So we'd watch old movies, and we'd watch TV, and we'd play a little cards and chat about whatever small thing would come up. And at one level, this was fine. It was completely fine. It was fine. And like I say, it was what she wanted. But at another level, I would sit there intermittently and secretly very anxious that I was wasting this time. That in 6 months or 2 years or 10 years, I was going to look back, and I was going to feel sorry that we had never talked about-- you know what? I didn't even know what we hadn't talked about. I don't know. Like who was her best friend in junior high school, or what her house was like when she was a little girl. I have a friend whose father died not too long ago who told me, well, if nothing else, I should use this time to just ask all the questions about all those little stories that I think I might want to know some day. And we did talk about some of that stuff. There were some old stories that I never really had straight that now I know. And there were a couple of times sitting on the couch in the middle of some long afternoon where I asked my mom, is there anything that you want to talk about? Is anything that we need to talk about? Anything we need to have resolved or that we need to discuss? And she asked me, why, in my 20s, pretty much through my entire 20s, I was so distant from the family. And I asked her about all the years that she and my dad completely disapproved of my career in public radio. And we talked about these things, we talked about them, I would say, for like, I want to say a total of, I don't know, three minutes. And that pretty much exhausted it as subjects. And then we moved onto the next thing, and that was that. Since she died, I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I keep waiting for the day that I'm going to be talking to somebody or reading something or watching TV, and suddenly I realize something that I want to ask my mom about. That suddenly I realize what we should have talked about during that stretch of all those weeks, what I should have said back then. I know it's going to happen, and the only question is, is it going to be tomorrow? Or is it going to be the next day? Or is it going to be next month? Or is it going to be next year? I know that people have this kind of feeling about the living also. You know what I mean? They have this feeling about their living friends and relatives, that they wish that they could go back and have do-overs and say something better or say the thing that it took them a really long time to figure out needed to be said. And in my experience-- maybe I'm unusual-- but in my experience, people almost never go back to do that. Even when the people are alive. They never go back and straighten it out and say it. Well, today on our radio program, we have stories about what it would mean to actually go back. What it would mean to finally say everything that you should have said at the time, but that most people never, ever do. We make an unscientific inquiry into that question. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in four time-traveling acts. Act One, Freeze Frame, in which Mr. Jonathan Goldstein, for once in his life, gets to suspend time itself, freeze the hands of time, and finally come up with the right thing to say in some situation. Act Two, In The Bush Leagues. We hear the true story of a 20-something activist who heckled the President of the United States, years ago, and failed horribly. President Bush completely bested this guy, leaving him mulling it over late at night for years. Act Three, A Can of Worms. David Sedaris wishes that he could take back a wish in an act. Act Four, Life Sentence, in which the president of the Maryland State Senate, a veteran politician, talks about the off-the-cuff remark that many people say changed his life forever. Stay with us. Act One, Freeze Frame. This is the sort of story that I think it's best to introduce the way that you would do a movie trailer. Ladies and gentlemen, if regret has a name-- a name, that is, besides regret-- that name is Jonathan Goldstein. Here he is, with some thoughts and a big plan to change things. Let me start by saying I have pretty much regretted every single thing that's ever come out of my mouth, from my bar mitzvah speech with its inordinate use of the word cherished, to the manner in which I recently responded to my dental hygienist when asked whether the office radio was on too loud. I said, no, it wasn't too loud. "In fact," I said, "it was totally cool." Lord knows where that came from. But once words are out there, they are out there, and there's nothing you can do about it. There are moments where I have misspoken or somehow failed to live up to the occasion that I am capable of replaying in my mind, searching for what I should have said, even years later. These moments have attached themselves to my brain like frightened cats that resist prying. And my capacity for regretting them sometimes feels like the deepest, most enduring part of my personality. Case in point: about 15 years ago, I was riding a train to Toronto with my girlfriend at the time, when she asked me if I could catch the porter's eye and ask him for a glass of 7UP. I didn't like the idea of bothering the train workers. As a group, they put forth a fair bit of gruff, and I did not like receiving the stuff. In fact, even a tiny little bit of gruff would be enough to ruin my weekend. Still, she was my girlfriend, and they had just handed out salted peanuts, and a drink seemed like a pretty good idea. I would probably even end up taking a sip off of hers. "Why don't you ask him," I said, offering a compromise. And by compromise, I meant I'd sit beside her pretending to be engrossed in a copy of Rolling Stone while she got yelled at. "You should," she said. "You're the man." She was right about that. I was the man. An 18-year-old man who was spending his first weekend out of town with a woman. When the porter, who must have easily been at least 75, came moseying by, I craned my head into the aisle and said, just like this, "E-- excuse me, but d-- do you think that maybe I could get a 7UP, please, when you get a chance, if that-- if that's possible?" "I already gave you a drink," he said. "There is no second 7UP." "No, no, you did," I said. "But that was before the peanuts. Now I need another. Peanuts will do that to a person. Ma-- make them thirsty. I'm-- I'm sorry." People turned around and looked at me. "There should be a drink before and after the peanuts," I said. "That would be so great. Don't you think that-- that might be a good idea, maybe?" All the while as I spoke, my girlfriend sat beside me, falling slowly and imperceptibly more and more out of love with me. When he placed the plastic cup of 7UP down on my tray, he told me hoped it would help me, "wash my nuts down." That night in bed, I realized what I should have replied. "My nuts are washed, old timer. Don't worry about me." Several months later, daydreaming in class, I thought of this. I could have lifted up the cup in a toast and said, "To clean nuts." But at the time, all I could think to do was to look down at the tiny, effervescent world within my cup and say thanks. Within the month, my girlfriend and I would be history. If I could stop time, I would not rob the Bank of England, nor would I spend probably more than an afternoon or two studying the hummingbird in mid-flight. I would use my power to freeze time just before I was about to open my mouth to speak. I would get up from wherever I was and pace. I would pace back and forth and perhaps drink a glass of cold water. And once I had crafted the perfect response and steadied my nerves, I would unfreeze time and continue. Of course, one cannot stop time, but one can stop tape. As an exercise in getting things right, I decided to go through one entire day tape-recording all of my interactions. That way, when the day was over, I would be able to go back over all of my conversations. And by stopping the tape and inserting the right words, I would be able to make everything, finally and for once, perfect. Lord knows saying the right words to people's faces would be far too frightening, but right here, behind their backs on the radio, that would be just right. So in the morning, I had to go by to my friend Mary's house to babysit her kids. Helen is four, and Katie is two. Silly Johnny. Silly Johnny. This is what the kids do every time they see me. They start chanting. They chant, "Silly Johnny." For them, that is my name. It is what they call me. Silly Johnny. Silly Johnny, silly Johnny, silly Johnny, silly Johnny. OK, hold it right here. There they stand, frozen like porcelain figurines, their mouths frozen wide open, their heads thrown back in cruel delight. And this is what I should have said. I am not the silly one, baby Katie. I could sit down to watch Apocalypse Now with a plate of spicy chicken wings and beer without getting all scarred for life. And I do not have to wear diapers, unless, of course, I choose to. And Helen, can you walk out the door anytime you want, go to an ATM machine, and put a down payment on a leather couch? I don't think so. So who's really silly? Instead, I said this. Silly Johnny, silly Johnny, silly Johnny, silly Johnny, silly Johnny. As you could hear, I said nothing. Silly Johnny, silly Johnny, silly John, silly Johnny, silly Johnny, silly-- Mary runs a profitable fancy soap shop, and she's been looking for a part-time employee for months. And every time she starts in about how hard it is to find good help these days, I always tell her how I'd be available to work in the store a few afternoons a week. And then Mary will suddenly remember something she left in the oven. Or she'll change the subject by complimenting me on the sporty-looking jersey I'm wearing, which, truthfully, is not sporty at all or for that matter, even a jersey, unless an undershirt can be called a jersey. Having most of the morning to watch the kids and brood, I decided that when Mary got back, I was going to broach the subject straight on. How come you won't have me work for you? You know I would be a good employee, right? No, you wouldn't be a good employee. Now, you see, most people would just drop the subject right here. But I am not most people. You really feel that way? Yes. The first thing is, you pay no attention. You're completely spaced-out. Plus, you look a little bit ratty, and I think that the women who are coming in to ask you advice about fragrance and the different soaps and how well they wash, I don't think you look the type that would be able to give them some good advice. And you don't follow direction. And you can't multitask. OK, stop the tape right here. You don't respect me, do you? Um, I think you're a nice person. Later in the afternoon, I had to drop by the bookstore and pick up, for reasons I won't go into right here, a book on patent law. So when I get to the bookstore, this guy I know, Billy, is there. He doesn't work at the store, but he's there pretty much every time I go in, leaning against the counter and recommending The Master and Margarita to anyone who will listen. Anyway, in the back of the store, Billy and I get into this discussion about Lord of The Rings. I'm not even sure how we got onto the subject. Billy is one of those guys who in high school used to hang up maps of Middle-earth in his locker. The kind of guy who could sing songs by Simon & Garfunkel in Elvish. I start telling him about how I had just seen the movie, and how Frodo struck me as a little overly emotional about carrying the ring. Sure, the ring tempted people with acts of evil, but so does combining Jack Daniels, insomnia, and the Google search engine. I said I didn't think it would be such a huge deal to carry the ring, at least for a little while. Now, admittedly, our whole argument was ridiculous, but as ridiculous as it was, I was still losing. I give you the Ring of Power, OK? What are you going to do with it, John? What are you doing to do with it? No question about it. You wouldn't pull it off. You couldn't pull it off. You'd die. Your soul would be taken. Finished, end of story. You wouldn't cut it. You wouldn't cut it on the throne. You wouldn't even be a steward of Gondor. You wouldn't even be one of the Rohirrim? And you want to hold the ring? You couldn't hold the ring, John. Now, if I could have just paused things right here, right at this very moment, paced around a bit, shadow-boxed myself towards the right state of mind, I might have found the gumption to say that I didn't even want the stinking ring because all it does is turn you into a pretentious diva anyway. Everyone who holds it becomes Zsa Zsa Gabor. I would have said that even thinking about this ring stuff was for 14-year-old black-hooded Goth kids who strap suede pouches of 20-sided dice from their belts as fashion accessories. Instead, I answered this way. Um, I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know. To which Billy replied: You don't know? You don't-- there's even a question? No, Jonathan, you couldn't hold the One Ring of Power. I wouldn't trust you for a second with the Ring of Power. Not for a second. Then I started to backpedal, saying that he was probably right, that I was ill-equipped to hold the ring. I was weak-willed and had little sense of community. I then said that he, Billy, was probably better suited to the task of ring bearer. To which Billy responded: I wouldn't touch the ring, John. OK? Gandalf wouldn't touch the ring. Elrond wouldn't touch the ring. Fools like Boromir tried to touch the ring, but they died. I cannot handle the ring. I am not of Hobbit stock. I don't have that kind of heartiness. OK, stop right here. No, Billy, you don't have that kind of heartiness. You wear yellow sweatpants, and your hands are as smooth as peeled tangerines. You possess the unearthly habit of pulling jaw breakers out of your mouth every five seconds to check what color they are. And whenever you burp, you're compelled to simultaneously speak the word, "Ralph." But if you're standing there with Billy, looking into his eyes, frozen or not, of course, you don't say anything so mean, despite the fact that you want to. We all carry the ring around inside of us, and that ring is our capacity for wrongdoing. And both he and I, in some way, wish that this capacity could be removed from within us and pounded out into a shiny ring that could be passed around from person to person, allowing us to ease the burden of our urges. Such urges, say, as wanting to voice the really mean things we really think, but in the end, that would be appalling. And rather than voicing any of this, I said, instead: Um, I thought-- I don't know. Silly Johnny. Silly Johnny. In the evening, I had dinner with my parents. I was going to be leaving to New York in a couple of days. And all evening, my father kept bringing up this bottle of vodka he wanted me to buy for him. And all evening, my mother kept cutting him off and yelling at him, louder and angrier as the night wore on. She told him it was impossible for me to get him the bottle, simply impossible. Why she thought it was impossible, I have no idea. But anyway, eventually, my father dropped the subject. But then, after dinner was finished, he started once more. It was a good meal, yeah. It was a good meal. But also I would like you to bring me back another bottle of that-- Could you understand that he can't? It's impossible. Stop that-- It's imposs-- Yes. Go on out, and buy yourself what you want. You can't Smirnoff's 100 proof-- He can't get it. He's not going to schlep bottles from New York City for you. All right. I have to say one thing, that if I have certain pleasures in life-- Who says you need pleasures? You don't need any pleasures. You're too old already for pleasures. She diminishes my manhood. And she knows where to hit. OK, Johnny, just have some pineapple now, sweetheart. Sit down and relax. Come eat something. OK, let's just stop right here. What do you say to that? Even after days of rumination, I still got nothing. After dinner, my mother drove me to the bus stop. And in the car along the way, she spoke of how her job was going. My mother works at a daycare, and she really, really loves the kids. She was telling me about how her favorite thing is when the children let her hug them. You used to be so mean. I used to beg you for hugs, and you wouldn't give me any. You used to not give hugs. I realize now that it must have been difficult to have a child who never let you touch them. In old photographs, you could see me inching away uncomfortably from her hands on my shoulders. At my grade six prom, at the beginning of the mother-son dance, which I still remember as Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson's "You Don't Bring Me Flowers," I refused to dance with her. The whole notion of dancing with your mother in, of all places, your school's gymnasium struck me as unwholesome. If there had been a pause button on the dashboard, and I could stop time, stop the flow of traffic entirely so that all the cars beside us on the road became these blurry Monet lily pads, and I could open the passenger door and step out to pace around among them, if I could have sat down on the hood of the car and stared at my mother's face, then maybe I might then have been able to say something better than what I did say, which was this: It's really nice the way you talk about the kids in your school. It's-- it-- it-- you know, the-the parents are lucky to have you looking after their kids. You really-- you know, you give them love, you know, which is something that you can't-- you can't really pay someone to love your-- your kids the way that, you know, the way that you would want them to be loved. Even as I was saying it, I knew there was a better, more difficult thing to say, namely, I am sorry for never hugging you. Although what I did say wasn't exactly right, at that moment, it felt like the least wrong. Life isn't about saying the right thing anyway. And it is certainly not about tape-recording everything so that you have to endure it more than once. Life is about failing. It is about letting the tape play. It is about eating the pineapple you are being force-fed, and, to the best of your ability, enjoying it. Jonathan Goldstein, author of the novel Lenny Bruce is Dead and host of the CBC radio program Wiretap. Act Two, In The Bush Leagues. When he was in his early 20's, barely out of school, at the very first political event of his life, Charles Monroe-Kane got into a shouting match with the leader of the free world. And he pretty much lost that one. This was in the early 1990s. He just left the religious school where he had been studying to be a minister. And he moved to Amsterdam, where he fell in with a bunch of anarchists. He edited an environmental newspaper called the Green Tree News. And I wanted to be an activist, so that's the whole reason I think I wanted to be a minister. I was into liberation theology. That's what I wanted to be. And I was there about four or five weeks. And the G7 meeting was happening in Munich, Germany. President Bush-- former President Bush, or President Senior, or Dad, whatever you want to call him-- he was president. So we went down like a good activist would do. It was in Munich, Germany. We went down to protest. And I had only been doing this for four or five weeks, so I was kind of down. It was my first political action ever. I was sleeping in the back of a bus with a bunch of dread-locked people. I had my hair down over my shoulders, and I had just gotten my ear pierced. I had a peace sign in my earring. You can imagine the person, right? And so basically, we were going down to protest, and I had this press pass. I'm a bit of a talker, bit of a schmoozer. Met some people there, and found out that there are seven levels of press passes. I had level number one, which got you nothing but some faxes. Level number two got you nothing but some faxes, but also got you this buffet once a day. And now I'm sleeping in a bus. I'm like, well, hell, I'm not stupid. So I fandango my way in-- press pass number two. Well, of course, food brought me to number three and number four. Now, number five got you a hotel room. I thought, well, my friends could use this. Because we were starting to smell on the second day. So I kept BS-ing my way all the way through just to get these press passes. Wait, so you get the room? All the way to the sixth level, yeah. I get the room. We get in there-- and the food was awesome, by the way, on the sixth level-- and the suite was-- it was a decent-- it was almost like a suite. It was a decent size where all of us could stay for free. And then what happens is I'm with some people who later became very good friends of mine, but at the time, I didn't know them very well. A friend named Paxus and some others who were high level at Friends of The Earth and Greenpeace. These people are like, "Do you realize what you have? You have a level six press pass at the G7 meeting. You have access to all these places and all these things." "OK, that's cool." He said, "But what you don't have is you don't have a White House press pass. That's the top level." So he's like, "You know what you ought to do? You ought to try the next level. You should try to get a White House press pass." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because you could be live at a press conference. You can protest. Tomorrow, George Bush, at 11 o'clock in the morning"-- this is in the afternoon the day before-- "he's giving a live press conference on CNN." I was like, "Oh, I never thought of it. I've never done an action before." So I went, and I went to this beer garden where I knew some of the people who made the decisions were. And I met a man named Marlin Fitzwater-- I think a lot of people might know who he is-- and he's sitting there drinking. But I didn't know who the hell he was. The White House Press Secretary. Yeah, yeah. The actual White House Press Secretary. Because that's the step. Because that's a higher level. The president's got a different security issue. Well, here's the logic for him, right? He's already assumed I've been checked. Remember, he already knows I have the sixth level press pass, so I'm not like I'm an anarchist in Amsterdam or something like that, for Christ's sake. So I think that he wasn't too worried about that. So then, anyway, he gives me a press pass. It's very exciting. I go back to my hotel room with a bunch of naked, dirty hippies, and I show these people the press pass. And they flip out. They're like, "You're kidding. You got it." I don't understand the ramifications of what's about to happen at all. So basically, they're like, "Well, tomorrow morning, President Bush, at 11 o'clock in the morning, is giving this conference, a press conference live on CNN. You should-- you have a press pass to go there-- I think that you should do something." I was like, "Well, I agree." So then I sit down with these guys, these guys now who are like-- all the hippie, dirty activists are out of the room, and now I've got the Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth people who know what they're talking about guys. And they're like, "Have you thought about what you're going to say?" And I was like, "No, not really." So we talked about it. And they said, "The most important thing to do is two things. Keep your hands away from your body while you do this, so you don't get shot. Because they might think it's an attempted assassination or something. And you're going to get 20 to 30 seconds max. That's all you're going to get, so know what you're going to say." Wait, wait. These are the two pieces of advice they give you? Piece of advice number one is, don't get yourself shot? Like, that's-- It's good advice, though. And I took it. Because they were like, "Keep your hands away from your body." They said, "Don't wear a watch. Roll up your sleeves, or have on a short-sleeve shirt. You have to be careful. You're in a small room. You're standing up-- basically, you're going to stand up on a chair. Situate yourself in the middle of the room, so you're hard to get at by the Secret Service guys, who are going to, in 15 or 30 seconds, drag you away and arrest you. So what are you going to say?" And I thought, "Well, all I know is Christianity." And they said, "Well, that's OK. You can go with that. Americans relate to that." And I said, "You know, I've always wanted to be one of the Old Testament prophets. I thought that would be really cool. That's kind of a life dream. That was what I wanted to be." Now, wait, wait. Now when you say this to a bunch of real activists, "I've always wanted to be one of the Old Testament prophets," is that pretty much where they roll their eyes and slowly shake their heads and look at the ground? They just think, "Oh, what have we gotten ourselves into here?" No, I think they were more like, "Jesus, this dude's got a White House press pass in his hand, and he is such an idiot. He's so not prepared that we've got to help this kid out. Because we don't have the press pass. He does, and he's the only one who's going to get in." And so I went to the Bible. And my favorite profit was Jeremiah. And Jeremiah had a certain style. So I think, "Here's what I want to do. I want to get some ashes. I'm going to put some ashes on my head. I want to rip my shirt off, rip it open [MAKES RIPPING SOUND] like that. And I'm going to give him a line from the Old Testament. A good line." And they said, "Well, maybe you shouldn't quote the Bible. You should do it in that style, something from your thing." So I thought about it, thought about it, and I came up with this great line. "The homeless in the trees are mourning your economic decisions. Repent, dear King, or go to hell." I thought, "Now, that's a good line." That's good. It's about him, but it takes inanimate objects into effect. I'm an environmental activist as well. So I said, "That's what I'm going to do." Now Charles, can we just pause the story right here-- Absolutely. And let's move to the present, a dozen years later. Now, when you think about that quote now, as the adult you are, how do you view that quote now? Oh, my god, it's the most embarrassing choice of anything I would ever use in my life. If I had 30 seconds to choose now, I think I would say something maybe a little bit more, a little less, whatever-- symbolic, I don't know. But that's what I had. I was 22, and that's all I knew. So I practiced it over and over again. "The homeless in the trees are mourning your economic decisions. Repent, dear King, or go to hell. The homeless in the trees are mourning your economic decisions. Repent, dear King, or go to hell." Hands away from my body. But then one of the activists guys came up with a great idea, this American guy. He was like, "Well, don't rip your clothes because that's going to get misunderstood. You should rip an American flag in half. And that should be the cloth that you rip." I said, "That's a great idea." So I'm going to put ashes on my forehead, I'm going to rip an American flag in half, I'm going to read that statement, yell it out with all the passion I can muster, get arrested, and awesome! Wait. Have you ever-- you've lived in the United States of America, right? Yeah. Are you familiar with how people feel about the ripping in half of the American flag? That's probably part of the reason he liked and I liked it, I think, at the time. But weren't you trying to win the sympathies of your countrymen? Yeah, I think I was. But I also think I was-- I don't know what I was trying to do, man-- I was 22. When you were 22, did you know what you were trying to do? Good Lord, I don't know I was trying to do. So I couldn't sleep that night. They were right. I couldn't sleep. I was a little nervous. And they got me a shirt and a pair of pants. Some shoes that fit me. We had to go to different activists to find it all. A nice tie. I took the earring out. They had a lawyer for me. I gave him my passport. Nothing in my pockets. But shoved down the front of my pants is an American flag-- partly ripped on the top, so I could easily rip it in half-- and some ashes in my pocket. And this quote burned into my brain. It was like a zen-- I don't even know what zen is at the time-- I do now. But at the time, it was a zen mantra. "The homeless in the trees are mourning your economic decisions. Repent, dear King, or go to hell." And that's all I had in my mind. So I go into the press conference saying, you know-- and a former Christian kid, here I am. So I sit down. I situate myself in the middle of the room. There's about 44, 45 people. And I remember counting them. I was nervous, so I counted all the people. My throat was dry, and I thought I was going to pass out. And I didn't want to throw up. I knew that would be bad. That wouldn't be a good symbol. And I didn't want to pass out. So it's coming up to the point. My heart's aflutter. Well, let me stop you right there. Because we have here in the studio a videotape of this day, July 8, 1992. We got this courtesy of the Vanderbilt University Television Archives. And you have never seen this? No, I've never seen it. I've never even seen the highlights from any of the news. All I've seen is newspaper stuff. I'm really nervous about watching this. OK. Let's roll the tape. Right now, let's go live to Munich to hear President Bush's comments at the close of the G7 summit. I totally remember that, him coming in. That was intense. --the last three days discussing the responsibilities and opportunities that we had-- Because that's the point where I'm sitting there with a flag between my legs I'm going rip in half and yell at the man, the President of the United States. Oh my god, it makes me want to pass out. All right. Sorry. --sustaining political reform. I would cite five key accomplishments at the Munich Economic Summit. We've succeeded in achieving a solid consensus on strengthening-- Now, he's barely spoken for a half minute. He's still in his opening statement. --United States, Japan, Germany, and Italy have-- Now the camera's panning back. Repent. We mourn your decisions here. You're not giving us your voice. Oh my god, look at that kid. Wow, you can't even hear the great line, "The homeless in the trees are mourning your decisions here." You can't hear it all. You can't hear it at all. All you hear is the president. Oh, I didn't even notice that. I didn't even know that. What if nobody heard it? I guess not. This is the tape. This is the tape. I don't think anybody heard it. Wow. That's intense. I'm trying to give-- [INAUDIBLE] your voice in the US. I'm trying to give you my voice right now. And if you'd be quiet, maybe you could hear it. But you're not giving it to us [INAUDIBLE]. Well, would you please sit down? We're in the middle of a press conference here. You're not giving us your voice there. Well, what's your question, sir? I'm under 25, and I want to know-- Well, we can tell that. Nice. Good for him. He got me on that one. Now, what's your question? Now, this I remember. Because I just assumed I was going to be arrested. I knew I wasn't going to be shot. That hadn't happened yet, so that's cool. And I'm like, "This is it." And what happened next was amazing because nothing happened next. I didn't get arrested. He had this thing where he had his hands on the podium, and he kind of moved his hands. I don't know what signals they have, or whatever, but they didn't arrest me. And then the worst possible thing in the world happened to me. He ain't going to arrest me, and he's about to engage me. And I was like, "Oh, my god. The President of the United States is speaking to me right now, and he basically started asking me questions. And I was like, "Holy mackerel." I really almost passed out. Who are you, and who are you accredited to? My name is Charles Kane. Yeah. I'm from the United States. Yeah. I work with a magazine in the Netherlands. It's a youth magazine. And we want to know why we're not taken seriously. We're an environmental group. Well, maybe you're rude. People don't take rude people seriously. And if you interrupt a press conference like this, I'm sure that people would say that's why we don't take you seriously. Sit down, and I will take a question from you when we get in the question and answer period. Right now, I would like to continue my statement with your permission. Thank you, Captain. Go ahead. Now, where were we? We were talking about economic recovery. [CHUCKLES] So the President gives this little nervous laugh and sort of looks down, and then he goes on with his regular statement. Oh my god. And this continues for a few minutes. So I'm sitting down, That's all. I don't remember. So you're sitting down. Why didn't I keep yelling? What a wimp. I guess I was probably-- but he gave me a cue there. Well, what do you mean why-- What he was saying was perfectly reasonable. "I'll get to you during the question-- look, we're going to talk, and it's going to be during the question and answer period. I'm just reading my opening statement." How are you going to argue with that? Yeah, but it's a protest. I was supposed to be in there yelling at him. I was supposed to get arrested. I thought I was supposed to get arrested. Oh my god, I so didn't want to be there after I didn't get arrested. I was so embarrassed. It was horrible. Because from your point of view, the whole point was to get arrested. Yes. So now at this point, you've failed. Well, also, I not only failed at that point for not getting arrested, I also know I'm going to fail because he's going to ask a question to me later. Because I don't have anything to say. I mean, you've got to remember that. I don't have anything to say. I don't have a question. What do you mean, I have a question? Of course, I don't have a question. So finally it comes to you. You're the third question. And basically, he answers two questions, and then he says this. And that's what we're talking about. Now, let's go to this gentleman who's so agitated here. I just want to know why there's no new nuclear power plants in the United States being built, but you're proposing for Siemens to build them in Eastern Europe? Oh, I'd like some more to be built. Why are they so unsafe in our country and so safe in their country? Well, I don't think they're un-- Why it is only at the G7-- You've asked your question, sir. Now let me try to answer it for you. I favor nuclear power. I believe that it can be safely used. I believe that it is environmentally sound. The debate here has been that we ought to try to help those areas that have nuclear facilities that might not have the latest technology and might not meet the same standards of safety that we use in our country. Thank you very much. Now, we'll go here. Do you respect the flag? Then you said, "Do you respect the flag?" You had your question. Oh, now the media is yelling at me. It's all rhetoric. Come on, you guys, think about it. And then you say, "It's all rhetoric." Is the world going to be a better place in a year? This is coming out of your time, gang, and we've got 20 minutes here. This is a press conference, man. Come on. This [UNINTELLIGIBLE] acting up at all. Mr. President-- You guys are all part of this system too. And then the president sort of laughs. Thanks a lot. Go ahead. Much has been said here by you and others about the-- We've given up. And then there's the voice of Sam Donaldson. And then now, it's back to normal. God, I can't believe I did that. That's embarrassing. It's so hot in here. I'm totally embarrassed by that. Oh my god. I mean, I'm not embarrassed about yelling at the President of the United States. I do not sit here right now and say, "Wow, I wish I wouldn't have done it." No way. I sit here right now and say, "I wish I would have done it down better." And what would doing a better job have meant? What do you wish that you would have said? I wish I would have said something that kind of hung in the air for a moment, that made everybody silent, that would keep him awake for one moment of his life, that just would make him think, "Wow, I do have some responsibility, and I have squandered that responsibility." But what could that possibly be? I don't know. Haven't you been touched by one statement in your life that's affected you greatly? I have. Yes, but it's-- So I'm giving him credit. It seems very unlikely in this setting. Now, in retrospect, it's extremely unlikely. It's probably a million to one, but you got to try. You got to try I don't know. When I see the president answering questions at a news conference, I feel like what he's doing is-- he doesn't want to say anything that's going to get him in trouble. He doesn't want to say anything that's going to make his life more complicated and difficult. And it's not an environment conducive to learning. What I should have said is-- when I think about it at 3 o'clock in the morning, it's not the-- it's in general what I should have said. I should have said something that would affect the man's life. And what's depressing for me that really makes me sad is that I still haven't come up with what I should have said. And that really makes me sad. But of course, you didn't come up with what you should have said because nothing could have been said-- I won't accept that-- In that setting that was going to make the President of the United States rethink anything in particular. I won't accept that. I should have found something that could have changed the world at that moment. I had my opportunity at that moment. I think I should have gone for it. Now, you're in your thirties now. Have you ever had this experience where somebody just yelled something at you, some punk kid, whatever, yelled at you? I did. I was at an introduction. I was introducing somebody who was about to give a speech. They heckled me. It was a really interesting experience because immediately what came back was me. Did it keep you up at night afterwards? Did it give you something to think about? That's an unfair-- of course, no, it didn't give me anything to think about. No, it didn't keep me up at night at all. It didn't-- yeah, I get your-- that's a good question. No, it didn't keep me up at all. And so do you think, thinking about George Bush and the possibility that he would be kept up at night a moment like this-- No. No, OK, I understand where you're going. I respect where you're going. No, of course not. But I know this all along. Yeah, I know this all along. It's only what you wish would have happened. I hope-- I don't know. Maybe I'll read his memoirs, and he'll say, "You know--" OK, forget it. I won't even go there. I tried, man. It was a tough day, man. It was a tough day. I tried really. I did my best. My best wasn't very good at the time, but I tried my best. Charles Monroe-Kane. He's a producer for the public radio program To The Best of Our Knowledge. Coming up, David Sedaris and When You Wish Upon A Pie. 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, What I Should've Said. Stories where people go back in time, rethink the moments that have vexed them. We have arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, A Can Of Worms. David Sedaris told this next story before a live audience. Hugh wanted hamburgers. So he, his friend Anne, and I went to a place called The Apple Pan. This was in Los Angeles. I thought The Apple Pan would be a restaurant, but it was more like a diner. No tables, just stools arranged along a u-shaped counter. We ordered our hamburgers from a man in a paper hat. And while waiting for them to arrive, Anne pulled out some pictures of her bull terrier. She's a professional photographer, and so they were portraits rather than snapshots. Here was the dog peeking out from behind a curtain. Here was the dog sitting human style in an easy chair, a paw resting on the paunch of his stomach. When she's not taking pictures of her dog, Anne flies around the country on assignment from various magazines. A day earlier, she'd returned from Boston where she photographed the fire commissioner, whose last name is Bastardo. "That's bastard with an O on the end," she said. "Don't you think that's funny?" Hugh told her about some neighbors in Normandy whose last name translates to hot ass. But unless you speak French, it's hard to get the joke. "Is that hyphenated," Anne asked. "I mean, did Miss Hot marry Mr. Ass, or is it all one word?" I thought the conversation would rest here for a while, and so I prepared myself to contribute, wary of how easy it is to fall into a game of one-upsmanship. If you knew a Candy Dick, the other person is bound to have known a Harry Dick or a Dick Eater. I'd recently learned of the race car driver Dick Trickle. But for the time being, we were operating on a higher plane. Anne's last name is Fishbein, and she hates it. She and Hugh met in college, and when our hamburgers arrived, they reminisced about some of the people they had gone to school with. "What was that guy's name? I think he was in the art department. Mike maybe, or Mark? He used to go out with Karen, I think her name was. Or Kimberly. You know who I mean?" Talk like this can go on for a while. And while you do have to accept it, you don't have to actually pay attention. I stared straight ahead, watching a broken-nosed cook top a hamburger with cheese. And then I turned slightly to my left and began listening to the two men seated on the other side of me. The man beside me wore a t-shirt endorsing the state of Florida. And as if the weather were completely different on the other side of the ketchup bottle, the man beside him wore a thick wool sweater and heavy corduroy pants. A coat rested in his lap, and before him on the counter sat a newspaper and an empty cup of coffee. "Did you read about those worms," he asked? He was referring to the can of nematodes, tiny worms recently discovered on the Texas plains. They'd been sent up with the doomed space shuttle and had somehow managed to survive the explosion, the cause of which was still a mystery. The man in the sweater massaged his chin and stared into space. "I've been thinking we could solve this problem in no time," he said, "if only, if only we could get the damn things to talk." It sounded crazy, but I remember thinking the exact same thing about the Akita in the O.J. Simpson case. "Put it on the stand. Let's hear what it's got to say." It was one of those ideas that just for a split second seemed entirely logical, the one solution that nobody had thought of. The man in the t-shirt considered the possibility. "Well," he said, "even if the worms could talk, it wouldn't do much good. They was in that can, remember?" "I guess you're right." The men stood to pay their bills. And before they reached the door, their stools were taken by two people who did not know one another. One was a man dressed in a fine suit, and the other, a young woman who sat down and immediately started reading what looked to be a script. Over on my right, Hugh had decided that rather than Karen or Kimberly, the classmate had been named Katherine. While I'd been listening to my neighbors, he had ordered me a piece of pie. And as I picked up my fork, Anne told me that I was supposed to eat it backwards, starting with the outer crust and working my way inward. "Your last bite should be the point, and you're supposed to make a wish on it," she said. "Hasn't anyone ever told you that?" "Come again?" Anne looked at me the way you might at someone who regularly tosses money into the fire. The senselessness, the waste. "Well, better late than never," she said. And she repositioned my plate. As she and Hugh resumed their conversation, I thought of all the pie I had eaten during the course of my life, and I wondered how different things might be if only I had wished upon the points. To begin with, I would not be seated at The Apple Pan. That much was certain. Had I gotten my wish at the age of eight, I would still be rounding up mummies in Egypt, luring them from their tombs and trapping them in heavy iron cages. All subsequent wishes would have been based upon the life I had already established. A new set of boots. A finer whip. Greater command of the mummy language. That's the problem with wishes. They ensnare you. In fairy tales, they're nothing but trouble, magnifying the greed and vanity of the person for whom they are granted. One's best bet, and the moral to all those stories, is to be unselfish and make your wish for the benefit of others, trusting that their happiness will make you happy as well. That'll be the day. Since we'd entered, The Apple Pan had grown progressively busier. All the seats were now taken. And people leaned against the wall, their eyes moving from stool to stool, determining which customers should pay up and get out. Looking around, I saw that we were the likeliest candidates. The man in the hat had removed our hamburger wrappers, and all that remained was a single plate supporting the tip of my pie. I wished that the people against the wall would stop staring at us, and then quickly, but not quick enough, I tried to take it back. "I guess we should get going," Hugh said, and he and Anne pulled out their wallets. There was a little struggle over who would pay. "It's my treat." "No, it's mine." But I stayed out of it, thinking instead of what might have been had I not wasted my wish. A laboratory filled with sensitive equipment. Men in white coats trembling with hope and wonder as they leaned forward, catching the sound of one small voice. "Come to think of it," the worm says, "I do remember seeing something suspicious." David Sedaris. This story appears in his most recent book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Act Four, Life Sentence. In 1989, a politician named Mike Miller, president of the Maryland State Senate, the kind of political veteran who does not slip up, made a comment to a reporter-- just a few sentences off the cuff-- that many political observers say put the kibosh on his chances to become governor. The day this happened actually happened to be the day of a big political coming-out party for Miller, his first statewide fundraiser, to be held over in Baltimore. Miller comes from a district near DC. He'd sold over 2,000 tickets. Both US senators would be there, and the governor, and the mayor of Baltimore. But also, the same day, one of his law partners died at a desk in their law offices. So a lot was on his mind. And with all this happening, he gets a call from a TV reporter who was doing a story about a local gun control issue. She came to my office, and I was sitting there very despondent about the law partner who had been found dead sitting just a few hours before in his chair in his office. And she comes in and starts stalking to me-- no mic check or no white-on-white check or anything like that. She said to me, "Why are you going to Baltimore?" In other words, you're not from this area in Baltimore, you're from Washington. Why are you going to Baltimore? And I used some profanity-laced language about the city, defaming the city, which I love. But I was just using it to describe the need of the city in terms of jobs, in terms of economic development, in terms of education. But I said it in barnyard phraseology that-- which is sort of my standard nomenclature when I'm not in public life. I mean, I grew up in the country, you know? I don't mean to embarrass you for this thing. It happened 15 years ago. But let me just read the exact quote so people listening on the radio will know what we're talking about. You were asked why were you holding a fundraiser in Baltimore, and you said, "It helps educate my constituents as to why Baltimore needs the economic help. I mean, Baltimore is a goddamn ghetto. It's worse than inner-city Washington, DC. It is [BLEEP]." They beeped out the words like we're doing. And then you say, on tape, apparently, "I hope you're not going to play this on tape." And you laughed, and then you said, "I mean, it's a war zone. I mean, it's crack. I mean, it's dime bags of PCP. 1/4 of every kid is not in school each day. 50% of the kids that start out in school don't graduate. So looking at things from a statewide perspective, we really have to do things to help." Right. That's what I said. But you didn't know they were actually rolling film? No, absolutely not. But I didn't know that I had said anything wrong. I mean, I really didn't realize that I'd said anything wrong. I had no idea I'd said anything wrong. Nobody told me I was on television at the time. And so later on, she does her interview, and everything is fine. Doesn't mention anything, we don't follow up with it or anything like that. And then I get a call later on. Apparently, she'd got the tape, and she'd run to the Mayor of Baltimore, "Let me show you this." And she put it on the Baltimore stations, and then put it on the Washington stations. And they would make the announcement, "Be careful, have your children leave the room before you see this." Wow. It was very traumatic. Because like I say, the people showed up at the fundraiser, and the mayor of Baltimore was there and the governor. And they couldn't believe that I'd said what I said. So when something like this happens, is this just like a bomb going off? Does everything turn over in a minute? Yes, very much so. I couldn't sleep. I left the hotel at 4 o'clock in the morning. I left my wife at the hotel. I couldn't sleep. I just had to get out of the city. I said, "Look, I'm leaving." And the doorman, he said, "Senator?" He says, "I don't understand this." He says, "You've always been great to Baltimore. I don't understand this." He says, "We'll figure a way out of this." He says, "You and I will figure a way out of this." This is the doorman at the hotel. Wow. And I said, "I appreciate it. Thank you very much." And anyway-- Man, I've got to say, that's a bad number when-- He was a great guy, he was a great guy. When the doorman of the hotel is consoling you. The doorman of the hotel. He said, "Look, Senator, I'll help you. We'll figure a way--" This is at 4:00 in the morning? Yes. So the next night, I'm on all the TV channels, 2, 11, 13. And anyway-- You mean going back and giving your side of it? I went back in the city. I said, "Look, let me just explain this as best I can." And I explained it sort of the way I did to you. And the doorman goes-- I come back to the doorman because my wife had forgot her hat-- and he goes, "Senator, Senator," he said, "I knew you could do it, I knew you could do it." He said, "That country boy stuff gets them every time." So anyway, it was very traumatic for me. And like I say, a lot of people took offense that I used the word ghetto for example. And at the time, I didn't realize the connotation. Yeah. Now, this happened on a night of an exploratory fundraiser for statewide office. What effect did this have on your career when you look back? If I were going to run for statewide office, it would certainly have set me back four to eight years. My adviser said, "If you had just taken that theme and expanded it and say what you really meant, you could have turned it into a positive." And I said, "Look, I don't really feel like doing that much explaining, and I don't want my mother to have to hear this statement again." Because wherever I campaign, it's going to be on TV. It's going to be on sound bites and TV ads and wherever, and I really don't want to see that again on television or in print. This must have been one of those moments you ended up thinking about a lot afterwards, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, I just-- And what would you think? When you replay it in your head, what would you think about it? Well, as a politician, they give you these things, how you're supposed to deal with reporters and the press. And what you're supposed to say, and you're always on record. But I've never been able to follow that guideline for myself. I just-- People appreciate your candidness, but at the same time, it gets you in a lot of trouble. Did you find that you were more careful in what you were saying afterwards? No. But I did find that there were certain reporters I wouldn't talk to anymore. And I saw that a couple years ago, in 2001-- that's 12 years after this happened-- the Baltimore papers did a big profile of you, a very flattering profile summarizing your legislative career. And this is one of the things that they mentioned. Not in a big way, but just as one of the things that had happened in your career. Is it dispiriting feeling like you're just never going to shake this, you know what I mean? When you retire, it's going to be there? In your obit, they're going to mention this in passing? It's going to be in my obituary. It's going to be in my obituary. There's a lot of things. And unfortunately, as somebody said, "History is lies agreed upon." Well, some of it's the truth, and you just have to take the good with the bad. Mike Miller. He never did run for governor or for any other statewide office. He's a state senator, and now the longest sitting president of the Maryland State Senate in that body's history. Well, our program was produced today by Starlee Kine and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, and Sarah Koenig. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Kelsey Dilts. Special thanks today to Luke Burbank and William Eville. You can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, best-selling 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 has a message for you, a very important message. And he wants you to listen very, very carefully. Are you ready? The homeless in the trees are mourning your economic decisions. Repent, dear King, or go to hell. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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OK, so Dad, so you have the script. I have the script. From WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life, the Father's Day edition. Dad, you are such a pro. I haven't done this in 40 years. It brings back all kinds of memories. Now you better explain to our radio listeners in what context you actually sat in front of a radio microphone, Dad. Well, it was around 1955 or 1956 when I graduated from Maryland. Instead of getting an honest job, I went to work in radio. So here's a tape of what you sounded like back in 1956 on the radio. Oh, please don't play that tape. This is three years before I was born, and you're just a kid in this recording. You are 23 years old. Do personal problems and worries have you down? Are you disturbed by business problems, marriage problems, or emotional problems? See Mrs. K., reader and advisor. Mrs. K., formerly of Europe, gives you a reading and answers all your questions for just $1 and you'll feel much better. Dad, how could somebody who's charging $1 for a reading even afford to buy a radio ad? Well, look, she's been to Europe. She got her education there, so they must have taught her something over there. Now at some point, you gave up your career-- your burgeoning career in radio-- really before it took off the ground and that was because? It was nothing important. It was something called making a living. Right. And so now you're a certified public accountant living in Baltimore. Right. Well, let me say this. Let me give a little explanation that we try to give each show for new listeners. Each week on our program we document stories of life in these United States using all the tools of radio storytelling, documentaries, monologues, found tapes, anything we can think of. And today for Father's Day my co-host will be my own father, Barry Glass, certified public accountant. And it's a real kick to do this. I know. This is our little Father's Day adventure together. You could have bought me a tie. Dad, why don't you read the billboard. Our program today will have four acts. Act One, Sandra Tsing Loh finds out that the world sees her father very differently from the way she sees him. Act Two, Dad's Music. We have a story from writer Sherman Alexie. Act Three, The Moment Dad Left. Act Four, Reconciling With Dad, a story from playwright Beau O'Reilly. So Dad, take us into Act One, will you please? Act One, How the World Sees Your Father. So, Dad, our first story today is from Los Angeles. It's from Sandra Tsing Loh as you said at the beginning of the show in the billboard. When she was growing up, her father was not a fun dad. He himself had been orphaned in Shanghai when he was twelve. He was raised in poverty, and because of that he was just this-- penny pincher doesn't even capture it. He was miserly. They didn't celebrate Christmas. He never took his children to Disneyland even though it was less than an hour away from their home. There were no real vacations. Sandra tells the story. Once she bought a book of Charlie Brown comics for $1 at a book fair, and her father threw it across the room furious at how she had wasted money. He was really strict. But as Sandra found out recently, not everyone in the world sees her father the way she does. There's a kind of news that you're never prepared for, and here last week was mine. A friend told me that, incredibly, a local grunge band had composed a rock anthem about my dad and was performing it to great response in Malibu area clubs. The group in question was called Boy Hits Car and the song, a wailing rock cri de coeur powered by Pearl Jam-like riffs, was in fact called "Mr. Loh." The actual cover of the Boy Hits Car demo tape was a grainily xeroxed photo of a tiny, wizened 76-year-old Chinese man, grinning on a Malibu beach in tattered swim trunks, which was indeed my father. I have to admit, however, that the Mr. Loh in the song was not one I was familiar with. As seen through the eyes of lifeguard slash singer Craig Rondell, Mr. Loh is a mystical dreamy figure who swims naked among the dolphins. In the duality that characterizes certain types of rock poetry-- I'm reminded of The Doors-- the natural dance Mr. Loh does on the beach brings the listener comfort while at the same time poses a profound spiritual challenge. [MUSIC - "MR. LOH" BY BOY HITS CAR] Mr. Loh's not afraid to be naked, but some men fall from grace. They're not secure with themselves. He doesn't measure people by things we consider important. Can't seem to comprehend today, so he swims away. My first instinct was that this had to be a sick Freudian joke one of my siblings was playing on me, as in, what is the most wildly unlikely, most fraught with amazing ironies, most wacky '60s Peter Sellers film thing you can imagine could happen to our family. But, no. My father was these Malibu surfers' Eggman. He was their Walrus. I decided to meet them. Craig Rondell, bass player Scott Menville, and guitarist Louis Lenard were all too happy to come into a studio and explain how their song came to be. It was one day at the beach and there was about five of us just sitting in the sand, just talking. Mr. Loh came casually walking up, and he was standing there for just maybe three seconds without saying anything. And we were kind of like OK. And then he said, you're all victims of modern technology. I started thinking, wow, that's deep, and then he just started to talk to us. He would sing. Throughout the conversation he would start singing, and so that's where the song-- the premise-- kind of came from. [MUSIC -- "MR. LOH" BY BOY HITS CAR] Mr. Loh, will you speak to me. You're the only one I understand. Mr. Loh, will you sing to me. You're the only one who makes sense. Do you remember when you first saw my father? Go ahead, Scott. I remember-- these guys probably have earlier memories-- but it was in 1978 after the big fire came. Our house burned down and we moved to Malibu West, and I remember seeing Mr. Loh stretching naked, and then taking a shower outside naked. At the beach. At the beach. And I thought it was kind of like funny but like not in a bad way. I thought it was interesting. That was my first memory. I too have similar memories. I mean, I've been at that beach in Malibu West since I was in diapers. Five, six, seven, eight years old, I was down there and I'd notice him doing somersaults in the sand or doing headstands against the wall, naked as well. Talking to these guys, it suddenly occurred to me who my dad really is. You know how every neighborhood has its eccentric, the cat lady, the parrot man, the guy with the umbrella hat and recycling cart who yells? Well, in my southern Californian hometown, Malibu West, my dad is that person. It's an unsettling thing to realize about one of your own parents. And behind Mr. Loh's back, he was known as the Naked Handstand Man. For years I didn't even know his name. I just thought he was the Naked Handstand Man. You're going to have to do the song. So a song. What do you mean, the song? Scott wrote another-- I'm going to put him on the spot. Wait. There's a Naked Handstand Man song? Yes, of course, there's a Naked Handstand Man song. Unbelievably, the Mr. Loh song they'd recorded was only the latest in a decade long aesthetic exploration of my father on the part of Boy Hits Car bassist Scott Menville. Ok, it was like, I was walking down the beach one day. I happened to turn and look his way. There stood a man that we all know, and his name is Mr. Loh. He stood right there with his head in the sand. He's the Naked Handstand Man. Mr. Loh. Mr. Loh. Like something like that, I mean, we were like twelve. I invited my father to join me and the band in the studio. He doesn't really see all the fuss about his nakedness. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] at Stanford University, which I went there, too, in the men's swimming pool, everybody was naked, because that's the most hygienic, most clean thing to do, you see. But if some young people want to see his nakedness as a symbol of something more important, well, my father is happy to be of service. The way I discovered the tape was this. One day maybe a couple months ago, I hitchhiked, and a couple young men pick me up. They said, Mr. Loh, we hear that tape about you. Oh, I say, those rascals. They did tape. They didn't tell me. And it's very nice. I feel very happy, very honored , you know. Probably if they don't write any song about me, probably nobody will ever write about me. So this is my life chance. Of course, that's not true, because I've made my career writing about you. Yeah, but not song, you see. You see, you're on the writing so I appreciate that, too. But I like something different. That's very precious for me, you see. Of course, with all due respect to the members of Boy Hits Car, in my opinion, my father's the least likely candidate to become a symbol of individual freedom, of spiritual introspection, of the healing powers of nature. After all, this is a man who believed all three of his children should get Ph.D.s in engineering or else they would starve in the street. Then again, all these things may be a matter of personal interpretation. So you see my father's nakedness as kind of a rebellion of some sort? No, not actually. He's being natural. I feel that he has the ability to go beyond the general stereotype that America holds in that regard, and it's free. Contact with nature, now, that's very important. Now in this society, you're so busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. Not much time to talk to yourself or talk to the nature. Nature. But did you-- I'm just trying to remember as kids, if you encouraged us to do that. Oh, yes. OK, when? We did many things. We always go along the a Beach to the garbage can to collect those aluminum cans. And we'd compete with [UNINTELLIGIBLE] family. We have to go one step ahead. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a competition to collect cans for spare change is not the sort of communing with nature, say, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled, which brings me to another point. I have to say there is something sort of poignant about sitting in a room full of young people who are hanging on to my father's every word. He's like an odd little guru, they his apostles. God knows he never got that from my sister, brother, or me. At one point for reasons too complicated to explain here, my father sang the boys in the band a Chinese folk song that he had translated into French. Were you crying? I must say that tears were coming. Why? Why? That was just beautiful. That was just an unhindered true expression of something that I just felt that was totally genuine. It just gave me the chills. Should I sing another one? Why not? Sing another one. If this makes my father happy, well, then I guess I'll try to be happy for him. [MUSIC -- "MR. LOH" BY BOY HITS CAR] Mr. Loh he finds the water and seems to wash his place off as the dolphins jump and play. He speaks to us in the sand. Do you know the meaning of life or are you just a simple man? Then he swims away. Dad, do you have the script for the back end? Yeah, I have it. OK, why don't you give the back end? Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer, performer, composer, and columnist for Buzz Magazine in Los Angeles. She's the author of the book, Depth Takes A Holiday: Essays From Lesser Los Angeles. She tells stories about her father in a one woman show called, Aliens in America. It opens June 26 at Second Stage in New York City. Dad, I am so glad we're doing this. Hey, Dad, you know, one of the things that you often complain to me about stories that you hear on public radio is that they're too long. How are we doing so far? How long was that story in total? The total story is about eleven minutes. That's a pretty long piece. Too long do you think? Yeah, I think it's too long. Did your interest flag? No, my interest didn't slow down. However, if I were listening to the show at home with other distractions around, it might lag off a little bit. Dad, it's time to open up Act Two. Act Two, Father's Music. Now, Dad for this act I asked you to bring in an example of the kinds of music that you, my father, used to play around the house when I was a kid, because you had music going whenever you were home on weekends. Absolutely. OK. So what did you bring in? Well, I brought three Frank Sinatra CDs. Right on. Can you just choose a song and let's pop that on? Sure. What have you got? Probably my favorite Frank Sinatra song, "Lady is a Tramp." Why is this your favorite? I don't know. I just like the rhythm. I like Frank Sinatra's phrasing. Oh, Dad, this really swings. Ira, do you remember the 60th birthday party-- Your 60th birthday party, of course. --where we had the Frank Sinatra impersonator? Sure. He sang this there. Did a pretty good job, too. What do you think? Pretty good song? It's a great song. This next story that we're going to is by a writer named Sherman Alexie, who lives out on the West Coast. And among other things, it's about his father and his father's favorite song. And Dad, his father is, I guess, a bit younger than you. So it's not "Lady is a Tramp" or anything like that. No, this story is called, Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play "The Star Spangled Banner " at Woodstock. During the '60s my father was the perfect hippie since all the hippies were trying to be Indians anyway. But because of that, my father was always asking me, how does anybody recognize when an Indian's trying to make a social statement? But there's proof. There's evidence. Back during the Vietnam War, my father was at one of those demonstrations against it, you know. Yeah, there's this photograph of my father demonstrating in Spokane during that Vietnam War. And the photograph made it on to the wire service and was reprinted in newspapers throughout the country. It even made it on the cover of TIME Magazine. And in this photograph my father's wearing bell bottoms and this flowered shirt, and he's got red peace symbols splashed on his cheeks like war paint, and he's looking like a hippie or an Indian. Yeah, and in his hands he's holding this M-16 rifle, and the photograph captures him in that moment just before he proceeds to beat the crap out of the National Guard private lying prone at his feet. A fellow demonstrator holds a sign that is just barely visible over my father's left shoulder. It read, make love, not war. That photographer won a Pulitzer Prize, and editors across the country had a lot of fun creating captions and headlines. I've read a lot of them collected in my father's scrapbook, but my favorite was run in the Seattle Times. The caption under the photograph read, demonstrator goes to war for peace. Anyways, my father was arrested, but he got lucky. At first they charged him with attempted murder, but they plea bargained that down to assault with a deadly weapon, and then they plea bargained that down to being Indian in the 20th century. He got two years and spent them in Walla Walla State Penitentiary, you know. My father made it through those two years in prison, you know, and never got into any serious trouble, somehow avoided rape, and got out of prison just in time to hitchhike to Woodstock to watch Jimi Hendrix play "The Star Spangled Banner." After all the [bleep] I'd been through, my father said, I figured Jimi must've known I was there in the crowd to play something like that. 20 years later, my father played his Jimi Hendrix tape until it wore down. Over and over the house filled with the rocket's red glare and the bombs bursting in air. He'd sit by the stereo with a cooler of beer beside him, and cry, laugh, call me over, and hold me tight in his arms, his bad breath and body odor covering me like a blanket. Jimi Hendrix and my father became drinking buddies. Jimi Hendrix waited for my father to come home after a long night of drinking, and here's how the ceremony'd work. I would lie awake all night and listen for the sounds of my father's pickup. And when I heard it, I'd run downstairs, turn on the record player, and Jimi Hendrix would break into "The Star Spangled Banner" just as my father walked in the door. He'd salute, walk over to the table, sit down, and start drinking some more, or I'd walk over there, lay down at his feet, and he'd pass out on the table. I'd fall asleep at his feet and we'd dream the same dreams. And then when he woke up in the morning he'd feel so guilty he'd tell me stories. He talked about how he met my mother, you know. He'd say, yeah, me and your uncle Raymond were sitting in the Pow Wow Tavern when your mother came walking in. And she was real tall, about six feet tall, you know, just beautiful. And your Uncle Raymond turned to me and said, she's real tall, ain't it? And I said, yeah. And your Uncle Raymond said, what tribe do you think she is? And I said, Amazon. And your Uncle Raymond leaned in real close to me and said, their reservation's in Montana, isn't it? Your mother and I ended out that night sitting on the hood of a '65 Malibu, both smoking cigarettes and coughing away. Neither of us smoked but we both thought the other one did. Somehow my father's memories of my mother grew more beautiful as their relationship became more hostile. By the time the divorce was final, my mother was quite possibly the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Your father was always half crazy, my mother told me more than once, and the other half was on medication. Yeah, one night my father and I were driving home in a blizzard after a basketball game, you know, listening to the radio. We didn't talk much. And we heard this DJ on the radio. Hello, out there, folks. This is Big Bill Baggins with the late night classic show on KROC 97.2 on your FM dial. We have a request here from Betty in Teco. She wants to hear Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner" recorded live at Woodstock. My father smiled, turned the volume up, and we rode down the highway while Jimi led the way like a snowplow. Until that night, I'd always been neutral about Jimi Hendrix. But in that near blizzard with my father at the wheel, with the nervous silence caused by the dangerous roads and Jimi's guitar, there seemed to be more to all that music. That reverberation came to mean something to me, you know, something specific, something Indian. You know, I said to my father, my generation of Indian boys ain't never had no real war to fight. The first Indians had Custer to fight. My great-grandfather had World War One. My grandfather had World War Two. You had Vietnam. All I had was video games. My father laughed for a long time, nearly drove off the road into the snowy fields. We kept driving through the snow and talked about war and peace. Those are the kind of conversations that Jimi Hendrix forced us to have. I guess every song has a special meaning for someone somewhere. I mean, Elvis Presley is still showing up in 7-11 stores across the country even though he's been dead for years. So I figure music just might be the most important thing there is. Music turned my father into a reservation philosopher. Music, a powerful medicine. You know, my father told me once, I remember the first time your mother and I danced. We were in this cowboy bar. We were the only real cowboys despite the fact that we're Indians. We danced to a Hank Williams song. You know, Hank Williams was a Spokane Indian. Danced to that real sad one, you know, that I'm so lonesome I could cry, except your mother and I weren't lonesome or crying. We just shuffled along and fell right god damn down in love. Hank Williams and Jimi Hendrix don't have much in common, I said. Hell, yes, they do. They knew all about broken hearts, my father said. You sound like a bad movie, I said. Yeah, well, that's how it is. You kids today don't know [BLEEP] about romance, don't know [BLEEP] about music either, especially you Indian kids. You've all been spoiled by those drums. You've been hearing them so long you think that's all you need. Hell, son, even an Indian needs a piano, a guitar, a saxophone now and then. My father played in a band in high school. He was the drummer. I guess he had burned out on those. Now he was like the universal defender of the guitar. A few years back my father packed up the family and the three of us drove to Seattle to visit Jimi Hendrix's grave. We had our photograph taken lying down next to that grave. There isn't a gravestone there, just one of those flat markers. That's all that's left of Jimi Hendrix. He was 28 when he died. That's younger than Jesus Christ when he died, younger than my father as he stood over the grave. Only the good die young, my father said. Nah, my mother said, only the crazy people choke to death on their own vomit. Why you talking about my hero that way, my father asked. [BLEEP], my mother said, old Jesse Wild choked to death on his own vomit, and he ain't anybody's hero. I stood back and watched my parents argue. I was used to those battles. After a while, after too much fighting, and too many angry words had been exchanged, my father went out and bought a motorcycle, a big Harley Davidson. He left the house often to ride that thing for hours, sometimes for days. He even strapped an old cassette player to the gas tank so he could listen to music. With that bike, my father learned something new about running away. He stopped talking so much, stopped drinking so much. He didn't do much of anything except ride that bike and listen to Jimi. Then one night my father wrecked his bike on Devil's Gap Road and ended up in the hospital for two months, you know. Ended up in this big surgery thing. Broke his legs, cracked his ribs, and punctured a lung. He lacerated his kidney, really hit his head. And the doctor said he could have died easily. They were kind of surprised he made it through surgery. And my father laid there in that coma for two months, and my mother went there every day, you know. And one day my mother was there holding my father's hand, you know. And even though the doctor said if my father woke up, he might be somebody different, he might be somebody new, he might be a vegetable, my mother said on that day when she was holding my father's hand with those heart machines sounding like a drum and my father's fingers started beating along, you know, with those heart machines sounding like a drum, my mother said I knew it was your father. I knew it was him, because he was way off rhythm. Yeah. Yeah, and when my father finally had the strength to sit up and talk, hold conversations and tell stories, he called for me. Victor, he said, stick with four wheels. He had to learn how to walk again, and when he did, he walked out of that hospital, forgot his advice to me, and got himself a new motorcycle, you know, and he ended up leaving us completely, you know. And then I'd get postcards from Browning, Montana, and Poplar, Montana, and South Dakota. For a while I got postcards nearly every week from him. Then it was once a month. Then it was on Christmas and my birthday. And then we didn't hear from him at all. My mother did her best to explain it all to me. Was it because of Jimi Hendrix, I asked her. Part of it, yeah, she said. This might be the only marriage broken up by a dead guitar player. There's a first time for everything, isn't it? I guess, she said. Your father just likes being alone more than he likes being with other people. Even me and you. And then on the night I missed my father most when I lay in bed and cried with that photograph of him beating that National Guard private in my hands, I imagined his motorcycle pulling up outside. I knew I was dreaming and all, but I let it be real for a moment. Victor, my father yelled, let's go for a ride. I'll be right down, I said. I need to get my coat. I rushed around the house, pulled my shoes and socks on, struggled into my coat, and ran outside to find an empty driveway. It was so quiet. A reservation kind of quiet where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away. I stood on the porch all night long and imagined I heard motorcycles and guitars until the sun rose so bright that I knew it was time to go back inside to my mother. She came outside, took me back inside, made us both breakfast, and we ate until we were full. Sherman Alexie lives in Seattle. This story comes from his book of stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven. Hey, Dad, it's time for us to give stations a chance to do the local ID breaks and local promos, so I think you have a piece of copy there in front of you. I do. Coming up, one father leaves, another one returns, in a minute when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our special Father's Day edition. And co-hosting with me for this day is my own father, Barry Glass, now a certified public accountant in Baltimore, but once upon a time, back in his early 20s, a DJ. Ira, you also said you wanted a song dealing with fathers. That's right. Did you bring in a song dealing with fathers? I did. What have we got? It's by somebody that you may have never heard of, because you're too young. Maybe you have. Eddie Fisher. The only way that I know who Eddie Fisher is-- wasn't he one of Elizabeth Taylor's husbands? That's right. That's right. He was the one before the guy who she did Cleopatra with. Right. Is that right? That's right. How very sad for Eddie Fisher that this is all that I would know. Here I am a person in my mid-30s, an educated person, that is all I would know about him. Richard Burton was married to Elizabeth Taylor after Eddie Fisher. The name of the song is "Oh My Papa." Dad, it's like Jewish mariachi music. Is that on point for Father's Day? You couldn't get more on point. Actually one of our producers-- You go around singing that about your father? I will now, Dad. I promise. At least for the day, at least for Father's Day. Do you want me to do it now? No, that's OK. No, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. No, no, I'm going to do it. I've heard you sing, Ira. You can't stop me. When he would take me on his knee and with a smile he'd change my tears to laughter. Oh my Papa. Dad, this is going out to you. To me he was so wonderful. Ira, my heart is breaking. We're now at Act Three, The Moment Dad Left. In this act, we have a story from Jay Allison. Jay Allison is this radio producer that all the people who kind of work behind the scenes in public radio, we all know him. He just won the biggest award in public radio, the Edward R. Murrow Award. He does these really unusual little stories. He lives in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Cape Cod, and one of his neighbors is a guy named Dan Robb. And Dan Robb is a writer and a teacher and a carpenter. And Jay and Dan had an idea for a little radio experiment. Dan's father left his family when Dan was a little kid, just, I think, three or four years old. And Dan remembered that night vividly, or he thought he did, but he never discussed this with his parents. So, Dad, Jay encouraged Dan to talk to his parents about this on tape, and I'm going to play you the story they put together, OK? Yeah, I'd like to hear it. I remember clearly the morning they told me they were separating. I was three and they leaned over my bed, which was narrow, and told me this. Something like, don't think this changes anything, but dad's moving out. And what I remember is telling them that it was not OK. Then later that day, I remember watching my father's back as he walked down the stairs outside the house. They were cement and had a black wrought iron banister running up both sides, and he was walking down the steps away from me. He had a brown tweed jacket on and brown leather shoes, and he was carrying two brown suitcases. He put them in his Jeep back when they still said Willys on the side, and he drove away. The steps were cement steps pretty steep and about three flights, three little flights, three steps and then a landing and three steps down. And there was something crooked about them. One of the steps sort of went off at an angle. There was an iron railing along the way up, very pretty. Now, if I looked out the window and watched Dad packing his car and then driving away, at that time what kind of a car would it have been? Well, he had bought a little sports car, because his car was in the garage-- in the shop-- and he didn't want to wait until it was ready, which would have been two or three days later. He bought a little car so that he could leave right away. And he told me he was leaving on a trip across the country, because that's what he had to do in order to clear his mind and get his feet on the ground again. So he packed up and he got in this little sports car and took off. What kind of car was it? It was a little Triumph, a little two-door. It was a neat little car, which I sort of got special for the trip. I just drove out West. I mean, I just wanted to get away from Pittsburgh and just sort of clear my head out, I thought. I remember telling Allison that when I got back I thought I would want to move out. I had a lot of different feelings. I was angry that he'd done it. I was angry that he hadn't ever taken Dan and me-- you and me-- on a trip. And he was walking down the steps away from me. And he was carrying two brown suitcases. He put them in his Jeep back when they still said Willys on the side, and he drove away. A little while before he left that day, he knelt down in front of me and tightened my belt for me. I have a picture of that. His hands are big, bigger than mine will ever be. Farmer's hands or a ballplayer's hands. And he is cinching the belt gently tighter and saying something to me. I mean, I feel bad about all of the sort of gaps when I wasn't there. And all of that time, I mean, once it's gone, it's gone. You can never get it back. And relationships in many ways are built of memories, and the more memories you have, the deeper the relationship. And if you're missing several years of memories, you know, that's hard. Well, there's a snapshot of his doing your belt up for you when you were probably three or four. You were four when he left, weren't you? I don't remember exactly what the season was. It had to have been fall, I think, because I remember taking a lot of pictures of you in the subsequent weeks when we'd get together and go to the parks and stuff. And it was all autumn shots. And he is cinching the belt gently tighter and saying something to me. I can't make out the words in the picture, which is black and white, and shows me standing there three years old in front of the big window that let the monochrome Pittsburgh light into the living room. The light is stark as if all of the coal burned to smelt the steel in that city had burned the color out of the air. And it reflects off his hair, which is smooth with Vitalis, and shows his strong jaw and the depth of his dark eyes. There was no abuse in that household, no harsh words that I could hear, just nothing. No father anymore, and my mother sobbing over the dishes in the sink. What do you think you would have done after he had packed up his car and left? What would have been your reaction that I might have observed? Oh, you probably saw me sad and mournful, but then turning back to the house and trying to look cheerful. I also felt abandoned, and I felt that it was the end of marriage, the end of my hopes for marriage, the end of my hopes for a family for you and me. And he'd left us. But I also felt, as he drove out of sight, well, thank goodness. What a sense of relief. I'm free of all that abuse and misunderstanding and bad feeling that had been going on for so long. I thought, well, at least I can be me now and not try to be something that somebody else was making me be. The split up was my doing, and coming out of sort of a combination of my own immaturity, restlessness, dissatisfaction, inflated hopes and expectations. I guess I just felt that I'd never had any kind of freedom. Of course, I never really found freedom afterwards. You think, well, you're going to change your life and then, lo and behold, your life turns out to be about the same. I was three, and they leaned over my bed, which was narrow, and told me this. Don't think this changes anything but Dad's moving out. And what I remember is telling them that it was not OK. I didn't want him to tell you first, and he didn't want me to tell you first, so we did it together. And I remember I knew it was a terrible blow for you. I don't remember telling you with her. You were in bed, I remember. At least I have this picture in my mind. And in that little room at Maple Heights. And I came in and I started to say something like, Dan, I'm going to be leaving and whatever I was going to say, and you somehow knew what was coming. It was not OK. And you said, I don't want to hear it, and put a pillow over your head, and didn't want to listen. And it was a wrenching moment. It really was. I've thought since then that actually when I walked out of your bedroom that night, that that was really a major turning point in my life. And I don't know to this day whether it was for good or ill. When my father left my bedroom, it was a turning point for me, too. It was the moment I moved outside the myth of the American family, left it, and became a part of something else, something with no affirming mythology to look forward to, and my restless memories of that day to look back on. I became a part of divorce, which is like the death of the family, and I turned down a path less well-marked, less well-lit, but I, unlike my father, no longer wonder if it was for good or for ill. It just is. OK, well, I think that's about it. This will be on the radio right before Father's Day. So I'd like to wish you a happy Father's Day. Oh, OK. Thank you. You're welcome. And maybe we can make something good out of this. Yeah. So thank you so much. All right. I love you. Love you, man. OK. Talk to you soon. Yeah. Bye. Bye. Hey, Dad. Yes, Ira. Do the next act open, please. Act Four, Reconciling With Dad. You know, this whole show is like go to reconciling with Dad. But you and I we don't need to reconcile. No, we don't. We don't. Well, Dad, this next story is about a father and son. The father was this pretty well known man here in Chicago named James D. O'Reilly. He was an actor here and a director from the 1960s through the 1980s. He's one of these people who everybody knew. He was the artistic director of the Body Politic Theater and the Court Theater, which are two theaters here in town. And he wasn't the most reliable dad. And his son is a guy named Beau O'Reilly, who's a playwright and a local musician and stages a lot of theater here in town. And Beau has this story about his father, including a moment in their lives when they did reconcile in a way. When I was a little kid, five or six, my father would do these big variety shows, these musical revues for college theater groups. And I would often appear with him, playing the bad kid in town or the midget clown screaming the lines of "This Old Man" from the top of a step ladder. And at the show's end, we would rush first to the bar where my father knew all the girls' names, and then to the train station to catch the last train home. And I would get very tense then and hot in my stomach like I was going to burn up and pass out. So we would often miss the last train home and have to spend the long hours until morning waiting in the train station, my father falling quickly asleep, his huge head thrown back on the train waiting room seat. It seemed to hang in an impossible odd angle from the rest of his body like the dot at the bottom of a question mark that knows it has to be there but hangs on and unattached. And this scene-- my father drunk and snoring, a big question mark of a presence-- would be repeated numbers of times over the next 25 years. My father passed out at the family table on Christmas morning. My father nodding off behind the wheel. My father snoring through the still Latin mass. My father's head thrown back in the last row during my high school production of The Glass Menagerie. But when he was awake, he was not totally present either. He was this silent brooding man home once a week for a family dinner. And I would sit up all night in that train station listening to the muted rumblings of the next morning's diesel engines and the fluttering of pigeons in the ceiling above, my father snoring made rusty and noisy by too much cigarettes and beer. When I was 29, something changed between me and my father. I was 29 and very drunk most days, and I came home to Chicago to work for my father, I guess. I had rarely seen him in my alcoholic adulthood, his alcoholic adulthood having taken him away from the family circle years ago. And when my father, he got me this job as a house manager and sometimes understudy at his theater on Lincoln Avenue. And he was warm and kind about it, I guess. This kindness was unusual. It was hard for me to recognize it. I didn't know whether it was kindness really or not. Maybe he just recognized something in my swaying walk and my overly bright loud way of speaking, a kindred alcoholic spirit. We would from then on do our drinking together late nights at the pub next door to the theater, a pub where we could sit for hours, get a burger and a beer, a pub where my father ran a tab, and I was always on the tab. Now the pub tables were family long with my father always at the head and crowded with actors and confidantes all with one ear pointed at my father, hoping for a good joke from him, which usually came, or some word of praise which came rarer, but when delivered were always delivered with a flair and a passion. These tables would start full, full of people and huge pints of black Guinness and brown beer, but by one or two in the morning, they would be empty except for my father and I. Me talking loud and feverish now, lovers and women and broken hearts and politics and plays and broken hearts and lost lovers and lost women and broken hearts. And me doing most of the talking, my father nodding and grimacing and looking appropriately sad. But his eyes looking away always, scanning the bodies of the young women who moved about in the pub's waning hours. Sometimes these women stopped by the table to speak to my father, him finding sly ways to kiss and touch and pinch them, locking their eyes with his as if his eyes were gift enough to allow him his inappropriate touching. The pub would close with us still in it. The tables having adopted the chairs and now holding them piggyback, and my father would sign his tab with a flourish, and we would part company, Me often watching him walk slowly up Lincoln Avenue, a large man with a lordly old-fashioned head, always aware that he was like something out of Shakespeare or O'Neil. He might be swaying, but swaying with a charm and a dignity. The further my father got up the street, the more real he felt to me. There. There. That was the father I knew, half a courtyard away under the hot lights doing Shakespeare's Lear or Brecht's Galileo, and I would stand on Lincoln Avenue crying, the crying of a 29-year-old drunken baby whose father is moving away, always moving away, and that baby knows he's better off having Dad go. I learned a lot watching my father's theater that year, wonderful productions of The Playboy of the Western World and Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, Brian Friel's Translations. My father's performances were always in the center of the plays, and I was the house manager. I was skittish in a baggy suit and non-matching vintage ties, greeting the audience at the door and selling them coffee, but mostly watching the performances night after night. My understudy assignment was not something any of us ever expected to use, but one week here it comes. An actor could not appear, and I was to play my father's tortured, crippled son. It was an Irish play about an Irish father and his Irish sons, and I was an Irish son, never mind that I had an Irish brogue like Ringo Starr's Liverpool, and I'd never appeared on a professional stage. There would be one rehearsal, my father not even on stage but seated in the audience, chain smoking, hung over, barking orders, orders that moved my body hot and frightened clumsily around the stage, me mumbling the lines and standing in all the wrong places. And the night of the performance I was pacing and shaking in the hall outside of the green room where my father and the rest of the cast were making up and preparing to perform. I could hear them talking, but they couldn't see me at all. They didn't know I was there, and one of the actors said, with a good actor's projection and precise actor's diction, get ready for amateur night. What did you say? My father said it quietly but with force. Get ready for amateur night. Well, he'll be fine. You worry about yourself. Prick. Now this is the only time I ever heard my father defend me, and I now realize the significance of that, but at the time I was very angry. And it was the anger that burned the fear out of me like a fog on a new hot summer Sunday, and I was fine when I hit the stage. I was understudy good enough. And when I played to my father, his eyes a deep well into the heart of Brian Friel's Translations, I actually enjoyed myself. There were moments of real emotion between us. And on the stage, my father was really there, like I could reach out and touch him, and he would really be there. And when the lights came down, I stumbled off stage, tripping and falling in the dark. My father was waiting, his big, noble actor head shaggy with sweat, his arms open to receive me. We, hugging, missed the curtain call. Probable first for my father. He was not one to miss a curtain call. A few months later, my father fired me during his production of The Dresser by Ronald Harwood, my father playing Sir, a bullying, tyrannical, Shakespearean actor Sir. My father was not one to shrink from typecasting. And one of my assignments was to meet him in the lobby, holding a towel which he would use to wipe the makeup and sweat from his face before returning to the stage for the curtain call. I wasn't there with the towel. I had wandered off to the pub for a pint before the show ended. The truth be told, there were probably many nights when I wasn't there. I was off crying into the phone, running up the long distance phone bill for the theater, or selling dope out of the theater concession stand to my friends. I was 29 and drunk most of the time, and my father, he recognized me for what I was. I was becoming very much like him in my 29th year, and perhaps he was embarrassed and uncomfortable having to see himself in me every day. He was fired soon after from his theater on Lincoln Avenue, and we continued to meet in the pub night after night for many months. Beau O'Reilly is a Chicago playwright. His show The Third Degrees of J. O. Breeze, is running in Chicago until the end of June. He is also performing in a play called The Trips by Jenny Magnus at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. So, Dad, you're sitting there in a studio in Baltimore. I'm here in Chicago. Do you have our credits? I do have your credits. All right. Our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and Ira Glass with Peter Clowney, Nancy Updike, and Dolores Wilber. Our contributing editors are Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and the fabulous Margy Rochlin. Music help today from Chicago's John Connors. The story about Dan Robb's father leaving comes from Jay Allison's ongoing series, Life Stories, which is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. If you would like a copy of this program, it is only $10. You can call WBEZ 312-832-3380. That's 312-832-3380. That was so smooth. Or you can email the program. All emails get a response, and if you want to reach my dad, we'll help put you in contact with him, too. The email address, [email protected] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass. And I'm Barry Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Until then, don't drive like my father. Don't drive like my son.
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From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. I give up. I mean, I want to leave the radio. The government is closing in on me. They've already won. They've got these broadcasters in such a snit that they're hitting buttons on me. And I'm not-- --firing people. Like a lot of you, I switch back and forth between Howard Stern and Morning Edition every morning. The Howard Stern, NPR crossover audience exists everywhere. Here in Chicago, it's 10,000 people a day, an equal number of men and women, average age in their 40s, good incomes. And in the last two weeks, as Congress has moved forward with bills raising FCC fines from tiny to a half million dollars each, Howard has been kicked off six stations owned by the conglomerate, Clear Channel. And Howard has told his audience that, because of the fines, he might be off the rest of his stations soon. And how you see all of this really depends on how you frame the issue. Howard Stern frames it as a simple, First Amendment issue. He's not going too far, the government's going too far. In the news media, this story has often been framed as, kind of, wacky news. There goes that crazy Howard Stern, running his mouth again, getting in trouble. Maybe there's some theoretical First Amendment issue here, but this guy, in this guy's case, he definitely goes too far. He's crazy. I have to say, this seems like the least useful way to view this story. For one thing, it's just weirdly condescending. For some reason, lots of people get this strange condescending tone when they talk about Howard Stern. And, most importantly, it sidesteps the bigger issue, which is that, for better or worse, what we're witnessing here is a real sea change in how government is regulating radio and television, making it much easier to revoke station's licenses for indecency, fining the actual people on the air up to a half million dollars. You may like that. You may not like that. But let's acknowledge what it is and talk about it like adults. It'll change the environment, even for what we do here on This American Life. One of our contributors, Sandra Tsing Loh-- maybe some of you have heard about this in the media already-- has already been fired from the public radio station that used to run her comments every week, under a so-called zero-tolerance policy. This is a big change. Though, fascinatingly-- again, it all comes down to how you frame what the issue-- when I talked to the head of the congressional committee that's behind the fines-- this is Fred Upton of Michigan, a congressman-- he framed the whole thing much differently. He downplayed all of this. He said it is much simpler. It is much smaller and, at its heart, it's completely uncontroversial, the way that he frames it. This is actually one of the arguments that got the new fines approved by the House, overwhelmingly, 391 to 22. That argument is, Congress isn't doing anything fancy or radical here, Congress is just bringing the FCC fines up-to-date with the times. That's it. The fines were peanuts. And, in fact, at some of the hearings that we held, we learned that the Justice Department has actually balked at collecting the fines because it often costs more to them to saddle up their attorneys and to go file that claim in Federal Court than they're going to recoup in the payment of that fine. The activist groups fighting for the fine say that what all this is about is kids, protecting kids. Brent Bozell heads the Parents Television Council, one of those groups. A quick warning that, in this little snippet of tape, he and I discuss an adult sex act very, very briefly, so protect your kids. Mr. Bozell and I don't need a half million dollar fine each. If there's one thing that is upsetting is the assault on the innocence of children. And what harm does it do? For example, one of the fines that Howard Stern is facing from the FCC is for talking about or referring to anal sex on his show. If a child were to hear him refer to that, what harm does that do, specifically? How do you envision the harm of that? Well, first of all, there is right and there is wrong, two concepts that are utterly alien to Howard Stern. There is also the idea that a child, a young child, ought not to have messages of anal sex or any other kind of sex. They can't comprehend these notions. They can't understand these notions fully. Right. But if they don't understand it, then how does it actually hurt them? No, they don't understand it in its fullest. It's a simple proposition, my friend. These are adult messages being addressed to children. I think the people who disagree about all this are never going to see eye to eye. I kept asking Brent Bozell to explain this part of the whole issue that I've never understood, which is, what was the big deal about Janet Jackson's breast? What harm did it do to anybody, young or old, to see that for a moment? He said that kids would imitate it in school. That was the harm. But, of course, if that were true, why haven't we seen a rash of playground shirt tear-off offenses? You know? And, in a sense, it doesn't really do any good to talk about this stuff because you just go around, and around, and around. And, on this issue and on most issues, we're never going to have a meeting of the minds because we don't even agree what the issue is. Is it First Amendment rights? Or is it children's innocence? Is gay marriage a question of the Bible or of equal rights under the Constitution? Iraq, the deficit, in the end, because we don't agree on what the issue is, the facts don't matter. Well, today on our program, we have two stories about this, of people in a situation where the facts don't matter. Act One is about something that happened during World War II, where the government covered some things up and the facts only came out much later. Act Two happens right now, during the presidential primaries. Stay with us. Act One, Straight Eyes On The Quirin Guys. Three weeks ago, in Washington, military officials announced that two men with ties to Al Qaeda, one suspected of smuggling weapons, the other of spreading propaganda, will be tried outside US Civil Court in military tribunals. And, if you've been paying attention to the debate over these tribunals, you may have heard reference to a Supreme Court case, which the Administration uses as the legal precedent for their existence, it's called the Quirin case. The original Quirin decision involved eight Nazi saboteurs who snuck ashore on Long Island, in Florida back in 1942. With Quirin, the Supreme Court changed what had been the law until that time. The Supreme Court said that it was now OK to try enemies captured on US soil in military courts not civilian courts. But a look back at the facts of the original case reveals a rather more complicated story, part spy thriller, part farce. When you look at the facts of the story, it's not only unclear whether they support the policies of our current administration, but whether they even supported the original decision. Chris Neary reports. What the Quirin decision has come to stand for and what actually happened in the case have grown so far apart it's probably best to start with the facts. Here's what everyone agrees on. On June 13, 1942, on a beach in Amagansett, Long Island, four men dressed in Nazi uniforms rowed ashore with a huge cache of weapons. By sheer chance, they were stumbled upon by a 21-year-old Coast Guardsman named John Cullen. Cullen, who's still alive and living in Virginia, declined to be interviewed on the radio, but he did talk with Michael Dobbs, a reporter for The Washington Post who's written a book about the case called, Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America. Dobbs says Cullen remembers the night vividly. It was a very foggy night, the night of June 13, 1942. He walked, I guess, about a half a mile along the beach when he saw two men pulling a little rubber dinghy in from the sea, which was very unusual because there was a blackout. People shouldn't have been out that late at night. He went up to one of the men, asked him what he was doing. The man said he was fishing. The man had a strong German accent, so Cullen immediately started getting suspicious. The men were also drenched, so Cullen suggested they come back to the Coast Guard station with him. And the men refused, and that's when he really started getting suspicious of what was happening. Cullen would have had to have been pretty suspicious to fully imagine the situation he found himself in. The men he found on the beach had come from a German U-boat still 200 yards offshore and stuck on a sand bar. For the last two months, they'd been trained in the art of espionage at a secret camp disguised as a farm in the German countryside. In their pockets were sea-soaked lists of key factories and bridges along the Eastern seaboard. If they successfully completed their mission, the aluminum industry, relied on in making things like tanks and planes, would be crippled. There were eight men all together: four that night on Long Island, and four still on another U-boat preparing to land off the coast of Florida. And though they were all foreign spies, they were all very familiar with the United States. Most of them had left Germany in the '20s, had come to America looking for jobs. But when jobs dried up in the Depression, they'd returned to Germany, leaving behind wives, girlfriends, and family. Many of them had personal problems that they wanted to resolve. For example, the leader of the Florida group, Eddie Kerling, who was probably the most fanatic Nazi of all eight saboteurs, he had not only a wife in the United States, but he also had a mistress. So when he got back to New York, he quickly set up meetings with his mistress in Central Park. And he was about to meet his wife the day he was arrested. So, even in his case, he had mixed motives for coming back. For any of them, was sabotage their first motivation when they came over? I think that many of them simply wanted to get back to America. We know this about how committed they were to their mission. That night, on the beach in 1942, though they were under orders to kill anyone they encountered, instead, George Dasch, the leader of the group, handed the young Coast Guardsman $300 and told him to get lost while the rest stood by and did nothing. Then, before authorities arrived, the Germans had time to dig a hole, hide their explosives, and walk to a commuter train station, where they hopped a train to New York, but not to commit sabotage. They had spent the last few months, in some cases several years, in Nazi Germany where there was nothing to buy in the stores. They had $100,000 in their pockets, which is the equivalent of over $1 million today. So, when they got back to the United States, the first thing that came to their minds was to go on a shopping spree. And the first thing they did was to head for Macy's. Also, Dasch loved a place called Horn & Hardart. I guess Horn & Hardart was the McDonald's of the time. It was the largest fast food operation in the world at the time. It was an Automat, so you put in your nickel and you got out a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie, or a sandwich from a bank of dispensers. And he loved to go to that place. They had many assignations at the Horn & Hardart. They also visited a lot of movie houses. And, in Dasch's case, he'd been a waiter. And he spent some time with his old waiter buddies at a waiter's club in New York. Dasch spent two days and nights playing cards to calm his nerves while he hatched a plan. He was deciding how to give himself up. During training sessions in Germany, he thought he might have detected that another man on the mission, Peter Burger, shared his feelings about defecting. One night, while the two saboteurs were having dinner in a posh New York restaurant with the money they were supposed to be using for the mission, Dasch decided to risk revealing his intentions to Burger. "There's something I need to tell you," Dasch said. "I know what you're going to tell me," Burger answered. "And I'm quite sure our intentions are very similar." In choosing eight spies for its first espionage team, Germany managed to select, not one, but two who wanted to defect. They struck a deal. Burger would occupy the other men on the mission while Dasch figured out the best way to give them up. And you might think Dasch had the easier of the two jobs, but he soon found out that, even when you're a spy trying to give yourself up, the FBI is not an accommodating organization. On June 14th, just a day after landing, Dasch called the FBI office in New York saying he had statements of military and political importance to make. Immediately, he was transferred to something called the "nutters" desk and forgotten. Undeterred, Dasch got on a train and traveled to Washington, determined to turn himself in directly to FBI Chief, J. Edgar Hoover. But, in Washington, this Nazi traitor, who really did have statements of military and political importance to make, was only slightly more successful. He first called the FBI headquarters and wanted to talk with Mr. Hoover. Here's Duane Traynor, now a dapper 94-year-old living in a retirement home in Springfield, Illinois. But, at the time, a 35-year-old special agent in FBI headquarters when Dasch tried to turn himself in. The [? officiant ?] Secretary says, what do you want to talk about? It has something to do with sabotage. Well, that's in Mr. Ladd's department. The [? officiant ?] secretary then wanted to know what he wanted to talk about. It was sabotage. And the call was referred to Mr. Russell Kramer. The same thing went on. What do you want to talk about? Sabotage. They said, well, that's Mr. Traynor's section. And they referred the telephone call to me. Dasch told Traynor everything, that the other sub had already landed in Florida, that the two teams were supposed to rendezvous in Chicago, and that they planned to target US aluminum factories. But Dasch didn't confine himself to just the mission. He was a talker. A team of six secretaries took turns transcribing Dasch's rambling testimony. Traynor ended up staying with Dasch overnight in a hotel to get everything. He came away with 240 pages of information about, among other things, the state of Nazi Germany, Dasch's service in the US Army, and a laundry list of his remarkable personal ambitions. The only thing Dasch didn't claim expertise in, in fact, was the thing he'd been sent to do: spy. For example, he'd paid so little attention to his mission that he couldn't remember the name of one of the men he was supposed to be in charge of. Dasch had a little trouble with the name of one of the individuals. He couldn't remember it at first, except it was to say, T- The- The-, something. So I took out a Washington telephone book and started reading the names of all the people whose names started with T. And I kept going down the list. Finally, I got to the name Thiel, and he said that's it, Werner Thiel. And for a trained spy, well, he was no James Bond. I said, is there any way you can get in touch with the leader of the other group? And he said, well, yes. I had him write the name of somebody on a handkerchief. And he picked the hankie out of his pocket. And the name of this individual and his address is written in secret ink on this handkerchief. And I said to him, well, how do you develop it? And he said, I can't remember. He says, it was some smelly stuff. Crack scientists back at the FBI lab determine what that mysterious smelly stuff was: household ammonia. George Dasch is one of the great enigmas of this story, not because he didn't talk about his reasons for doing things-- he did, a lot-- but because it's hard to believe him. He said that he hatched a plan to defect way back at the secret training camp in Germany. He said many times that, when Hitler declared war on America, I declared war on Hitler. But grandiose statements like that made people suspect less pure motives, especially for a man who had already betrayed one country. At the trial, the government argued that Dasch didn't decide to defect until much later, and then only because he was scared. Whatever the case, he clearly didn't consider himself a Nazi saboteur. Again, writer, Michael Dobbs. He thought that, if he went to the FBI, turned himself in, they would welcome him with open arms and allow him to launch a propaganda campaign by radio against Hitler. So he imagined a starring role for himself. But J. Edgar Hoover had other ideas. On June 27, 1942, The New York Times headline read: "FBI Seizes Eight Sabateurs Landed by U-Boats Here and in Florida to Blow Up War Plants." The article doesn't mention that the FBI was only able to crack the case because one of the saboteurs literally walked into their headquarters to confess. This is the first moment in this adventure where the official story diverges from the facts, and for decades the two don't find their way back to each other. The FBI decided the case would be conducted in secret before a military commission. Lloyd Cutler's been a White House Counsel for two presidents, helped ratify the SALT II Treaty, and negotiated with Iran during the hostage crisis. He's the kind of guy that, when reporters ask to talk with him, his secretaries ask, regarding which famous case? His first one came 60 years ago, when he was appointed to the legal team prosecuting the Nazi saboteurs. Of course, the decision to have a military commission was the President's decision under our Military Code of Justice. And the reason it was all done in secret was because we had a dirty, little secret of our own. And that was, although the FBI was trying to create the impression that it had itself penetrated the German saboteur school and the German army, and were waiting on the beaches to catch these fellows, the fact is that the FBI knew nothing about it at all. So the trial was held in secret more so that the FBI could create an image rather than for national security? Correct. And it was not just the FBI, it was President Roosevelt himself, because, remember, this was six months after Pearl Harbor. Half of our fleet had been destroyed. General MacArthur was being isolated on Bataan in the Philippines. And the fact that these saboteurs fell into our laps was the first chance to show that the United States was doing something to defend itself. In fact, at one point, according to the attorney general's memoir-- his name was Francis Biddle-- President Roosevelt said to him, "Francis, you'd better not lose this case." It was clear from the beginning that President Roosevelt had every intention of trying and convicting these fellows before a military commission, and then executing as many of them as he could. Roosevelt decided at the outset that, as he put it, they were as guilty as can be. He wanted them to be executed. The civilian court would not have returned death sentences against them, so he decided that the matter would have to be resolved by the military court. Writer, Michael dobbs. So the question for Roosevelt was not whether or not they should be put to death, but how they should die. And he had discussions with his aides over whether they should be shot or whether they should be hung. So there was a kind of a bloodthirsty side to FDR. In fact, when he first heard about the arrests of the saboteurs, he told Francis Biddle, the attorney general, that they should be taken around the country in cages and displayed like trophies. If anything, this wasn't quite harsh enough for the population at large. An article in Life magazine, entitled "The Eight Nazi Spies Should Die," shows a picture of militia men with rifles who had volunteered their services as a firing squad. And it's at this moment of heightened national anxiety that the story of the saboteurs drifts still further away from the actual facts. Here's why. People thought they were calling for the blood of Nazi spies but, at least in one case, what they were getting was the blood of a 22-year-old American citizen. Hans Herbert Haupt, one of the eight saboteurs, had lived in the United States since he was a small boy and, more than anyone, seemed to stumble into this case through a series of unlucky accidents. The misadventures that brought him there began less than a year before the trial, when he was busy chasing girls on the north side of Chicago in his brand-new Chevy, and was known as Herbie to his best friend, Wolfgang Wergin. Herbie and I worked together in a place called Simpson Optical. He was always ready to have fun, to dance, to spend money, especially spend money. He was just a great guy. Wolfgang Wergin is 81 years old today, and lives in San Pedro, California. And in a way, his life is a shadow life of what Haupt's might have been. Wergin was intimately involved in the story of how Herbie Haupt ended up on trial for sabotage. And if not for what amounted to one bad job interview, he could have been there on trial with him. It all started the summer of 1941, before Pearl Harbor, when America still hoped it might avoid a war. On a lark, the two friends took Wolf's 1934 Chevy and drove down to Mexico City. Wolf was 18. Herbie was 21. They had $180 between the two of them, and they spent their time in Mexico blowing through it. During one particularly expensive night of buying rounds for some dates, they ran out. They had to sell Wolf's car just to afford the trip back home. We had enough money to go back on the train. But they wouldn't let us over the border because, in those days, you used to have to have a tourist card. And on the back of the tourist card, my tourist card, which I didn't notice that, but it had a little stamp: intro automobile. In other words, that I had entered an automobile. And of course, they wanted to know where the car was. And we said, well, it broke down. They said, well, you have to go back and bring it back or prove that you didn't sell it, because they wanted the tax money. So we just went back to Mexico and told that guy that we were living with, that rented us the room. And he says, oh, that's no problem. He says, I have my friend who's the Chief of [UNINTELLIGIBLE], in Manzanillo, and he'll get you on a boat going to Los Angeles. And then you can hitchhike from there. And then we thought, oh, that was great. The two set off for the port city of Manzanillo, and two days later they went to sea aboard a freighter, Wergin says, they thought was bound for California. It was called the Genyo Maru, and it was supposed to go to from Manzanillo to Los Angeles, and from there to Seattle to pick up some more scrap metal. But about three days later, we talked to the steward and he says, oh, we having trouble. Anyway, we got no answer at all. And then, two weeks later, we were in Yokohama. So there they were in Japan, four months before Pearl Harbor. Later on, in trial transcripts, Herbie said he'd gotten on the freighter because he'd heard there was work in Japan, but when he and Wolf arrived they couldn't find any. They went to the US Embassy, but found no help there either. Broke and not sure where to turn, they finally got work on a German freighter they thought was headed for neutral Portugal. Just a couple of days after arriving in Japan, they found themselves, once again, on the high seas. What did you guys think of the United States at that time? What were your feelings towards it? Oh, home. Nothing but home. My parents were there. I had a brand-new drum set that my dad bought for me. We had a little neighborhood band, you know. We used to play for bar mitzvahs and things like that. It was our home. And how did Herbie feel about it, about the US? Oh, he was same thing. He was no Nazi. I mean, we had no more interest in politics than the man in the moon. The boat sailed down the coast of Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope. And while it did, the home they'd left behind slipped into war. During the time they were at sea, Prime Minister Tojo came to power, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and the US sent fleets into the Pacific. On the day they hit dry land, more than three months after they'd first set sail, Germany formally declared war on the United States. And unfortunately, they hadn't landed in neutral Portugal, but in the German-occupied French port of Bordeaux. Not surprisingly, the two men were taken to be Americans and put in an internment camp. After a couple of days, though, interpreters came around and discovered that both Wolf and Herbie had been born in Germany and left for America as little kids. Herbie was sent to relatives in the German town of Stettin, Wolf to his grandparents in Konigsberg. That was funny, too, because they couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak German. The only thing that my mother ever said to me or I ever said to her was nach de tur: close the door. In Stettin, Herbie was contacted by a man named Walter Kappe. Kappe was the head of the espionage program that recruited the saboteurs and sent them to the US. A blustery man full of ideas, Kappe had also spent decades in America before the war and had come back when Hitler came to power. In Herbie, he saw an affable young man, a perfect double agent. In the eager Kappe, Herbie saw a ticket back home. Herbie sent a letter to Wolf explaining it all and inviting him to Berlin to a meeting in Kappe's office. And we sat down, and he give us this spiel, you know, we would be doing our thing for the Fatherland and that kind of stuff. But it seemed, to me, that he had a dislike for me right from the beginning, maybe because I didn't immediately take to his scheme here. And, for some reason, we just never even considered me being part of it, but Herbie was. After the meeting, the two went back to Stettin to talk things over. The last time I saw Herbie was in Stettin. We were at his uncle's house, and we had a little bit of wine and things. And what Herbie told me was that, when he found out that they were going to have this school and they were going to send the saboteurs back to the United States, he said, well, it's great. I can't wait to get back. And I said to him, Herbie. Now in those days-- we grew up in Chicago-- you've got to remember that the G-men, the FBI, were the big thing. There was Dillinger, they gunned down Dillinger. And I said Herbie, you're not going to make it. You go back and the G-men is going to get you and put your ass in jail. And he said, no, no, no. I'm going to go over there and I'm going to disappear. Herbie thought he was putting one over on them. And, for some reason, he was almost jovial. And then he just burst out crying. There was no words. There was just sobs. And I don't know what made him start bawling like that. That's the thing that bothers me today, is why would he, all of a sudden? Was it the fear of going into something that he had no intention of completing? Or was it the fear that what I'd said was probably true, that he would be put in jail? I don't know. The only thing I can say is that I was embarrassed. That's all. Embarrassed? I was embarrassed for him. Wolf went back to his grandmother's house, where within a week he was drafted into the German army and sent to the Russian front. He spent two years there in slimy foxholes, in some of the bloodiest battles of World War II. Herbie got on the U-boat to America. There's still a question about how serious he and the other seven saboteurs were in their intention to commit sabotage. And people who've studied the case say that one of them was an ideologically committed Nazi. Three of the men, Herbie, Dasch, and Burger, seemed to have had no interest in the mission, and the rest are anyone's guess. They're described as a not very impressive bunch, in over their heads. Let's see here. All right. These are copies of the official stenographic transcript of the proceeding before the military commission to try persons charged with offenses against the Law of War and The Articles of War. In his office, Jonathan Mann flips through one of his many binders of trial transcripts. Mann got interested in the Quirin case in the early '80s, the result, he says, of a history thesis gone awry. He'd spent years tracking down all the living participants in the case and these formerly secret trial transcripts. There are 18 binders in all. And reading through them, you get a sense for what the proceedings were like. They were held on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. No press was allowed. Photos from the time show the defendants in the double-breasted suits and two-toned shoes that they had bought on their shopping spree. And here's Eddie Kerling, Neubauer, Quirin, Thiel. They were defended by an army officer named Colonel Kenneth Royall. Colonel Royall didn't relish the idea of defending eight of his country's sworn enemies, but he took his job seriously. And right away, he realized that, if he was after a fair trial for them, he was in the wrong place. In the transcripts, the very first argument he makes to the commission is the same argument that those assigned to defend the detainees at Guantanamo are making today, namely that his clients should be allowed access to civilian courts. Colonel Royall immediately stands up and he says, "In deference to the commission and in order that we may not waive, for our clients, any rights which may belong to them, we desire to state that, in our opinion, the order of the President of the United States creating this court is invalid and unconstitutional." Lloyd Cutler, who was a lawyer with the prosecution, says Royall's arguments fell on deaf ears, which isn't surprising considering who his audience was. The judges were seven major generals, of whom only one was a lawyer. And Attorney General Biddle asked the first question of one of the defendants, because all of them took the stand. Colonel Royall, who was assigned to defend those people, stood up and objected that no proper foundation for the question had been laid. He was perfectly right, but under the military procedure, the court adjourned to decide how to deal with the motion. And they stayed out for 45 minutes, which was just about long enough to smoke a good cigar. And they came back in and they denied the motion. The next moment, the Attorney General asked the second question. Colonel Royall objected a second time. The same thing happened: another 45-minute adjournment. The generals came back: motion denied. And as a result, Royall never made another objection. But if the defense could read the writing on the wall, the men they were defending had a harder time. The gulf between the facts as they understood them, and the story that was being told about them was so huge that, while the entire country was calling for them to be executed, they were thinking about their future. Again, writer, Michael Dobbs. They didn't really understand the extent of the trouble that they were in. After all, they hadn't actually carried out any sabotage against the United States. And at one point, Herbie Haupt said in the trial that the prosecutor asked him whether he said that he had intended to turn everybody in himself. And the FBI said, oh, what would you do then? And he said, well, then I intended to go off on my honeymoon with my old girlfriend from Chicago, who he had, in the meantime, proposed to. And the prosecutor was incredulous and said, how can you think you'd go off on a honeymoon when you've just admitted to being part of a sabotage mission against the US? And he said, well, if I turned everybody in, there'd be no reason to be guilty of anything, so I could go off on my honeymoon. And I think that reflects the kind of naive attitude that he had to this mission. He thought that, if he cooperated with the FBI, then perhaps they'd hold him for a little bit, but then they'd let him go. On July 27th, after making his final arguments before the commission, Colonel Royall sent an appeal to the Supreme Court. That appeal would become the Quirin case. In it, Royall argued that all legal precedent suggested that the saboteurs should be tried in civilian courts. Under intense pressure from the Administration, the Supreme Court took the highly unusual step of meeting out of session. Three days after hearing arguments, blinding speed for a Supreme Court, the Justices refused Royall's appeal, but they did settle in an even more unusual manner. They offered their decision without any supporting opinions, saying, in effect, it's fine for now. You don't have to free them. We'll explain our reason soon. But nine days later, long before the opinions could possibly be issued, Roosevelt pronounced the sentences. Dasch and Burger were given long jail time. The other six, including Herbie Haupt, were executed in the electric chair. At the time, most people had no problem with that. And even today, Lloyd Cutler, who was one of the prosecutors, and Duane Traynor, the FBI agent, say it was the right decision. It was wartime. All six of them that got executed, you feel sorry for them. They really didn't want to do it. But they were allegedly trying to hurt the United States. They were allegedly trying to do this, but you knew that at least six out of the eight of them really had no intention of doing anything. Oh, it doesn't make any difference. You have to make an example of them. Why was it important to make an example of them? Oh, you had to. You know, you're in war. A lot of people in war get killed for no other reason that they're against it. People over there in Iraq are getting killed all the time, but it's war. You have to look at them as enemies. As enemies, you have to deal with them that way. The Quirin case authorized this notion of wartime justice, that, in times of war, we don't have the luxury of normal procedures and civil liberties. But it didn't take until the end of the war for the Supreme Court justices, who made the Quirin decision, to start regretting it. Justice Stone had second thoughts the day he sat down to write the opinion for the court in 1942. It is clear that four of the nine justices, after the fact, believed they had made a mistake and pretty quickly came to the conclusion that they'd been buffaloed into this and regretted what they had done. Michael Greenberger, a Law professor at the University of Maryland and head of the school's Center for Health and Homeland Security, has studied the Quirin case. Justice Black, in memos to other justices, for example, said that he felt as if he were involved in a meat market slaughtering cattle, and that it was a lesson to him that you could never decide a case by an order and then sit down and write out why you decided the case the way you did, that the writing itself evinces issues that you don't think about when you're just deciding thumbs up or thumbs down. So there's every sign that, if they'd given themselves the time to think it through, the decision would have been different, and they would have ruled that these people should have been tried in a civilian court, and this precedent wouldn't even exist. Because of the special history of the case, the fact that it was written in haste in the early, dark hours of World War II, the fact that several justices regretted the decision, Quirin was a footnote for 60 years. If anything, Quirin was a cautionary tale about the extremes courts go to in wartime, like the Korematsu case, which allowed the internment of Japanese-Americans. It wasn't used as a precedent. But after September 11th, the Bush administration started citing the case, saying that, again, we're a nation at war and that enemies captured on US soil should be tried in military courts. Greenberger says he understands the impulse to hold military trials, but says the danger of reviving the Quirin case like this is that we'll end up with show trials just like the saboteurs got. When you use a process that does not really help you get to the truth, you can easily commit injustices. Had these people been tried in a civilian court, the lack of threat these people posed to the United States would have been clearer. And to the extent ex parte Quirin is being used today to say that people are guilty without giving them some kind of process, we are falling into the same pattern. This April, the Supreme Court will take up the case of Jose Padilla, a US citizen seized and held without charges for two years, and will decide, by summer, weather Quirin justifies that kind of treatment today. The verdict in the sabotage trial will be back in court again. Chris Neary. Coming up, we sit the pollsters down and we ask the questions. 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. Today on our program, The Facts Don't Matter. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Mush Polling. Whenever poll results have shown up in the news these last few months, I've thought about this story that one of our producers tells. She was a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. And the newspaper commissioned polls on elections that were coming up. And it was our producer Sarah Koenig's job to call up the people who'd already been polled by this fancy polling organization, and ask them to shed some light on why they had chosen the particular candidates they had chosen, to put some quotes into a story about the poll. And Sarah says that the problem was so many of the people who she called didn't really know much about the candidates who they had chosen. They didn't know what they stood for, or they had it wrong what they stood for. They'd say things like, oh, wait, is he that tall one? The poll presented their opinions as hard fact, but really their opinions were kind of a vague cloud of feelings, wispy and malleable still. And poll numbers, especially during elections, are a huge, big deal. They dictate which candidate is going to get covered on the news, which dictates who's going to be able to raise campaign dollars. They have real-world consequences. So how wispy are they? How worrisome is this? Sarah went to find out. I called Zogby International, one of the country's main polling operations. It's run by John Zogby, who agreed to let me watch his callers conduct a tracking poll he was doing for Reuters and MSNBC of Wisconsin's presidential primary. Zogby's call center in Utica, New York is on the third floor of an old General Electric factory. The rest of the million-square-foot building is basically empty, so the feeling is of this one, buzzing cell inside a huge industrial carcass. The room is row after row of about 100 cubicles, but each contain a computer and that's it, no photos of kids or beanie babies on top of the machines. Supervisors walk up and down the aisles, making sure people are pronouncing words properly and sticking to the script. As a Protestant, dear, do you consider yourself to be a born-again Christian, an Evangelical, or a Fundamentalist? Born again? That's wonderful. I'll see you in heaven one day. The Lord says we'll know one another. Oh, thank you. Of course, some people have a much harder time sticking to the script than others. Which of the following best describes your status in life, dear. Are you married? Single? Oh, I know you were married. Are you a widow, dear? I am very sorry. I'm a widow also. Trust me when I tell you my heart goes out to you. Yes, I do appreciate where widows are coming from. Do you, or does anyone in your household, keep a gun for, like, personal-- The Wisconsin poll was short, a handful of questions about the general and primary elections and how the person felt about the candidates: very favorable, somewhat favorable, et cetera. Then there were a bunch of demographic questions. The whole thing took about seven minutes. The Zogby staff I talked to were surprisingly idealistic about how important polling was for democracy. Aileen, the born-again widow you just heard, calls each respondent a good, American citizen at the end of the survey, and has been known to salute her computer. Another caller told me answering a poll is more effective than voting because politicians actually listen to polls. Hello. Good afternoon. My name is Boden and I'm calling from Zogby International. Today, we're doing a poll of Wisconsin voters for Reuters MSNBC News. I watched Boden [? Kwazoski ?] a farmer, and DJ, and MIT-trained physicist, make his calls for about an hour. I wanted to see how often people are undecided, vague, or simply uninformed, and end up in the results anyway. The first thing I discovered is it's really hard to get someone to answer a poll. For Zogby's Wisconsin sample of 600 completed surveys, they had to call almost 10,000 telephone numbers. In an hour, Boden reaches three people who are willing to stay on the phone to take the poll, which is average. And how likely are you to vote in the national elections: very likely, somewhat likely, or not likely? Very likely. The very first voter I watch him get is a woman: age 41, union member, separated, college graduate, white, conservative, makes between $35,000 and $50,000 a year. And she turns out to be exactly what I'm looking for. And the Democratic candidates, the Democratic candidates for president in 2004 are Howard Dean, John Edwards, John Kerry, Dennis Kucinich, and Al Sharpton. If the primary were held today, for whom would you vote out of these Democrats? OK. You sure you're not sure? Or might you be leaning towards one? You're not sure at this point. OK. He enters undecided into his computer, and a screen comes up with this question, which is basically the same question asked in a different way. And, if you had to choose today, if you had to choose, which candidate might you just be leaning towards: Dean, Edwards, Kerry, Kucinich, or Sharpton? Just the slightest lean towards one of them, if you had to choose today? Dean, Edwards, Kerry, Kucinich, or Sharpton? Dean? OK. Thank you. And there you have it. She's officially a leaner. She'll now be counted as a Dean voter. In this particular poll, 7% of all the respondents were just like her, leaners who had to be prodded. There is an I don't know button Boden can push for almost every question on the poll, but he's not allowed to offer it to the respondent. He can only use it if they say they don't know. Everyone at Zogby seemed to truly care about getting an accurate poll, and none of them worried about whether they were pushing undecideds to choose. In fact, the only person in the building who had any problem with how the poll dealt with uncertainty was me. So I called someone outside the building. I described what I'd seen at Zogby to Daniel Yankelovich, a famous, old-school pollster who started The New York Times Yankelovich Poll in the 1970s. Now he's chairman of two organizations, Viewpoint Learning and Public Agenda. Yeah. You were observing something that's very familiar, which is, on issues where people haven't made up their mind and where they haven't given the matter a lot of thought, that their points of view are inconclusive, vague, mushy, volatile, they could change their mind in a minute or overnight. And when you see these nice, crisp numbers on polls, they can be very misleading because they seem to suggest a definiteness and precision that is not really the case. Yankelovich has spent a lot of his career studying exactly what I was worried about. He first noticed the problem in the 1970s, and came up with a method of asking four questions on a poll that pinpointed exactly how strongly a person held his or her opinion. They were simple, like, on a scale of one to six, where one means that the issue affects you personally very little, and six means that you really feel deeply involved in this issue, where would you place yourself? Then he rated the totals on a scale of firm to mushy. In published reports, the mushy answers would be indicated by an asterisk. His system was dubbed The Mushiness Index by Time Magazine, one of his clients at the time. And they were quite enthusiastic. And then they found, when the reporters and writers sat down to write the stories, they found it slowed them up. It slowed up the storytelling and, as a result, they just didn't use it. And it's one of the many clashes between journalistic values and polling values. Not only is there a simple fix to mushy polls that's almost universally ignored, Yankelovich says some topics just generate more mushiness by their nature. The newer and more complicated the issue, the mushier the polls, and the higher the likelihood that the results will cause problems. It's happened many times in recent history. I mean, for example, when the Clinton Health Care Plan first surfaced in the early '90s, polls uniformly showed a more than 70% acceptance. And when we dug behind the numbers, people were so vague and the answers were so mushy, people were just sort of uttering a truism, yeah, that would be very nice. But if they had to go to any expense, or sacrifice on equality, or give up anything else, they weren't willing to do it. And we came to the conclusion that it was not a 70% level of support. The real level of support was somewhere between 30% and 40%. Well, that's the difference between success and failure. That was the first real setback for the Clintons early in his term. On some big issues like this, he says it takes years, decades, for people to work out their opinions. Take, for example, the gay marriage issue. It's new, it's just come up. There are fierce advocates on both extremes. But the mass of the public is going to have the most mushy attitudes toward it. So the fact that it's so new, it's controversial, it's full of moral ambiguity, you'd be crazy to trust poll results on a question of that sort. But we do. I mean, like every day you hear people say, well, the majority of Americans agree with the Administration. There shouldn't be-- 60% of-- you know, whatever the number is. You hear it all the time. Well, I mean, they're misleading. And as we do at the top and bottom of every hour, now here are your latest headlines. Senator John Kerry says he is fighting for every vote in Wisconsin despite a commanding lead over his Democratic rivals. Zogby's poll aired on MSNBC the morning before Election Day. According to our MSNBC Reuters Zogby poll, Senator John Kerry is leading Howard Dean 47 to 23. Senator John Edwards is in a close third with 20%. Commanding lead is the same language John Zogby used in a press release to describe John Kerry's chances. His quote was used by The Associated Press in a story that ran in many newspapers, including The Boston Globe and The LA Times, the day before the Wisconsin primary. The problem was, Kerry ended up with a skimpy lead instead. He won, but only beat John Edwards by four percentage points, not 27. And Dean, instead of coming in second, as Zogby's poll showed, was a distant third. Zogby wasn't the only pollster who got it wrong. The day after the election, the power of incorrect polling was laid out like a textbook example. Edwards was on the front page of The New York Times, not because he'd beaten Kerry, but because he'd beaten the polls predictions. Some people complained all this gave Edwards an artificial boost, which helped him raise $310,000 on the internet the day after the election. And, they said, the faulty numbers make Kerry look like more of a loser than he really was. Newspaper stories talked of Kerry scratching out a victory and Edwards as a serious challenger in a sudden two-man race. I called Zogby to find out what happened. He was in LA and spoke to me from his cell phone. If he sounds a little defensive, it's because he was. Zogby is a controversial figure in polling circles. Some of his colleagues claim his methods aren't rigorous enough, and that he hypes his results in order to market his company. On the other hand, his polls are accurate enough, often enough, that he has some major clients. Is this an example where the vagueness of those people's answers played out in a way that you couldn't anticipate what's going to happen? All right. That's an interesting question. But look, all we're doing is taking a snapshot of a moment in time. Polls should not be seen as being predictors, even though we try to do that. Polls need to be seen as taking a temperature at a given point in time. And there is not a doubt in my mind that my poll was relatively accurate Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Zogby told me he had to stop Sunday afternoon because his client needed the numbers for Monday morning's Today Show. The problem was, after Zogby's callers stopped their work, Edwards was endorsed by Wisconsin's biggest newspaper and then did very well in a televised debate, and people changed their minds. Some pollsters I talked to said stuff like that happens all the time, and Zogby should have known better than to stop Sunday afternoon, Today Show or no Today Show. I conducted a miniature poll of my own, just to see if something else could have affected the Wisconsin results. I got the phone numbers for Zogby's respondents and spoke to 15 of them. Most people said they voted for the person they told Zogby they would vote for, and some had well-thought-out reasons why. Two people said they never made it to the polls at all. And then there was Douglas Wills. Hello. Wills was listed as a Dean voter in the poll results. Well, they said, if I had to choose one of the Democratic candidates, who would I vote for? OK. And what was your answer to that? Dean, I believe. Dean. OK. Did you, in fact, end up voting for Dean? No, I voted for Bush. So in the poll, though, when they gave you the choice, you decided to pick one. Yes. OK. How did you come up with Dean? Oh, I really don't know. I just picked one. I said, to whoever called me, I said, well, I didn't think that I would vote for a Democrat. And they said, well, if you did vote for a Democrat, which one would you vote for? And they kind of forced me into making a choice. Harley Schmieden was also listed as a Dean voter and said he liked what Dean had done about health care in Vermont, and did, in fact, vote for him. Here's why he chose Dean over John Kerry, because of a mistake I'm sure a lot of people make. I'm a World War II veteran. Anyway, and Kerry was boasting about his Vietnam record, but what he didn't tell you was when he mowed down the women and children over there one time. He did? I don't know if you're even familiar with that story. Oh, yeah. He shouldn't boast about his war record. I thought the Kerry who got in trouble in Vietnam was Bob Kerrey. Far as I know it was John Kerry. No, I'm pretty sure it's Bob Kerrey, who is also a Democrat. Is that his brother? No, there's no relation. In fact, Kerry is spelled slightly differently. Then I'm mistaken, but that's what I thought. I thought it was John. Then there was Melanie Faith, who was watching TV when I called. She was counted as voting for Dennis Kucinich. Who is it? I don't even know who he is. Oh, you don't? No, I don't. Is he running for state? No. He is running for President. Oh, no, no, no. I was not interested in him. No. You weren't? No, I wasn't. Did you end up voting in the primary? Yes, I did. And for who did you vote? I'd rather keep that to myself. OK. But it was not for Kucinich? No. No, it wasn't. Several other people I talked to reminded me of the Baltimore Sun poll respondents. Like this one woman who had an opinion, she voted for Kerry, but she really just couldn't say why. The thing she liked about Kerry was Kerry. Only about half the electorate turns out for presidential elections and, of those, one prominent pollster told me, only about 20% are paying close attention to the race. In primaries, the percentages are even smaller. That means that, most of the time, what political pollsters end up measuring are those mushy feelings that lead to big, general conclusions about a candidate. The classic lesson on this was the presidential election in 1984. At the end of the campaign, a Gallup poll asked people a series of policy questions. Who do you agree with, Walter Mondale or Ronald Reagan? And most people said Mondale. Then they asked them who they planned to vote for, and most people said Reagan. Sarah Koenig. You know, you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife. 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 Mr. Torey Malatia, who says-- The government is closing in on me. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK, we are ready to begin. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. When you guys are ready, we can start. OK, today we will be selecting our bride and our groom for the mock wedding. Ms. Hannah's Adult Living class, at Rock Island High School, near the Illinois-Iowa border, has as part of its curriculum a mock wedding. These happen in high schools all over the country. And if you're from a place where they have them, they don't seem like a big deal at all. Today, before Ms. Hannah's class can choose decorations and bridesmaids outfits, before they talk to florists and a caterer, they have to choose a bride and a groom. And the money-on favorite for groom is [? DeAndrew. Because he's just the most outgoing person, the person that's actually one of the guys-- because we have very few guys-- one of the guys that are actually into it, you know? DeAndrew ?] is going to be the groom. I think [? DeAndrew ?] will get the groom. Out of the boys, it's either me or [? DeAndrew. This is Kevin, another contender. I think we're running neck and neck. Yeah, he wanted it too, but-- This is Stacia. I don't know. I think more of the kids in the class will vote more towards [? DeAndrew, ?] because he's the class clown. He makes everybody laugh and everything. As for who will be the bride, [? Jackie ?] says the girls talked about it during gym. ?] There's not that much competition, because a lot of girls don't know if they want to be it. I think it's three girls. Me, and Heather, and [? Keena. ?] So we were the only three that really said we want to to be it. And I know a couple people that have said that they didn't want to be in it. I don't think anybody else wants to do it. Ms. Hannah uses the overhead projector to walk the class through a budget for the wedding, which is $250, by the way, that the kids will have to raise themselves. Then she takes nominations. Everybody votes on little slips of paper that she hands out. Is there anyone who has not voted? AJ is sent to the chalkboard to tote the results as Ms. Hannah counts the ballots in a style that is less like the Illinois election commission and more like Jeff Probst from Survivor. She basically pulls out each ballot, unfolds it, and reads it. OK, here we go. [? DeAndrew. ?] AJ. AJ. Kevin. AJ. Ooh, look at AJ in the lead. Oh, my God. What? Hold on. Oh, my God. Even AJ looks surprised. But these early returns don't hold up, and in the end it is the predicted favorite, [? DeAndrew ?], who will be mock-marrying [? Jackie. ?] When the results are announced, [? DeAndrew, ?] who admits that he used to have a little thing for [? Jackie, ?] jumps up and sits next to her. ?] Yeah, I'm getting married to [? Jackie ?] [? Thompson. ?] I'm talking six, seven, nine kids. Of the 11 juniors and seniors who showed up for class today, one has a baby and one lives with a boyfriend. She's engaged. I asked Ms. Hannah if the idea of this curriculum is to encourage kids to get married. And to my surprise, she says no. She's just showing them how, the same way this class shows them how to rent an apartment, or buy a used car. Even here in small-town Illinois hours from the big city, even the teacher who teaches marriage has complicated feelings about marriage itself. The students could not believe that I wasn't married when they found out I was not married. Because of all the joy and the fulfilling things that has happened to me since my divorce, I have truly experienced life. And because it has been such a grand experience being on the single side of life, I can honestly tell students that, yes, you can be single and you can be happy. You can be married and you can be happy. Some of us will be happy with the institution of marriage and some of us will not. What it means to be married is up in the air right now, and not just because people are fighting about whether gays should be able to marry. The number of women getting married has dropped a third since 1970. People are getting married at a later age than ever before in this country. Fewer households have children, and a fourth of all children are raised by just one parent. The number of couples living together without marrying is 10 times what it was in 1960, over 4.5 million people. So today on our radio show, a look at what it really means to be married today. Our program today, in three acts: Act One, What Really Happens in Marriages. Like the 15th century explorers and mapmakers, there is a generation of scientists mapping out what happens in marriages, finding out stuff that people did not know about before. Act Two, The Defense of Marriage Act. Gay marriage can hurt straight marriage. One man explains how. Act Three, I Want to Be a Statistic. Starlee Kine gets answers about her parents' marriage from her dad after a lifetime of mystery. That is three, yes, three big acts, each one designed to make your family happier. Plus we have a real wedding band, the Doug Lawrence Orchestra, playing us wedding standards all this hour. Hit it, boys. Act One, What Really Happens in Marriage. OK, here's something that, when you first hear about it, does not sound like it can possibly be true. So let me preface everything you're about to hear by saying that the guy that you're about to hear from is not some isolated crank, but part of a movement, that he and his colleagues, for decades, have been scoring million-dollar grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health. They publish their findings in mainstream scientific journals. Other scientists have replicated their findings. They've essentially created a radically different and eminently helpful way of understanding marriage. OK, here's what we're talking about. Dr. John Gottman takes couples, wires them up to devices that monitor their breathing and their heartbeats, sits them in front of video cameras, and then asks them to talk about something that they disagree about. From a 15-minute videotape of a couple talking about an area of disagreement, we have an 85% probability of predicting what's going to happen to them in the next four years. You mean if they'll still be together. If they'll still be together or not. And also, if they're together, whether they'll be happy or miserable. But that's not all. If he spends another hour or so, and asks them to talk about how they met, what kinds of things they share-- Then it goes up to 94%. I should be clear. He doesn't offer this as a service. You can't go to John Gottman, sit with your spouse for a 15-minute videotape, and then have him declare to you on the spot, this will be your marital fate. No. When he says that he can predict, he means it in a more sciencey way. What he does is he videotapes couples, follows their marriages for years, and then once he sees who stays together and who splits up, he goes back and tries to figure out what in the videos might have predicted that. And he has found a whole taxonomy of things that doomed couples do that happy couples don't. I don't know about you, but when I heard about this, I wanted to understand exactly what Gottman was seeing on those videotapes. And so I went out to visit him in Seattle, to sit with him and watch some of America's unfunniest home videos. You might think it would be easy to spot which couples in these videos are heading down the tubes. But in a study where Gottman's videos were shown to clergymen, and therapists, and other people who you would assume would be able to identify this kind of thing, they were unable to predict better than random chance which couples eventually divorced. Take this couple in their early 20s, talking about their finances. --a month at the most and at the least. Estimate it. Do the math. You don't even sit down and do that. You don't even sit down and do it either. I don't have to. I bring home the money. You told me you [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] manage it. Well, yeah, to that [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] because I've been asking you to do that. Because, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], how can I do it until I-- I need to get the first bill to know what I'm working with. Watching them, to me, it looks pretty bad. They just don't let up. Are they doing good or bad here? Well, I don't see this as a negative interaction. A lot of people might. But we don't see our predictors of divorce here. We don't see contempt. We don't see him turning away, stonewalling, which is a particular guy thing to do. We don't see her insulting him. It could be a lot warmer, it could be a lot more supportive, but they've got to work this out. Newlyweds have a lot of fights. And this is respectful. You just know what you know, and you block out everything you hear. You just tell me the same thing. Yeah. That's how I feel. I feel like you do that. I feel like I keep telling you, and you only want to hear what you want to hear. You don't hear the good stuff, like I'm telling you-- The way Dr. Gottman turns what look like the most intimate, meandering conversations into hard data that can be analyzed is really pretty simple. After the video is shot, two women in a tiny room down the hall from Dr. Gottman score the thing moment by moment on side-by-side computers. Every time the husband or the wife on the video shows anger, sadness, defensiveness, disgust, humor, neutrality-- any of 20 different things-- it gets coded in the computer alongside data of their heart rate and their breathing. These people have so much affect going on. It's really hard, because you have to make-- you're watching it in real time. You have to make your decision really fast. Is this person being contemptuous? Or wait, was that criticism? Elizabeth Schoettle and Katherine Schwartz spent months in training, learning specific facial expressions, particular kinds of behavior, before they became reliable-- reliable meaning in this case that their codes match those of fully-trained people. I asked them to name the codes that they were punching in out loud as they scored one of the videos. So I went to contempt, and then I went to neutral. You move back and forth all the time. Now, if you look at his eyes, he's on tension. He finished one of her sentences and sort of helped her along, which would be a high validation. Every momentary interaction-- affection, anger, stonewalling, contempt-- gets assigned a number, one to four for the good ones, negative one to negative four for the bad ones. So if they do a contempt, they get a minus four. A disgust, the get a minus four. And the computer just keeps track of when they happen and how long they last. So let's watch this conversation. Gottman gets another video, and another couple comes up on the TV in black-and-white, split-screen, one camera is on his face, one on hers, a time code in the corner. They're talking about the fact that he is always late. I don't believe you. You are really something. It's like-- It's not funny. Well, you could wake me up. No, I don't want to wake you up. You don't like to hear my voice. It's just like the tone of your mother's. That makes me feel real good, too. You don't like to talk to me. So she's sarcastic and contemptuous. "My tone is just like the sound of your mother. That makes me feel real good, too." That's dripping with contempt, which is one of our best predictors of divorce. She gets a negative score at that instant, that time instant. Tell me to get up. What am I supposed to say? "Please, get up, dear. Would you get up?" Well, if you asked me to. I mean, that's like-- Get serious. Now, think-- he has a lot of choices here. He can say, "I can see why that would really hurt your feelings, my saying that." He could back off. He could de-escalate. Exactly. He could de-escalate. He could hear her pain, which he doesn't. So when Gottmann and his colleagues make a little graph of all the scores that the man and the woman are getting, as you might imagine, it drops lower and lower and then just never comes back up. Picture a chart in the newspaper of the Dow Jones Industrial Average heading down, and you pretty much have the idea. This kind of fight, the kind which gets worse and worse, is one of Gottman's findings for couples heading for divorce. When they argue, it just escalates. They don't take a break, they don't see each other's side, they don't accept influence. That's a phrase that Gottman uses to mean that when one of them says something, it has influence on what the other one is thinking and saying. Couples who are in what we call the attack-defend mode, where there's escalating quarrels-- we can actually tell from the first three minutes of their conversation. Most couples will divorce very early, an average of five years after the wedding. One of these studies had been going on for over a decade when Gottman and his colleagues started noticing a second group of couples from their sample getting divorced. And at first, the researchers could not figure out what was going on. And our predictions were lousy. We couldn't figure out what was wrong with them, at first. Because they seemed fine. They seemed really pretty neutral. They weren't escalating the quarrel. They stayed together. They were fine. Boom, they divorced. 16 years after the wedding, they're divorcing. And then we're going back and saying, wait a minute. Let's look a little more closely. And now you can see that there's no positive emotion really going on that's shared. One of them may laugh. The other one doesn't laugh. One of them looks warm and interested. The other one is pulled away. There's just no fun. They don't seem to enjoy each other at all. Those are the couples where, when you go to a restaurant, you see these couples who aren't talking to each other. That's them. They can last a long time being quite unhappy. They can be great parents. But especially when the kids leave home, they're at risk for really falling apart. Gottman says that when they started this research, they had no idea which factors were going to be the ones that would predict divorce. Nobody had ever observed couples so closely and then followed them over time to see who stayed together and who did not. Therapists and pop psychologists had all kinds of theories as to what would make a good relationship. They were all completely untested. They thought that having lower expectations of marriage might make for happy marriages. Turns out to be untrue. They thought that good couples make "I" statements instead of "you" statements. Turns out, no. Many people thought-- including Gottman and his colleagues-- that anger would predict divorce. This idea is actually still around, that anger is destructive to any relationship, that it's against the scriptures, that it should be banned from marriages. In fact, the data shows, happy, stable couples get angry all the time. But their partners heard the anger. They responded to it. So a person might say, in a good relationship, "Will you shut up and let me finish?" Really angry, right? And their partner would say, "Alright, finish." Angry response. But then the person got to finish. The anger didn't predict anything negative. Now, in a relationship that wasn't working well-- "Will you shut up and let me finish?" "Oh, I don't get to finish until you finish, is that it?" "Yeah." "Why, that's just like what your mother would say?" "Oh, now I'm like my mother, now?" "Yeah, you are. Yadada, yadada, yadada." Contempt. An escalation to defensiveness and contempt. And that's the difference. The anger wasn't predicting anything negative, but the escalation-- that was predicting things negative. Marriage counseling had been around since the end of the second World War. But in a sense, until the 1970s-- until Gottman and this whole generation of researchers-- it was really a pretty ad hoc business. Therapists would give couples all sorts of advice. Sometimes it was useful, sometimes it wasn't. But it wasn't based on scientific research. Until Gottman's generation, nobody had figured out an effective way to observe real marriages-- successful and unsuccessful ones-- and figure out what the happy stable ones were doing that the unhappy divorcing ones weren't. Where we were-- and it's kind of like when we were in the Dark Ages about health care, and we were bleeding patients. Diane Sollee runs what amounts to the preeminent clearinghouse for marriage research and education, called Smart Marriages in Washington, DC. And we were basing our premises on old thinking. And then these guys got all these gizmos-- computers, and video cameras, and heart monitors, and all kinds of gizmos-- and they went at it. And so we got real accurate, for the first time, observational research information about what makes marriages succeed or fail. One of the most radical findings in the studies is that the studies threw doubt on the idea that couples should split up if they had irreconcilable differences. All couples have irreconcilable differences, the studies proved-- the ones that stay together and the ones that don't. They found that all couples disagree basically the same amount. And then they thought, well, maybe it's about what they disagree about. And they found, no, it's not that. It's not that some fight about money, and some about sex, and some about-- they found that all couples basically disagree about the same issues. Which are? Money, kids, sex, others, and time. And others are things like who you're jealous of at the office, or your in-laws. And time is like, what are we going to do on Sunday with our leisure time? And so if all couples disagree about the same amount and about the same issues, well, then, what is it? And they found that it was that some couples understand-- they don't go to pieces when they're disagreeing. The success of marriage, they found out, was not based on finding someone with whom you agree on everything, and finding your soul mate. It was how you're going to handle the inevitable disagreements that are going to come up, no matter who you marry. OK, so these guys are also talking about the problem of lateness and time. He is always late. I guess I'm-- I feel kind of like it's dumping on you to discuss-- She's smiling as she says it. --your being late. No, I mean that's one of my few weaknesses. I do have some weaknesses. And he smiles as he says that. But I don't disagree-- There isn't much to argue about. OK, stop there for a second. Notice how she softened her start up. She didn't say, "I am sick of you being late." She started off by saying, "I feel it's kind of picking on you to start off talking about the lateness and that it's your problem, focusing on you." That's sweet. In fact, the best couples in Gottman's studies-- when they bring up something difficult, they do it in a way that does not make the other person defensive. Even talking about their disagreements, there's laughing. There's joking. This is important because when somebody feels attacked, feels defensive, their heart rate goes up, and basically, Gottman says, reason gets thrown out the window. The heart's beating harder. The arteries start getting constricted and contracted. The body starts secreting adrenaline. And people just can't take in information very well. They can't process information. You can want to be a great listener. Once your heart rate gets above that level, you just can't do it. And you tend to get into what we call the summarizing yourself syndrome. You keep repeating your own ideas over and over again. And so when Gottman watches these videos, he's intensely aware of when somebody criticizes and what it does to the other person's pulse. Like here-- this wife tells her husband that a guy that they work with also hates his lateness. And now I've learned to kind of just expect it and plan around it. Even [UNINTELLIGIBLE] plans around it. Yeah. He isn't as tactful as you are. No. They're both laughing. But see then, I can be late but he can't. But you see, I think you're just getting back at your mother for all those times she left you swinging on those swings. You know, you may be right. Here she goes. Yes, and I think you should grow up and not do that. Now his heart rate is going up. I'm not your mother. I'm conscious of it, but as you say that-- And watch him start stuttering. --the reality of those times when she'd forget about me for hours-- boy. Well, those were very turbulent times for me. See? Yeah. God, I hated her for that. He's looking down. The message was very clear. The message was very clear. Boy, life's complex. What about those shoes, anyhow? These are not fancy shoes. These are old shoes. They're all worn down. No, they're pretty shoes, too. They're nice. Isn't that wonderful? Now, there's a repair. Now a lot of therapists wouldn't consider that a repair. Because he's changing the subject. He's changing the subject. A lot of therapists probably would stop this guy and say, hey, wait a minute, we're talking about lateness and your mother. What happened with the shoes? But there-- his heart rate is going down as he's doing that. And she's letting him change the subject and they both laugh about the shoes. And his heart rate goes down. And then they go back to the lateness issue. As you might expect, after these researchers noticed all these techniques that happy couples use when they disagree, it didn't take long before they started to try to teach those things to the rest of us. They created marriage education courses, which explained how to bring up a difficult subject without completely alienating your partner, how to keep yourself listening when your partner is criticizing you, how to take breaks when things get too hot-- all the stuff that the good couples in the videos do. Lots of course like this have sprung up. They generally take just 10 or 12 hours. And Diane Sollee says they get results. And we've spent millions of dollars of tax money researching these things. And we know that with a 10-hour class in this marriage education, we can reduce the divorce rate 50% five years out. Reducing the divorce rate by 50%-- or really anything at all by 50%-- is the kind of track record that makes policy-makers take notice. And in fact, it is exactly these kinds of marriage education courses that President Bush's $1.5 billion Healthy Marriage Initiative is providing free for welfare recipients. The Army is spending $1.8 million in courses for military families, a program called Building Strong and Ready Families. The courses are also popular in churches. In fact, studies show that couples learn the techniques better if they're taught by their own clergy. Some researchers say that this new interest and investment is great, but they caution that while Gottman's study and most of the other marriage studies get interesting results, they're still relatively small as research goes-- anywhere from 30 to 300 couples usually, small enough that you can get random results that really might not have much meaning. One researcher told me that it's not like science has killer airtight conclusions about marriage yet. It's more like we have decent preliminary findings, and the main reason these courses and government programs exist is not that the science is perfect, but that people want answers. They want answers now. They want help. And it seemed like we knew enough to act. Gottman and a researcher named Bob Levenson have also done a 12-year study of homosexual couples. There were just 42 couples-- a small study for Gottman, who usually gets 130 couples of races and ages to match the demographics of Seattle. In fact, we've just submitted a research grant application to do that study over again with a larger sample size where we would try to get representative sampling. It's just that it's hard to get funded to do research on gay and lesbian relationships. The government is really not positively disposed to doing that research, and in fact, if you say "gay and lesbian" it will be pulled. It won't even be reviewed by the government. It will get pulled. There are these watchdog organizations. So how do you say it? You talk about commitment in same-sex relationships. But why wouldn't they just notice that same-sex means the same thing? It turns out they have these computer programs that scan the abstracts for keywords. I see. And if you don't use those keywords, then they don't get picked up. Well, I hope I'm not blowing your cover here by broadcasting this. Well, that's the kind of climate in which we're working. The study looked at 21 lesbian couples and 21 gay male couples, and compared them to 42 straight marriages of the same length of relationship and relationship satisfaction, as measured on a questionnaire. The researchers videotaped the couples talking about some issue that they conflict about. And they found that the homosexual couples were far better than the married heterosexual couples at bringing up an issue in a non-confrontational way, of listening when criticized. They were less defensive. They were more positive. The other thing we were able to do with our mathematical modeling was to find that not only do they start differently, but also the influence process in the married couple really moves them toward a more negative direction. The longer they talk to each other, the more angry they get, the more adversarial they tend to get. But in gay and lesbian couples, it's the opposite. The longer they talk about the issue, the closer they get and the more positive they become. So a very, very different process operating in the gay and lesbian couples we studied. Now if they're representative, then we heterosexuals have got a lot to learn from gay and lesbian relationships. But John, the gay couples and the lesbian couples that you're talking about-- they're simply as good as the very best couples in your heterosexual couples? Or you're saying they're even better than them? They're even better than them. Really? I mean, when you listen to the tapes, it's unbelievable what they're like. I'll give you an example of this. One gay man said to his partner, "What did you think about the sex this morning? Who do you think initiated the sex this morning?" And his partner said, "Well, you don't really have the kind of body on a man that I find really the most attractive." And the first man said, "I know that. But who do you think initiated sex this morning?" Now can you imagine a husband-- Oh, my God. --talking to his wife, right? And saying, "You don't have the kind of body that I find attractive." That's right. Can you imagine her saying, "Yeah, I know that. But who do you think initiated sex?" So there's so much less deception, so much more honesty, and so much more directness. And I don't know if it's representative. But I was very impressed. Gottman still can't explain why the gay couples would be so different. He thinks part of the reason might be that, in general, it's just easier for men to talk to men and women to talk to women. The fact that they communicate so differently makes things harder in heterosexual couples. Back when I started calling around to marriage researchers, I expected that as a group they would be people who think a lot about our country's 50% divorce rate, like the divorce rate is the Mount Everest that they're all aiming at not just assaulting, but ultimately blasting down into rubble. But in fact, every researcher I called was reluctant to speculate about what all this new research could mean for the divorce rate someday. Could they get it down to 30%? Or maybe 10%? It's just too early to know, they would say. After some prodding, I did get Gottman to tell me that a significant portion, 15% to 20% of the troubled couples in one of his studies probably were people who should be divorced. Even before their marriages, he said, they never had a basic rapport where they could spend time together easily and comfortably, where conversation just flowed. For everything this research shows about how people can prevent divorce, for everything that it shows about how much happier couples can be if they master certain communication skills, for everything that he can quantify with his video cameras and his heart monitors, in the end, John Gottman still believes in chemistry. See, that's a wedding band. Coming up, it's raining lawsuits. A look inside them-- 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-- The Sanctity of Marriage, stories about what that might mean. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Defense of Marriage Act. When the White House proposed the constitutional amendment preventing gay marriage, the president explained why it was necessary this way. He said, marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. If activist judges insist on redefining marriage by court order, the only alternative will be the constitutional process. We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage. Well, Adam Felber says he knows just what the president is talking about. This gay marriage thing is tearing my wife and me apart. Because of activist judges in Massachusetts and overzealous officials in San Francisco, our union is hanging on by the thinnest of threads. Are Jeannie and I expected to treasure our union solely on the basis of our deep love, personal beliefs, public vows, and the government's blessing? Sorry, Judge Pinkypants, but that's just not good enough, not for us. We need to know that we've got something that's only available to 90% of the population. Sure, some of us are criminals, murderers even. Some of us have committed rape, beaten children, tattooed swastikas on our bodies, abused animals, bilked the government out of millions of tax dollars, lied under oath, cheated on previous spouses, dishonored our fathers and mothers, failed to keep the Sabbath holy, mowed down pedestrians in our SUVs while intoxicated, coveted our neighbor's stuff, gotten ourselves put on death row, sold military secrets to the Chinese, urinated in public places, beaten up people who looked or sounded different than us, but we're straight. And that means we can get married. And that's special. Or at least it was. Are some gay people serious about their commitment to each other? Sure, of course. That's not the point. Let me give you an example. Jeannie and I know this couple, these two men. They've been together for years and years, longer than we have. They live on a farm in Pennsylvania and treasure their time together. They are loved by their community, have saved lives as members of the local fire department, and have opened their home to youth groups from the city. They've built a life together based on love and trust. But-- and here's my point-- they're gay. They're both men. And if they're allowed to marry someday, where does that leave us, my wife and me? See what I'm saying? It would cheapen everything we have. That's why we need a constitutional amendment that will protect marriage for straight people. Unless we have the right to enter that sacred union, violate it, exit it, and enter it again with somebody else over and over, regardless of what crimes we commit-- unless we have that right and gay people don't, then there truly is nothing sacred in the United States of America. Adam Felber is a writer in New York, sometimes heard on the radio program Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! His website, where this first appeared, felbers.net. The opponents of gay marriage are vigorously pushing for state and federal constitutional amendments. And they are fighting in court. But sometimes it seems like they're in kind of a funny position. I don't know if you saw this. I saw them on Larry King the night that the president called for a constitutional amendment last year. And they were on there talking about the Bible, and quoting scripture, and saying that homosexuality is just wrong, that it's a values question. Not for everybody, but for lots of opponents of gay marriage, they think that gays just should not be such a big part of mainstream America. And the problem is, you can't really argue that in court-- not in this day and age-- not and expect to get very far, anyway. And so we asked Matt Staver, who runs the Liberty Counsel and goes into court for them-- they're the group opposing gay marriage that went into court in California-- to briefly explain to us what arguments he is actually using in court, the legal arguments to defend a traditional marriage clause. The defense would be several-fold. Number one, it would look at the marriage laws and ask the question whether or not the government of that particular state has a rational reason, or a rational basis, for classifying marriage between one man and one woman. So if the court can find what it calls a rational basis, then the law is ultimately upheld. You break that down in several ways. Number one, you can look at children. We already know, for example, from many studies, that children do best when they're raised in a home with a mother and father. So the state could certainly have a rational basis for instituting marriage between one man and one woman to protect children. Now, that may be debatable. But the question is not whether it's debatable or not. It's whether or not the state has a rational purpose, even though it's debatable. As long as it's reasonable or rational, that's enough to uphold the state marriage law. In a way, the power of that comes from the fact that-- let's say the other side has their studies which argue one thing, and you guys have your studies that argue something else. You're saying, as long as your side is defendable, you win. That's exactly right. In Massachusetts, the problem for people like Matt Staver who oppose gay marriage is that the court said, no, there is not even a reasonable case to be made. There is not a rational basis for the state to give preference to male-female couples in raising children. And the court did this in a kind of interesting way. They said, essentially, our hands are tied. We are bound by our own precedents and by laws that the legislature has passed. Under Massachusetts law, gay adoption is just as good as heterosexual adoption. Gays are equal to straights in custody cases. There is a network of vigorous gender-neutral laws that have already settled this question, and settled it by saying that in Massachusetts, gays are equal parents to straights. So the opponents of gay marriage have even started to lose this test of reasonableness. The other problem for opponents of gay marriage is that a couple of state courts-- Alaska and Hawaii-- have said that keeping gays from marrying is the most serious kind of discrimination, just as serious as race or gender discrimination. Now, from Matt Staver's perspective, this is an outrageous kind of judicial activism, and here's why. Homosexuality has never been considered a class by any court in the country, such that it actually comes under the equal protection clause. You have to be considered a class. And one of the ways to be considered a class is to be a distinct group that has immutable characteristics like, for example, race-- that's an identifiable group-- and gender-- that's an identifiable group. Homosexuals may see themselves as a distinct group with immutable characteristics, but the courts haven't seen them that way in the past. Then Oregon ruled otherwise in 1998. And now that states are shifting on both the big questions like this one and some of the smaller questions, Matt Staver's job has gotten a lot harder. None of the arguments available to him is a slam dunk anymore, like they were in the 1970s. David Cruz is a law professor at the University of Southern California who follows and writes about these issues. If they get an occasionally sympathetic judge, they might win a victory. But if they want to make sure that you don't start seeing marriage in state after state, then they need to do something blunt and dramatic. That's why they're asking the nation to amend the constitution, because the arguments for keeping marriage to just a man and a woman are too weak. It's like changing the rules of the game. If you can't win making the arguments that are currently allowed under our constitution, they have to try to change the constitution to just eliminate the need for argument, and just on the face of it say, well, marriage just is this way. Hence the push for a constitutional amendment. 13 states banned gay marriage in their state constitutions this fall. And another 18 are considering it. Act Three, I Want to Be a Statistic. Well, John Gottman may videotape couples as they argue, but nobody observes marriage better than a couple's own kids. Starlee Kine has this story about what marriages stay together and which ones break up, and about her parents' vision of marriage back in southern California. About three months ago, I received a postcard in the mail. On the front was a picture of a kitten staring out at me with big watery eyes. On the back was scrawled a handwritten note. "Dear Starlee, divorced and loving it. Love, Mom. " My parents filed for divorce this past November. They had been unhappily married for 31 years. My earliest childhood memory is from when I was four years old. My family took a road trip to Oregon. I was sitting in the back next my older sister. My dad was pointing out the window at the trees saying something along the lines of, "Wow, these trees are really something. They're just so tall." My mom whipped her head around, her eyes already in mid-roll. "For God's sake, Norm. They're not that tall." Then both my parents let out a long sigh. It was at that moment that I can remember having a thought, maybe the first original thought I ever had. I recall looking up at my parents and thinking, "Well, this just isn't going to work." If we switched, sooner or later, they'd have to unswitch us. Mother would have to bring me to California to unmix us. And they'd have to meet again. Face to face. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Exactly. Let's get to work. I watched The Parent Trap all the time when I was a kid. It became a bit of an obsession. I regarded the plan the twin sisters came up with as a blueprint for how to deal with my own family, with one minor change. While the twins in the movie wanted to get their parents back together, I wanted to break mine apart. I'd watch the movie and try to notice how it was done. It was like following directions somewhere, and then just doing the opposite to get back home. Where you turned right before, you now turned left. Where you turned left, you now turned right. Instead of tricking my parents into being in the same room, my sister and I would schedule my tap and her drum lessons at the same time, so only one of our parents would be able to pick each of us up. And really, it didn't seem like breaking my parents up was something that should be that hard to do. They fought constantly. For my mom, everything about my dad seemed to irritate her-- the way he ate, the way he slept, even the way his feet were extra long so he had to wear specially sized shoes. All the stories she told of my childhood ended the same way. "I brought you home from the hospital. You were such a beautiful baby. And then your father carried the bags in and forgot to shut the front door. I remember it like it was yesterday." My dad responded to my mom's irritation by withdrawing more and more from our family. Every day without fail, as soon as he got home from work, he'd get on the phone and talk for hours and hours. At first, they were just regular business calls to his associates. The conversations would be all about work. But then, as the hour grew later, he'd start asking about their kids, about what they were having for dinner that night or their plan for the weekend. He seemed more comfortable taking an interest in the lives of other people's families than in ours. I used to joke to my friends that half the time, my dad wasn't even talking to anyone at all, that if we were to go upstairs and pick up the extension, we'd hear nothing but silence from the other end. For years, the biggest mystery in my life was how these two people ever managed to end up together. But over time, that question was trumped by a much bigger one, why they decided to stay together for so long. I can't really get the answer from my mom because, to put it mildly, she's a little off-kilter. She's never been officially diagnosed with anything, but even so, she does a lot of things outside the realm of normal people. And over the years, her behavior has become much more extreme. So that leaves my dad. All my life, I have urged my dad to leave my mom, to free himself of all the unhappiness, and yelling, and erratic behavior. But not only has my dad refused to end the marriage, he's refused to even acknowledge they had any problems. It wasn't until after the divorce finally went through this year that my dad was able to gain any perspective on his marriage. My dad agreed to talk to me on tape to try and explain to me why he and my mom stayed together. Hello? Dad? Hi, Starlee. I start off by asking him if there was ever a good time in their relationship, or was it really always as bad as I remembered it? It was always rocky from the start. I don't remember. You don't remember. Did it ever feel right, though? You and Mom? I have-- I don't know. I mean, from my perspective, it never seemed right. I mean, it's a different perspective. But from what I've always witnessed-- from a very, very, very young age-- it never seemed like you guys were right for each other ever. I remember lots of times when I was a kid, running into your office and trying to tell you to get a divorce. Do you remember any of that time? I don't recall that at all. Really? Because it wasn't a mystery to us that you guys had problems, obviously. Well, people who I knew that I had not seen until recently have all-- many of them have made the remark that they felt that your mother was very hard to live with. Yeah, I'll say. Why they would even know that or say that, I don't know because-- Mom had a lot of outbursts around Whittier. Like, lots of fights and craziness. Remember when she tried to buy the house without telling you? Oh, I remember that. Yeah. What happened there? What happened when she tried to buy the house without telling you? She forged my name. And then the people sued us. And they got a judgment against her. They couldn't get it against me, because I had no knowledge of it. What was she planning to do with that house? Was she going to tell you that you guys were going to move? Yeah, she told me on the last day. She said, this is the house we're buying. I said, number one, we can't afford it. Number two, it's ugly. And that is not a good sign of a healthy marriage. That's true. Not a sign of a healthy relationship. That's right. No. So how did you feel when she did that? How did I feel? I wasn't very happy about it. No. But you stuck with it. Yeah. Why? I just did. Why? Y is a crooked letter. My dad has always been fond of this answer. Sometimes he likes to mix it up with a, "the grass is always greener" or a "you can't fit a square peg in a round hole." But this one was always a keeper. And as I got older and started asking him all the time why he stayed in such a miserable marriage, my frustration would just grow stronger with each "Y is a crooked letter" answer he gave, especially as my mom's antics became more and more pronounced. Or as, for example, the day my mom finally took my dad to court, although it wasn't for the reason I'd always hoped it would be. My dad was born Norman [? Slobodkin. ?] For the first few years of my life, that my last name too. Starlee [? Candy ?] [? Slobodkin. ?] Yes, it was hard to spell and clunky to say. But I could live with it. My mom, on the other hand, could not. In her mind, his name was the only thing that stood between us and a world of endless possibility. She held the [? Slobodkin ?] name personally responsible for all her problems. She'd lie on the couch, a hot towel pressed to her temples, and marvel at how her life had ended up this way. "How will I ever be a diplomat's wife now, with a name like that? And I can forget about First Lady. President [? Slobodkin? ?] Please. The press would eat us alive." We'd try and point out my dad's lack of political aspirations. But our mom would just wave us away impatiently. And then finally, when she could not stand it a moment longer, she took action. She went to a judge and arranged to have my dad's name legally changed. My dad went along with it to keep the peace. And by the end of the day, my dad had gone from being Norman [? Slobodkin ?] to Norman Kine. For a little while, this seemed to satisfy my mother. She would happily sign both her and his new name in big flowery loops. But then as time went by, and neither the marriage nor her life seemed to improve, she was forced to confront the real source of her unhappiness-- Norman. "What kind of a name is that? Can you name one character from literature with that name? Or one great historical figure? I guess I'll have to accept the fact that I'll never be an astronaut's wife or own a fleet of ships. Commandeer Norman. It wouldn't happen in a million years." And so, once again, a trip to the courthouse was made. When my dad came out, his first name was no longer Norman. It was Richard. He was now Richard Kine. By the time I was in college, my parents seemed to lead altogether separate lives. My mom started to go to a lot of self-help seminars. And my dad now seemed to be working at all hours of the day. My mom got an apartment that my dad didn't know about. And most shockingly, she began seeing another man. They went on a trip to Europe together in secret, my mom telling my dad that she'd gone to Palm Springs to visit her mom. They seemed to have perfected a schedule that entailed neither of them being in the same house for more than 10 minutes at a time. My mom went back to school and got her credentials to become a substitute teacher, which my dad also didn't know about. It was all so bizarre and extreme that I didn't even know where to start explaining it. I imagined calling my dad up in the middle of the night to break the news to him. "Dad, there's something I have to tell you. For the past few years, mom has been leading a double life. She has a secret apartment and a secret boyfriend. She is also a substitute teacher." My dad, however, found out about it on his own. He hired a private detective and had my mom followed. And it was at that point that my father took what was, to him, the next logical step. Rather than putting an end to a marriage that he hadn't been happy in from the very start, he instead did the opposite. He put all of his energy into saving it. My dad started buying my mom presents all the time. They went to museums and for long drives up the coast. They sat up late at night and made plans for the future. This would go on for a while. But then I'd hear from my mom that things weren't working out, and that they were definitely going to do it-- get a divorce. A week later, I'd call my dad to see how he was holding up. And he'd tell me everything was going great. They were together again. This back and forth-- my hopes intermittently fulfilled then crushed-- went on for two whole years. It got to the point that the only way I could tell if they were separated or not was by calling my dad's cell phone to see whether it said to leave a message for Richard Kine or for Norman [? Slobodkin. ?] When they were doing well, he was Richard. When they weren't, he went back to Norm. I asked my dad what he was thinking during this time. And he tells me that he'd decided to be the attentive loving husband that he'd never been before. So again, I ask him why. It's quite a mystery why you fought so hard to keep this marriage together that you guys were never happy in. Like, never. Because I felt that I was primarily responsible for her unhappiness. That's not true, Dad. Well, I'm just telling you. You're asking me a question. I'm giving you an answer. I know. I just don't want you to feel that way. Well, I mean healthy people don't feel unhappy without a reason. Yeah. But unhealthy people-- Yeah. And there it was, the reason my dad stayed with my mom for so long. He didn't see her as being different from a normal person. He wasn't even thinking about it that way. He just saw her as his wife. And right or wrong, he had to stick by her. For him, that's what it meant to be married. Let's say, for an example, a person, male or female, gets into drugs or alcohol. So you say, what did I do, maybe, to cause this person to drink? What did I do to cause this person to become unhappy? To become moody? To become lethargic? To lose interest in life? And you're saying that's what happened with you? I was convinced that I was a contributing force, yes. Give me half a second here. Hold on. At this point, my dad's other line rings. And he has to take the call. So he hands off the phone to his new girlfriend, Ruth. Hi, honey. How are you doing? I'm OK. Are you listening to all this? Yes, it's very interesting. Some things I knew, some things I didn't know. Ruth and my dad have actually dated before, 34 years ago, before he had ever met my mom. They were engaged to be married, but Ruth broke it off because she hadn't felt ready. Then a few months ago, my dad looked her number up, and things took off from there. Were you surprised when my dad called you up? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I just went, "How come you're calling?" And he goes, "Well, I'm divorced." I go, "Is it final?" And he goes, "Yes." I go, "Are you sure?" Because I didn't want to get into anything like that, you know? And he goes, "Yes, definitely. It's final." And so I go, "OK, well, then come around some time. And I'd like to hear what happened." And he said, "Oh, I'm only two miles away." So I go, "Well, then you can take me out to dinner." Ruth is really, really nice. But the thing that gets me is how much she seems to like my dad. Now, because of her, he has this whole new life. My days are totally different. I wake up and there's breakfast on the table. I get a phone call from somebody during the day-- "How are you doing, love?" I'll call the person up, I'll say, you know, "I have to go to here, or there, or Timbuktu. You want to come along?" "Oh, sure." It's normal. Yeah. Normal is good, though, right? Yeah. Normal is fine. For the first time, my dad is discovering what it's like being with someone you like, someone you respect and who respects you, someone who is nice to you. My mom seems much happier these days too. When I talk to her, it's like a huge burden has been lifted from her shoulders. In August, Ruth and my dad are going to Germany on vacation. It's my dad's first trip out of the country. He doesn't even have a passport. When I ask him which name he'll be putting on it, Norman or Richard, he just laughs and says, "Either one." Starlee Kine. Well, our program is produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, and Jane Golombisky. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Kelsey Dilts. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free. Recently, we've actually noticed on eBay the This American Life secret decoders that we were offering a few years back on our program are now selling for over $150 each. And I've got to say-- not to drive the price down or anything-- at our website, thisamericanlife.org, you can get the decoder plus four of our old shows that have secret coded messages in them for a third of the price. And the proceeds benefit public radio instead of some guy in Kalamazoo. 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 reminded me just this morning-- Well, you know you don't really have the kind of body on a man that I find really the most attractive. I'm Ira Glass. Will you shut up and let me finish? Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Oh, I don't get to finish until you finish, is that it? PRI. Public Radio International.
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Back in the '60s, when Stephen was a young surgeon in Boston, a guy came in with abdominal pain, which turned out to be his gallbladder. He needed an operation. But the guy told Stephen this story of how, 12 years before, he'd come into that exact same hospital and had had cancer. It started in his stomach and had spread to his belly. The doctors opened him up. And the surgeons had seen cancer that had spread into his liver and throughout his abdomen. They could do nothing and they just closed the abdomen and sent him home to die. And yet, here he was 12 years later, seeming quite healthy. Stephen was skeptical. Cancer usually does not just go away with no treatment at all. The guy must have gotten the story wrong in some way. Then I went back to the patient's chart and I read, in fact, the pathology reports. And I was still skeptical. So then I went back and actually pulled out the slides to be sure in fact he had had the cancer. And we reviewed the slides, and in fact, it was a cancer. And then I made sure it was in fact the same patient. And in fact, it was. And then when you opened him up, were you fully expecting you were going to still find some cancer? Well, it was 12 years later and I didn't know what to expect. I operated on him, took out his gallbladder, examined the inside of his abdomen, and all of the cancer that had been present 12 years earlier had completely disappeared in the absence of any treatment. It appeared that this patient's body had somehow rejected his cancer. This patient set me on a quest for the next 25 years to try to explain how such a thing could happen. And in fact, this doctor, Stephen Rosenberg, is now a pioneer in inventing immunotherapies based on that research at The National Cancer Institute, where he's chief of surgery. Now, it's interesting, you can find the story about this early case of his all over the place. It circulates on the internet, it shows up in books about people spontaneously recovering from cancer, and he is not happy about that. He kind of hates it, in fact. Because he says that this story gives people false hope. In his career, he's seen maybe 10,000 cancer patients, and this is the only case like this that he has ever encountered. It is just fantastically rare. And it is so easy, he says, for patients to get their hopes up. How could anybody not get their hopes up? And Dr. Rosenberg has seen lots of patients taken advantage of by people who play on this dream of a spontaneous recovery. People who prey on cancer patients, offering quack treatments, often take advantage of cancer patients who are desperate. And I've seen entire families devastated as their entire resources are devoted to treatments of no value. Still, hope is important. So what do you do when people place hope in things that probably are not going to work? Well, lots of times his patients come to him asking about vitamins, and herbs, and visualization, and other treatments that have not been proven by science. And if the treatments aren't actually going to hurt them in any way, he says, sure, do it. Studies have shown that patients who are embracing life, feeling more hopeful, feeling more in control of their situation, do better, respond better to medical treatment of all kinds. There are real health effects to hope itself. And so, today on our radio show, we have two stories of hope, the power of hope, hope in some things that are not very likely, I have to say. We have stories about the great side of that and the maybe less great side of that. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in two acts. Act One, a son tries to help his mom in a faraway place defy the laws of medical science. Act Two, a daughter tries to help her dad by going to a faraway place to defy the laws of the United States of America. Stay with us. Act One, Changing the Channeler. You may remember Davy Rothbart. He's been on our show a few times. At one point, he came onto the show to tell the story of his mother, Barbara, who's a suburban mom in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who seems like lots of funny, smart moms that you have met in your life, except that she channels an ancient being named Aaron. Aaron is a Buddhist monk. Aaron gives advice along Buddhist lines to people who come into the house. He showed up in Barbara's life-- I think that's the right way to say that. He showed up in Barbara's life years ago. Barbara is also deaf. She hasn't been able to hear anything for decades. And a while back, she heard about this healer in Brazil, a man who goes by the name Joao de Deus, John of God, who, people said, could make the deaf hear. And she wanted to go down and see if he could help her out. Davy is really close to her and he agreed to along. She was very hopeful about it. She wouldn't say, I'm going to come back, I'm going to be hearing. But I could just tell that, in the months leading up to our trip, she was getting more and more excited about it. She started just dropping little things in the conversation, like one night, me and her were talking about-- my little brother has a new album coming out. Your brother has a band? Yeah, he's a musician. So my mom, she'd give me a little, funny smile, and she'd just say, I can't wait to hear it. I got excited, too. I talked to her about this on tape. I want to hear Peter singing. I want to hear my mother's voice, voices of the people I love. Dad's voice, which I have heard, of course, but will not remember. Oh, stop the tape for a second, Davy. We should say, your mom is deaf, but she can talk. And she reads lips, so whenever people hear you on these tapes you're talking really slowly and distinctly so she can read your lips, and you're also signing to her a lot of times, too. Right, to exaggerate the space between words. I want to hear some of my favorite music. Back at Thanksgiving, you asked me what songs I remembered, and all of my music is from the '60s. I want to hear what's happened to music in 40 years. Would you like to hear some 50 Cent? Some? 50 Cent? Want to hear some 50 Cent? Do you mean two quarters clinging together? No, the rapper 50 Cent. I've never heard of the rapper 50 Cent. I want to hear everything. Back when my mom could hear, she loved listening to music. Now she still sings sometimes. She still sings sometimes? Yeah, it kind of sounds weird. Well, it sounds interesting. Because she can't hear herself at all, right? Right, she has 0% hearing. A favorite song of mine that I love to hear is "Amazing Grace." Do you know that? I can't sing it on tune. [SINGING] Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a soul like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind but now I see. [END SINGING] This song, of course, far predates my deafness, but I learned it just before I lost my hearing. When you can hear again, you will be able to listen to the tapes of yourself singing. I'd say, ahhh. So Davy, before you guys went to Brazil, what did you think was going to happen? Did you view this as, oh, my mom is going to be disappointed? Was there a part of you where you thought that she might get a miracle cure? You know what? I had no idea. Who knows? And I think my mom's excitement got me excited about it, too. So I had heard stories from her friend who had been down there and had seen Joao heal deaf people. Wait, and your mom's friend actually saw this happen with her own eyes? Yeah. So I was also nervous because sometimes it was sort of heartbreaking because I would see her begin to get so excited about it. So Davy, where are we now? Now we're down in Brazil. It took us 31 hours to get there from Michigan. It's in a tiny town in the middle of Brazil called Abadiania. It's just, really, like a little village with a few farms and some houses, a little factory where they make bricks. And you know, a lot of sick people wandering around. And this is the sort of place where the town's main industry is healing tourists? Yeah, it's like a one-company town, a miracle town. People have come here on buses from all over Brazil. They'll drive for 36 hours just to visit for a few hours with Joao and then go home. And everywhere you go, people are telling these miracle stories. There's this guy, Marcel, who owns a little pizza restaurant. He actually came there because his dad had been sick. I have a friend, Alessandro. He lives in Abadiania, and I show you when he walk around. He had multiple sclerosis. That's the right name? Yeah, sclerosis. OK, he could not walk, problem to move, even to talk. Only his mother could understand him. He came here today, every day you can see he go into university, walking, he play volleyball with the people around. I figured, while I'm going with my mom to help her out, see if she can get her hearing back, I'd try to get healed, too. I have this skin thing, it's called psoriasis. And basically, it's like your skin gets kind of all red and scaly looking. And I have it on my chest and my back and part of my scalp. We should say to people who are trying to picture this that we're not talking about like, you just have dry skin, or red skin, that it's way more serious than that. Yeah, there's an arthritis that is associated with psoriasis, which I actually have. And it makes your joints and everything terribly painful. They swell up. I've had times when I couldn't walk. And that's scary. So I thought I would, you know, why not see if Joao could heal me, too. Good morning. On behalf of [? Medio ?] Joao Teixeira de Faria, welcome you all to his spiritual center. All belief systems are welcome here. So where are we now? We're in line at the Casa. The Casa is the place where Joao does his healing. It's like a little healing center, compound. And this is the first time we're going to meet him, and then see if he can cure us. It's just early in the morning. We're in the middle of a crowd of, like, 300 or 400 people. And most of them are Brazilian, but about a quarter of us are foreigners from the US and, really, all over the world. Everyone's dressed in white, head to toe. It's like the Casa dress code. You've got to dress in white. And it's funny, they've got Enya bumping over the PA system. Basically, you have all these people just waiting out in this grand hall, waiting to go before Joao. It just feels like a gigantic low-cost medical clinic. Everybody in this first line, please step back a little bit so that we can form the line. It's about 10 deep right now. There's just sick people everywhere. So Davy, so I know that your mom hired a translator and a guide for you guys. Is she there with you during this part? Yeah, she's right there. Her name is Heather. While we were waiting there, she told us how Joao had come to be Joao. It wasn't going through medical school. He has a second grade education. And when he was 16 years old, he was coming out of a town called Campo Grande in Mato Grosso. And he'd just lost his job as a tailor's assistant. And he was hungry and tired and lonely and on his way home. And basically, while he was there on the road, what happened to Joao was he was visited by the spirit of St. Rita. And she gave him just, like, this unfamiliar address. She told him, go back into town, knock on the door at this house. They said, "Are you Joao?" He said, "I'm Joao, I was told to come here. They said, "We've been waiting for you." The next thing he remembered is coming out of a faint. And he was very apologetic and said, "Gosh, I must have been so hungry that I fainted. I'm so sorry." And they said, "Oh, no. You incorporated King Solomon and you've just healed over 50 people. You've incorporated King Solomon. What does that mean? Incorporating, it's like channeling, except instead of just channeling the voice of a spirit, basically your whole body becomes completely possessed. So the idea is that there's 37 of the world's greatest healers of all time, and they just kind of take turns entering his body and performing these works of healing. They call these guys the entities. And are these healers that we would have heard of? Are these, like, famous people? Oh, there's a few all stars on this roster. You know, there's St. Ignatius and St. Francis, King Solomon. There's a guy named Dr. Octavio Cruz, he's like the father of Brazilian medicine. Each of these spirits has a different personality. In fact, the music that they play over the loudspeakers there, each one has a separate musical preference. So depending on which entity Joao is channeling, they'll play whatever music they most like. OK, so you guys are standing there in this big room with hundreds of people in this line. How long does that last? About a couple of hours. And then Heather says it's our turn. She gets me and my mom into the right line and kind of sends us through to see Joao. Just keep coming through. I'll meet you inside. First, we go through a couple of rooms where there's just a bunch of people meditating in chairs with their eyes closed. And then, finally, you can see him just way up at the front of the room. He sits in a big, wooden chair. It's almost like a throne. And he's got a beige shirt on, hospital scrubs. He's about 50 years old maybe, dark, wavy hair, round face, glasses. He's sitting there and he's got, like, a ballpoint pen and just a bunch of little slips of paper on his lap. And as each person goes in front of him for a few seconds, he does a real quick little scribble and just gives them the scrap of paper. It's almost like some old baseball player giving autographs at a baseball card show. So when we get up to see him, Heather explains my mom's deafness to him and she tells him about my psoriasis to Joao in Portuguese. To me, this is like the moment of truth maybe. But Joao barely looks at us. I mean, he just kind of nods and gives us one of those papers with this crazy squiggle on it. And Heather tells us it's our prescription. She says that Joao, he doesn't have to actually examine us because the entities have just been checking us out as we were approaching him in line. And she points me and my mom to a room where everyone's meditating and just says, you know, go over there, sit in current. They call it sitting in current. Go sit in the other current room. You stay here till the end. Hold on to that. That's your medicine. I'll tell you later. Current means like the current, the electrical current that comes from all the entities? Well, when you sit in current, it's like this, everyone that's there meditating is sort of conducting this powerful, spiritual current. And that gives energy to Joao and the entities while they're doing the healing. So you sit in this current room and you're just supposed to keep your eyes closed, make sure not to cross your arms or your legs because that disrupts the flow of energy. Most people in there are sitting pretty still. A couple people have fallen asleep. There's people that are making this weird, spooky, hissing sound. It sounds like this. So after like an hour of that, we all went outside and Heather told us to go the pharmacy window. Behind the counter there, it's just a kid sitting on a little stool, probably, like, 15-year-old kid with a Casa t-shirt. So me and my mom, we give this kid our pieces of paper with like Joao's scribble on it. And he really doesn't even look at the paper. He just takes them from us. He reaches down into this cardboard box at his feet and he pulls out some pill bottles and just gives us the pills. They're like these little Joao brand pills. And then I see him give the same pills to the guy behind me, and the person behind that guy. We all get the same exact pill bottles. It's got a [? jaguar ?] on the back. Heather tells us that these pills, they're just a passion flower extract, but the entities spike each capsule with a special energy. It's a vehicle to carry the energy that is imbued into the herbs for that particular person. Unique for you, so you can't give it your sister, your brother. It is for your condition. So Heather tells us what Joao's treatment plans are for me and my mom. Me and my mom are scheduled for surgery. Wait, wait. Surgery? You mean like, surgery surgery? Like, they cut into you? Well, no, it's psychic surgery. You're told this is how it works. Basically, you just sit in this room with 20 other people in a chair and the entities perform surgery on you. You just can't see it happen. I mean, Joao is not even in the room. And you get the surgery, too? Yeah, I get surgery, too. I mean, I sit next to my mom and we have the surgery together. I'm sitting here and my mom is next to me and she's breathing. I can feel her breathing really slowly and sort of intensely. And I'm not feeling anything, but I don't know. I'm hoping she's experiencing something. It seems strange now, but I was so kind of disoriented. And just everything was so weird. I never really felt like I had steady footing. I didn't know what was going on. I don't know, I felt like maybe it could all be real. Heather, she warns us. She says, you know, don't be too active right after invisible surgery, because you can rip out the invisible sutures that the entities have just put in. She says, you've got to treat it just like you would conventional surgery. And just stay in bed. And in fact, after these invisible surgeries, we were both totally exhausted. And we went to our rooms and we just slept soundly, totally for about 24 hours. The next morning, I wake up and I can look down and see there's been no miracle for my skin. I'm not cured. And it was really humid, so my tape recorder was sticking a little bit. So the sound's a little bit funny, but this is tape of me just kind of going down to visit my mom for the first time after the surgery. It's the morning after surgery and I feel pretty groggy. I slept almost 24 hours straight, and I'm ravenous. I'm going to go down to breakfast and see if my mom can hear again. Going downstairs. I hear some voices down there on breakfast. There she is. She's talking to someone. Well, she's looking at something. Hey Mom. Mom. I'm right behind you. She doesn't see me. Hey Mom. Mom. I'm right in your ear. Mom, can you hear me? Can you hear me? She can't hear me. OK, so clearly at this point, you probably realize like, OK, your mom didn't get her hearing back. Did they warn you that it wasn't going to be like, OK, man puts his hands on you and, kaboom, you know, that suddenly you get your hearing back? But that it might take weeks or more? Yeah. They said there's a whole range of possibilities. Some people are healed instantly. Some people, it takes a couple of weeks. Some people, a couple months. Some people, a couple years. But still, change will happen a little bit at a time. So I tapped her on the shoulder and I asked her if she felt any different? And she said she thought she felt like a greater sensitivity to vibration. Maybe it could be a sign that her hearing was coming back. And then she asked me how I was feeling. How are you feeling? I don't feel so great. It's either the invisible surgeries and the sutures within me, or it's the runs. The rest? The runs. The R-U-N-S. T-R-U-N-S. What is T-R-U-N-S? The runs. The rust? She's still clearly very deaf. Ladies and gentlemen, it's the comedy musings of Ken. I don't tell jokes. I only channel jokes from the entities. This is a few days after our surgeries, and there's sort of a town talent show. I'm translating all of this into sign language for my mom. Most of us foreigners are here for several weeks, so the town's got this whole kind of summer camp feeling. This is Ken and his doctors at home had given him a few weeks to live. He's got some kind of severe liver problem and he's supposed to die soon. How many entities does it take to change a light bulb? How many? Zero, we've already seen the light. So you basically do the same thing every day. Take the pills, you either see Joao, or you spend more time in that current room, the meditation room. And people are so nice. A lot of them are really down to earth. They're really cool and just really friendly. And so I am getting along with people and it's sort of powerful just to be around so many people that have cancer, AIDS, people that are really close to dying. Why didn't the entity cross the road? Why? He was already on the other side. The problem is, everyone's telling you these miracle stories all the time, just constant miracle stories, but you don't see any miracles. People in wheelchairs are still in wheelchairs. Blind folks are still blind. They're like urban legends. And it's like they can smell my skepticism. It's like the way animals can smell fear. And to them, everything that happens, everything that goes on there proves that they're right and that these entities exist. You know, like my back was just starting to kill because you're sitting in this current room for just hours and hours on end. They told me that the pain was proof that the entities are working on me. And I was like-- So in their view, is there like even room for coincidence? Or--? No. No, anything that happens, whatever happens, happens for a reason. And I mean, it would be one thing if they just asked me to believe or just to try to believe, but they all tried to convince me that it's based on science. Here's a couple examples. Our hearts create a field of energy around our bodies. We know this now. We can measure it. Each of us holds a vibration, and that vibration attracts other like vibrations and affects other vibrations. We also know that medium Joao has been hooked up to electrodes and that he goes down to 0 resistance. So he becomes like a lightning rod. Because I'm a Capricorn, I have bad knees. And I felt them working on my knees, and I also felt them working on my elbow. Capricorns are known for having bad knees? Yeah. For my mom, the longer her hearing is not coming back, the more obsessed she kind of becomes with just following every little rule of the place. Like, Heather told us we have to stock up on holy water, the holy water they have at the Casa gift shop. And it's really just a regular brand of-- it's just bottled water, but it's been blessed by the entities. And here, me and my mom are at breakfast. And my mom catches me drinking the regular bottled water. You'll have to brush your teeth. Humor me and drink this. It's the same thing, except this one is cold. This has extra energy in it. What extra energy? I see the skeptical side of you coming to [UNINTELLIGIBLE], and I think that, for your skin condition, I think it would be healing for you. I'm having trouble a little bit with the whole program here. Why is this holy water different--? The entities have really given their energy into this water. They've raised the frequency vibration. And it's a different vibration of [? frequence. ?] It's a charged water, let's call it. If I gave you the Pepsi challenge, and put some holy water in one cup and some regular bottled water in the other cup, would you tell the difference? I don't know. Over a period of days of drinking one or the other, I would feel the difference. But talking about the whole program here, Davy, this is-- I know you respect me. I do. This is consistent with everything that I know and have learned in the past 15 years. This is the problem. My mom's trying to use my belief in channeling to get me to belief in Joao. Yeah, just to remind people of how you've talked about this in the past, your mom channels this ancient being, Aaron. And the last time you came on the show and talked about it, you described it this way. You said that, basically you faced this choice as her kid. You could decide that channeling isn't real and your mom's a little crazy. And you don't think she's crazy. She's really wonderful in so many ways. And so you sort of provisionally were thinking, OK, well, maybe this is real. Yeah. And I've seen the work that she does with Aaron. And I've seen how helpful it is to people. Aaron gives people advice? Yeah, so I've seen the good that comes out of that. But now she's upping the stakes. She's saying, if I'm going to keep believing in Aaron and that stuff, I also have to believe in Joao and the entities. So it's like you're at a kind of showdown with her? Yeah. And I didn't realize this was going to happen. But it's true, at home it's easy to sort of each believe what we want to believe and just, it never has to come to a head. So is there any point down there when you thought that you started to believe a little bit? Yeah, actually. There was one day. All those who have surgery, please raise there hand. So what's going on now? We're at the Casa. We're going to see some physical surgeries. Oh, you mean like real surgeries? Yeah, knife. He does those, too? Yeah. He cuts into people. Scrapes their eyes. No anesthetic. Joao wouldn't let me record the operations, but he let me stand right there next to him while he did them. I knew this morning that a couple of the people I'd gotten to be friends with, Gregor and Cynthia, they're from Baltimore. Gregor has MS, so he's in a wheelchair. And Cynthia has some ailments, so she wanted to get surgery, too. OK, so how's it go? You go in there with Cynthia and she's in there with him. What's he do? Well, she's standing there with her eyes closed and he just kind of tilts her head back a little bit. He's got this wicked-looking instrument. They call it a Kelly clamp. It's about seven inches long. It's basically a long, metal skinny scissors with a little cotton ball kind of in the pliers tip of it. OK, I can feel where this is going. Let me just warn people, this might get a little graphic. OK, continue Davy. He tilts her head back. He dips the point of it just kind of up her right nostril. And then he turns around and just slams it all the way in, so just all the way to the handle, straight back into her head. Oh my God. It was horrifying. It was the most upsetting thing I've ever seen. The room kind of started swirling around me. And everything got really silent. There's sort of like a roar fills your ears. And I just kept watching as he started kind of poking and jabbing around in there. It was like if you're trying to scrape in a jar of peanut butter to get the last little bit out. OK, and so what is she doing? Is she like screaming? Like, what's she doing? She's just standing there, pretty calmly. I mean, she looks maybe a little uncomfortable. But she's very calm. Then what happens? Well, then after 30 seconds of that, he pulls the thing out and she kind of just collapses into a chair. And they wheel her off into this sort of infirmary. And that's the last I see of her for a little while. So I go and just sit down in one of these chairs for another hour or two. I'm freaking out. Because like, I just saw something that should not be possible, that there's no way that could happen. What he just did should have killed her and it didn't. I have to say, it was an hour or two like I've never had before. And I was just completely shaken. I was just sitting there and I didn't know what to believe. After I'd been sitting there for a couple hours, I went outside and I was standing with Gregor, her husband, who's in a wheelchair. And he was anxious about how she was and then she comes kind of skipping out, just happy as can be. Of course, she'd had her eyes closed the whole time. What does the thing actually even look like, the apparatus? Is it big or is it small? I have no idea. It's about a seven-inch scissors, like-- Scissors? Now I'm getting scared. I don't know if it's a good thing for me to describe it to you. Honestly, he twisted it back, so it was going like almost straight back into your brain. And then he just jammed it all the way in. I mean, I thought he had killed you. I honestly did. And so did you go and tell your mom? Like, what did your mom make of it? She had an explanation for exactly what was happening. The frequency of vibration of these tools is raised so high that they simply become energy and light. Material is transmuted literally into light. And then, as the instrument withdraws the tool, he releases that energy thrust into it and it turns back into the metal that it was. Then I had talked to a couple doctors and it turns out there's a cavity behind the nose and it goes back a long way. Oh, so there's room for the instrument? Right. And your brain's surround by bone, so there's no way you can harm it or help it, for that matter, by sticking something up your nose. So really, what Joao did, in the end, isn't proof of miracles, but proof of sinus cavities. Some day I'm not good, some day I'm very good. It's with ups and downs. That's it. There's this couple, Tatiana and Ed. They were from Holland. And you saw them all the time pushing their son around the Casa in a wheelchair, Alexander. He had muscular dystrophy. And the doctors in Holland had said there was no cure, like nothing that could be done for him. Here's Tatiana. You know what? The worst in this illness is that you feel helpless. You feel so very helpless. You know that this boy will die little by little every day in front of your eyes, and you can't do anything. It makes you furious. From time to time, you're furious. You're saying, why? Well, I want to do something about that. I can't just watch it happening like that. This is the only, our chance, and the last one. Tatiana hadn't believed in any of this stuff before Alexander got sick. But her and Ed were willing to try anything. The doctors had told them that the muscles would just deteriorate until, at age 18 or so, your heart just can no longer even beat, and he'd die. This is Alexander. He's 10. Well, the entities, they told us positive concentration. So we're working on that. We're doing our best. What's that? We're doing our best. Have they told you that you will be healed? Yes, they said a couple of times, he will walk. And then he said another time, you will walk very soon. What soon is for the entities, we don't know. To me, when I meet people like this, hoping for a miracle, it's really the only choice you have. It seems completely sane to me. It's the logical choice. One night, one of the posadas hired an accordion player and had a little dance. And everyone was there. Maggie, she's blind, and she's dancing with Dennis. Gregor, who uses a walker at home, but he gets up and twirls for a second with Cynthia. Then he topples over again. I mean, everyone who's here, they are so joyful just being together and having hope. And whether or not you believe in the spirits and everything, it just seems like it's good for you. It improves your health to be in a beautiful place. There was 25 people in my mom's group. No one was cured, but everyone was glad that they'd been there. Everybody, that is, but you? Right. It wasn't quite enough for me. I mean, my mom still's deaf, my skin's still messed up, and Joao told both of us we needed to come back for more visits. And the worst thing was, my mom and I, we were not seeing eye to eye. The thing is, can you open your heart to the possibility that this is real, and that in three or four years you could be healed if you do what you need to do? Do you know what I mean? Kind of, but I just think you and I see the world differently. We probably do. We're two different people. I used to see the world the way you do and I've learned some things by banging my head against the wall and then stopping because I realized it wasn't getting me anywhere. I'm not banging my head. I don't think there is a master plan. I don't think there is a reason for everything. I think there are accidents and coincidences. I don't. And I'm not going to argue that one with you. I don't know, Davy. I would hope that you can just say, let's see what happens. I don't want to let you down, but I don't think I'm going to come back here unless it's to visit you because you've moved here or something. You don't think you would come back even though he says he can cure you? That's up to you. That's entirely up to you. That's hard for me to understand why. I don't really believe in it. That was the first time I had ever told her that, and maybe realized it myself. I don't know what that means exactly for me and my mom. You mean, for the two of you who are so close to say, we disagree on something that's so fundamental and such a big part of her life? Right, because it is everything to her. It's been a couple months since we got back, and she says that she's experiencing some changes. And other people from the group, Maggie, who was blind is saying she's beginning to see a little bit. For my mom, it's the same thing. She says she can feel her inner ears. She can feel changes, shifts, vibrations, and she thinks it's the beginning of hearing. I can feel my voice going up and down. Suddenly, I have some sense of where the notes are. It's completely different. Do you hear the difference? It's like hearing. It's just vibration. I'm hearing it. I've got to get the tunes, the notes. [SINGING] Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a soul like me. [END SINGING] Am I way off? Am I better than I was before? It sounded beautiful to me. Davy Rothbart is about to head out on a 126-city tour for his new book of excerpts from Found magazine, the magazine he created. Details are at foundmagazine.com. Coming up, summoning the mysterious entities known as the Food and Drug Administration. 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, Miracle Cures. Stories of kids doing whatever they think it might take, doing the impossible to help their parents get cured. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two is this. Julia Whitty's dad had cancer, and he had used up all the available kinds of treatment. He probably just had a few months left to live. But there was one hope for him, one last drug that might work. And the problem was, a year of this drug would cost him $47,000, which his insurance couldn't cover and which he could not afford. So Julia Whitty, she just wrote a magazine article about this experience. She said that she found when she tried to find this drug for him, she found that most of the ways she could get the drug for less were not exactly legal. I absolutely was willing to break the law and I can't imagine too many people who wouldn't be, in all honesty. If you clearly saw there was a source for what you needed, and if you had to break the law a little bit to cross over the line to go there and get it, I think most people would do that for somebody that they loved. So that was where I began to look around and see if there was some other way we could get this drug. So you started looking around, what'd you find? I went on the internet, as most people would in this day and age, I just started surfing around. And I did find-- that's where I first came in contact with people who might have had a loved one who died and had leftover prescription that they would sometimes give away or sell. But obviously, we needed a steady, reliable, long-term dose of this stuff. And I eventually was able to locate a country that manufactured this drug for completely different diseases. And they were selling it for about $1,200 a year, which obviously started to sound really cheap. As compared with $47,000 per year? Exactly. So you go, you fly to some foreign country, you get some doctor there, I guess, to prescribe the drug? Right, which is not difficult to do in other countries. It's pretty much not difficult to do in any country if you're a traveler. Did you have to actually claim that you had a disease or did you just tell the doctor, here's my situation. I told him the truth regarding my father. And he was more than willing. I think he felt good being able to help me. And at this point, you're not exactly sure if it's legal to bring these back? That's right. So what do you do? Well, I had thought about it in advance, because I travel in my adult life and I've spent a lot of time in third world countries and stuff. And I usually travel with a pretty hefty medical arsenal. You know, I'd put multiple pills in one bottle. So I thought, well, I'm just going to go there. However they come, I'm going to take them out of that packaging and put them in empty prescription bottles that I have with other prescription names on them. And in all my years of traveling, I've never come back into the US and had anybody open my bottles. So I really didn't think I was going to have trouble with this. And so this is like, dozens of pills or hundreds of pills? It was somewhere between two-, three-, or four-month supply, enough to sort of start my father on it, do a set of scans and see whether or not it was working. So you have hundreds of pills, what was the moment like when you finally were coming back into the country? Well, you definitely get that sweaty palms thing going. You wonder, what are they looking for? What expression on your face? You know you're doing something that could be wrong. And what do we know about how many people are actually going overseas and bringing back drugs? I know that their estimates right now are that between one and two million Americans are getting drugs one way or another from Canada alone. And is that legal or is that illegal? In my personal experience, it was probably always illegal, but it wasn't enforced. For whatever reason, it began to be enforced around December of 2002. And I was told by the FDA that they were cracking down at that point. Do you know what the penalty would have been if you'd been caught? I don't know, but I remember being so angry at the time that I was perfectly prepared to go to jail. Not that I want to go to jail, but I was just feeling this was an absurd way to have to live. And it was ridiculous, in light of the fact that this drug could be had more inexpensively and why my father couldn't have access to it. I considered it immoral. Now, at some point you learned that you might be able to simply order the drug from, what was it, an online manufacturer? Like an online pharmacy? Not an online pharmacy. That would have been easy. It was the actual manufacturer in this country overseas. And they claimed they were already doing it for other patients in the United States. And they told me it would just sail through US customs and that did not turn out to be the case. It gets held up in US customs in Cincinnati and I began a long series of conversations with FDA officials, sort of case officers. And they tell me, it's illegal. You can't bring this in. And the reason for that law is because they can't vouch for the quality of the drugs? They haven't tested those drugs? Exactly right. They haven't tested those drugs. That's what they say. We haven't tested those drugs, we don't know if they'll be good for you or not. But in a way, that's a legitimate thing. Like. In a way, you'd want the government to actually do that, to say, we have no idea if this manufacturer's reputable and the drug's OK. Well, I would argue that I have the right to take that chance myself. We're just simply not allowed to do this. Now, we can bring in foreign-made food and foreign-made clothes and everything else, but we're not allowed to bring in foreign-made drugs because they are untested supposedly. There's a passage in your article where you say, "I can go to Europe and buy their wine for less, go to Asia and buy their clothes for less. American companies can buy their raw materials for less overseas, or they can move their operations abroad in order to hire cheaper labor or management. But on a mind-boggling reversal of the American principle of supply and demand, I cannot purchase cheaper drugs and bring them home." That's right. And that's the part that, to this day, infuriates me, particularly about the new Medicare drug bill, which has expressly now, completely, clearly forbidden Americans to go overseas and bring back drugs for any reason whatsoever. And so the FDA holds this stuff up. How long do they hold it? They held it for a couple of weeks. And for the first time, we'd cut his dose in half to try and eke it out, as the package wasn't delivered. Then we cut his dose in half again. Eventually it became clear to me that they were not going to give it to us for any reason whatsoever. And in fact, they were going to destroy it. And that's when I turned to my elected officials. I thought, well, maybe they can help me on this end. One senator, Barbara Boxer, was phenomenally helpful. Her office went to work on it. They just dug their teeth in and they had that package sprung in about 24 hours. And did you end up having to get the senator's office to intervene for you again? Yes, I did. Like, every time it would come to the border, the same place, same people? No, eventually I figured out a method with the FDA guy that they were willing to accept. We had to provide these very elaborate excuses of why my father was using the foreign version versus the American version of this drug. We had to sort of basically manufacture excuses. Oh, I see. You had to say that the American version didn't work? Didn't work as well for my father for the following reasons, which we pretty much made up. It was pretty bogus, but they went for it. And they did that a few times. That system worked, and then it stopped working. Why, what happened? At the end of 2002, we were bringing in another shipment and playing the game the way we'd learned to play it. And this time just couldn't get it sprung. And that was when I heard that the law, not that the law had changed, but that enforcement of the law had changed. And they were beginning to really crack down now on letting these drugs in. The FDA case officer suggested that I go to the US company that manufactured the drug and apply for patient financial assistance. Now, that's a special program which lets you say, we don't have the money to pay the $47,000, so give us a break, basically, on humanitarian grounds? That's right. And apparently, a lot of the pharmaceutical companies have these things, whether people know it or not, for their more expensive drugs. And we had actually applied for this at the very beginning, when my father was first prescribed this drug, and he didn't pass. He wasn't poor enough, they thought, so I decided we'd just lie. And I called the patient financial assistance line. They had an 800 number. And I was trying to sort of suss them out on, like, how poor did you really have to be before they would accept you? And she said, well, I can't tell you that. But she did, I think inadvertently, admit the only thing I really needed to know, which was that they don't actually check anything you say on the application. Oh, she said that to you straight out? She told me straight out. I felt like it was something, she went, oh God, I shouldn't have said that. And in my brain, a little bell just went off and I went, yes. Now, a few months after your dad died-- and we should say that he didn't die of the cancer, he ended up dying of heart failure-- Congress passed the Medicare drug bill, which was designed to address exactly this problem. If your dad had survived, what would this bill have done for him, which is supposed to, basically, take these expensive drugs and put them within financial reach of people? Well, I ran the numbers on it and I found that he would have still had to pay over $6,000 a year. And obviously, that's a lot cheaper. It's still not as cheap as the $1,200-a-year version you could get overseas. So is that good or bad, as far as you're concerned, getting it down to $6,000 to-- It's not good enough. It's not good enough, in my opinion, not if the drug companies are going to be able to ask $47,000, in my father's case, for a drug that all the research and development was done more than 40 years ago. If they have the right to do that, then I think we need to have something. If the government's going to become the biggest drug buyer on the planet, then they need to do something about enacting price controls or setting standards that they're willing to pay. The thing you're talking about is actually that, under the bill, the United States government would not be able to negotiate for lower prices. They wouldn't be able to say, we're buying a huge quantity, so give us a price break? Right. Congress expressly forbade that in the Medicare drug bill. And as you note in your article, when the government buys anything in quantity, they negotiate the price down. That's right. That's another case, I think, where the pharmaceutical industry wrote the law. And do you blame the drug companies for that? I blame the drug companies at getting through to our elected officials, yes. They're obviously phenomenally powerful, as we can see by the number of lobbyists that they employ: 600, more than one for every member of Congress. There's a personal lobbyist, in effect, for every member of Congress. Julia Whitty's story about getting her dad's $47,000 prescription filled is in the issue of Mother Jones. That is on newsstands now, and it's at motherjones.com. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself with Wendy Dorr, Diane Cook, Sarah Koenig, and Jane Golombisky, who is getting married today. Yes, today. We're going to have to call her Jane Feltes from now on. Our warmest wishes to her and to Rick. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Kelsey Dilts. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for free. Or, if you care, you can buy CDs of them now. Well, 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 Malatia. He came into the studio this week to watch us do the radio show. His review? It was horrifying. It was the most upsetting thing I've ever seen. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. The room kind of started swirling around me and everything got really silent. You know, there's sort of, like, a roar fills your ears. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Principal Gartner and Assistant Principal James have tried everything they know how to try. They've filed paperwork, they've talked to people above them. They've gotten the parents from their school to go and stand up at school board meetings. Nothing's worked. We were told the new school would happen, this is about, six years ago. They run a public elementary school in Chicago called the Richard E. Byrd Community Academy. The school has no lunchroom, no auditorium, no gymnasium. Even for Chicago, it's pretty bad. Promises were made. Land has been cleared. A sign has been posted for years and years and years. We have gone through planning, right down to picking out tile. And then, it's not happening. There go our bullet hole in the window. There go our missing drinking fountain. And there go our other bullet hole in the window over there. Caprice, a fifth grader, takes on a tour of what's wrong with the building. Things were going nowhere in the campaign to get a new school until the fifth graders in her class, room 405, got involved this fall. Among the things that got them maddest about the school was the heating system. Here's Davielle. At our classroom, I remember once the heat was supposed to be on but we had to put on our hats, our coats, our gloves. We put on our gloves, we can't even hardly write, because people have mittens. You know you can't write with no mittens. They walk me to the bathrooms. There's no soap, no paper towels, no paper towel dispensers. A door is missing from the stalls. We don't have our own privacy. There aren't any doors on the stalls. And don't nobody uses the bathroom anymore. But-- So what does everybody do? You just hold it in? Yeah, mhm. We go take it down to our lunchroom. It's a bootleg lunchroom. We've got a bootleg lunchroom, because it's a hallway with just tables in it. The bootleg lunchroom features bootleg cafeteria ladies, who look just like any cafeteria ladies anywhere, except they're serving chicken nuggets and corn and milk in the middle of the school hallway. The kids in room 405 decided that they needed a new school back in the fall when their teacher, Brian Schultz, a young idealistic teacher in his second year, decided to try something new, a program called Project Citizen, where the kids would pick some problem in the school or in their neighborhood that they wanted to solve. And then they would solve it together as a class. So one day Mr. Schultz stood at the board and had them name possible problems that they could address. Some of the problems that they came up with were everything from wanting to clean up litter in the parks to teenage pregnancy to stopping Michael Jackson. And did you try to get them to just choose one problem? That was the aim, was to pick one problem. And truly I thought that they would pick something like getting mandatory recess every day, or getting a different selection of drinks at lunch. But when the kids started naming their problems at their own school, he says, the feeling was so many of these problems could not be solved one by one. The only way to get an auditorium or a lunchroom would probably be just to build a whole new school, the one they were supposed to get six years ago, the one whose plans are actually on display in the entryway of this building for them to see as they walk in each morning. So that's what they decided to go for. They've had politicians visit. They've written letters to the head of Chicago schools. There have been TV crews. There's been coverage in the newspapers. But Byrd sits in the middle of Cabrini-Green, one of the most famous public housing complexes in the country. And the city of Chicago is tearing down the public housing high-rises around the school. Lots of Cabrini is already gone, replaced with expensive townhomes. Assistant Principal James says that maybe the new school will come only when this process is finished. And maybe this is what's happening. Maybe the plan is to let's just stall it, stall it, stall it until the buildings are torn down and the new townhomes are all in place and we get the population we want for the new schools, but not for our students. It'll be for the new residents, because they're going to need a school. I think they're going to fix stuff up. I don't really think they're going to give us a new school. Yeah? How come? Because they're going to build condos over there. Because my mama said that when they knock down the projects, all the other people from them move over here, they're trying to make us move from over here. The kids are getting some small results. The school board has finally scheduled some repairs for the building, minor stuff, covering some fluorescent lights, fixing some wiring. If they just get repairs and not a whole school, a lot of kids say they're going to be really disappointed. And Principal Gartner is worried about the lesson that they're going to take away from all of this. If they don't see things happening, I'm afraid that they're going to say, mm hm, voice all you want, but your voice is a small voice and doesn't matter. And this is the problem with the big, desperate, brave attempt to change things. When you raise the stakes, you either win big or you lose big. And that's what our show is about today. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, stories of people stuck in unfixable situations, people who try desperate measures, unusual, inventive, desperate measures. We're talking stories of American ingenuity, stories of problem solvers, stories of what this country is all about at some level. Act One, Hasta la Vista, Arnie. In that act, a patient, a doctor, a problem, and a movie star back when he still made movies. Act Two, We Built This City on Rock and Coal. In that act, a small town in Pennsylvania goes for the extreme makeover, decides to get a famous face of a favorite celebrity. Act Three, The Router Not Taken. A man tries to unload a piece of junk that he bought by selling it on eBay, not by concealing its many terrible qualities, but by bragging about them, which actually, it turns out to work. Act Four, The Rocks at Rock Bottom. In that act, a guide to how to get over a heartbreak using only your throwing arm. Stay with us. He would go on and on babbling about that he was The Terminator. And the big thing was that he had helped a bunch of other patients on this particular ward escape. They'd find them down on level two in obstetrics in there around the ward. And this had happened on more than one occasion. And they'd get a call, they would bring the people back up to the ward. And it wasn't too long before he'd be back out. So he would stage breakouts? He did. He was there to rescue John Connor and had to help those people get off the ward, that they were all being kept there against their will. And in fact, he felt also that he was being poisoned by the staff, The commandant, in particular, which I took was the lead psychiatrist on the unit, given drugs that was messing up his software. And was he quoting lines from the movies? Like would-- Oh, yes. He stayed in character, which is another unusual feature. Very often clients with this particular condition will go in and out of focus, different kinds of characters. They'll come in and out of their-- they'll remember who they are or what their role in life has been. But this guy stayed, and his delusion had fixed features. So what did you do? Well, the staff was just embarrassed, but also upset with this. And they would bring him back and try to have a very rational discussion with this very psychotic man about why he shouldn't be doing this. And one of the things that often happens is they give him more of the treatment that wasn't working. Like, they gave him more of the drug that didn't-- They give him more of the drugs. And they tried even more to be rational with him and explain the reasons why he couldn't be escaping from the units, restate who he really was, what his real name was. OK. So you guys try more drugs, and you try reasoning with him. Neither thing works. No. And here I am a student, so I probably don't know any better. And I had been to a couple of workshops, and I was intrigued by this man whose name was Milton Erickson, who was kind of this wacky psychiatrist who lived out in the Arizona desert. He was famous for treating very difficult clients, and often in very unusual and unorthodox ways. And the case that came to my mind, that I am sure I'd heard at this workshop, was of a man in a state hospital-- I believe it was in Michigan-- who believed he was Jesus Christ. He'd been at the hospital for decades if I'm remembering the story correctly. And nothing had helped. Milton Erickson comes in, learns of this particular case, and invites the man to his office. Or goes and visits him, I don't recall, and asks him if he is indeed Jesus Christ. The man says, yes, I am. And Erickson, rather than fighting with him, asks him, I understand that you're a carpenter. He said, yes, that's true. And he put him to work building bookshelves at the hospital. Within a very short period of time, he's out of the hospital, working as a carpenter. OK, so you remember this case, and? So one day I come in and this young man is now in the seclusion room. So I figured it's escalated even more. This is a padded room, and they've stripped him down to his skivvies. And I asked if I could go talk with him. They said, OK. Feel free to go ahead and chat with him, if you'd like. Right. Everything else has failed. Everything else has failed, but more, they figured there's nothing that I can do. I'm a student. I'm not going to mess things up terribly. This is a case that's going to take some time to remit. And so I went into the room. By the time I had gotten admitted to the locked room, he was sitting on the ground, cross-legged. And I walked in, and I just said, hi, my name is Scott. What can I call you? And he says, you can call me The Terminator. And so I stretched out my hand, and I say, I'm very pleased to meet you-- Terminator, or The Terminator? He says, you can just call me The Terminator. We keep talking for a while. I start to remember this case of Erickson's. And I'm thinking could I develop something similar to that, some way of joining him, some way of being with him? And I say to him at some point, out of the blue, totally by chance, are you really The Terminator or are you Arnold Schwarzenegger? And he stops, and he looks at me, and he says, how did you know? And he kind of smiled. And he says, you're the only one that knows this. And I say, thanks for telling me this. I said, great. I said, you know I've been watching your-- you're like an American success story. You come over here with nothing. You become an icon of weightlifting. You marry a Kennedy. My God, I said, it's incredible. We're laughing, and carrying on for another, I don't know, 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes. And again, I'm sort of thinking what the next move is here. And I got an idea. I said, I have a new role for you to play. I said, you know The Terminator series, how many really of these can you do? You really need to think about developing another side, a nuanced kind of role, not just sort of stare into the camera and really just be Arnold. And his reaction? What's the role? And as soon as he said that, then I thought, OK, the idea seems to be working. I said, it's a very different kind of role. It's not a role that you've ever played before. It's not a strong, silent, shoot-em-up kind of type. It's not action hero. Do you think you're capable of it? And he says, oh, I'm very capable. And I said, are you sure? He says, yes. I said, well, you know I'm not-- and he says, come on! Tell me what the role is. And I said, mental patient. And in so many words he says, what do I have to do? And I said, you have to leave this room. You have to start engaging the people running around here that are pretending to be the staff. You have to talk to them about your feelings. You have to sit in groups. You have to go to arts and crafts class and paint and mold clay and do all the things that they're doing in your arts and crafts class. And he says, I can do it. So did he get better? Yes. He was released I think within about five or six days after that. Over the course of time, he was in role so much that even he didn't seem to be able to tell that he was really Arnold Schwarzenegger. Right. He was just as willing to see himself as himself at some point. Yeah, it was equally rewarding. People got along with him well from that point forward. Oh, it's interesting to think about that in a way, his problem was that he didn't know how to relate to the world. He had some sort of breakdown, and he didn't know how to relate. And so he just chose a way to relate that it was clear how to relate. If he's Arnold Schwarzenegger, if he's The Terminator, it's clear what his role is. And all he needed for somebody to do was give him a way to think about, no no, here's who you are, and here's how to interact with the world. Yeah. And let's put a twist on it. It depends on whose eyes you look through. Maybe the world needed to figure out a way to relate to him, especially the small world in which he was living. But every day, I'm meeting people. And I want to blur the boundaries a bit here between so-called delusional clients and our everyday garden-variety clients who come through the door. They also have views that I sit opposite them and think some days, how the hell could they believe that? It's so patently absurd. But my job is to somehow understand that perspective and what that leads them to. And that seems to open up a connection that leads to change. How common is this as a technique to do with very extreme patients, though? This idea that you're going to enter their world in this way and enter their fantasy and just suggest a variation on the fantasy? I think the field would be divided about that. We have these notions that psychosis is a biological condition, and talking just really isn't the thing that helps them, they really need the drugs. In fact, very often people are advised, you don't actually engage people in conversations about their delusions. That might perpetuate them. So you want to make sure that you are very rational with them, set limits with them. And with some clients, that's going to work. The question is, you try that approach, it doesn't work, you probably need to try something else. And our research actually says that clinicians frequently don't recognize when a case is failing. Huh. So what does that mean? That means they persist in doing more of the same thing that hadn't worked before, either the same class of intervention or type of intervention. So if a little medication doesn't work, well, then we'll try a little bit more. If a little confrontation doesn't work to overcome the client's denial, then by God, we'll put them in a group where 12 people can confront them simultaneously. And do I understand right? You're saying that with these difficult cases, the problem isn't that people recognize, oh, this one's a stumper, and now I've got to do something different. The problem is that they actually don't recognize I'm failing in what I'm doing. I'm just doing it over and over, and it's not getting fixed. Yes, very often. So it's interesting to me that in mental health, often times when there's a problem, it's the clients who end up somehow blamed. Scott Miller is a researcher and clinician and co-director of the Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change. Their website is www.talkingcure.com. This story is mentioned in the book, The Mummy at the Dining Room Table: Eminent Therapists reveal Their Most Unusual Cases. Yeah, I don't really think there's anything here for me. I would love to move out of the state. Nancy is one of the people who the governor is trying to reach with this program. She is 18 years old, a freshman at Lansing Community College. She says that when she and her friends talk about the Cool Cities Initiative, they just can't take it seriously. I don't understand how they say a deli and a cafe, an internet cafe or whatever, is going to make this town cool. I mean, if this was coming from the youth, and they were knowing-- I wouldn't want to say the youth, because they're not necessarily youth. Is that what you all are calling yourselves these days, the youth? I always refer to myself as the youth, but-- I'm taking notes here. I mean, really, I kind of almost feel embarrassed for the people putting this out there. Well, one of the things that your governor says is that a big part of the initiative is getting broadband access everywhere. Do you have-- [LAUGHS] I'm sorry, what? That's just laughable to you, huh? Yeah, that's funny to me. But go ahead. Why is that funny to you? Why is it funny to me? I don't see how the internet's going to make-- I mean, the cities already have broadband internet access. And everybody has a computer in their house. And everybody's-- what you need is all there. I just don't see how broadband internet access is going to draw people in. Do you personally already have broadband internet access? Yes, at my house. Hm. And so that's not doing anything to keep you in the state, huh? No. Not in the least. I mean, where can't you get it? Let me just read to you a couple of sentences from your governor's state of the state address. "So the fourth way we will grow the economy is by spurring strong regional economies anchored by cool cities. We can have local commissions on cool. Government can't create cool. But we can and will target existing resources to support local efforts, to have vibrant cities." Do you find it disturbing to hear the governor say the word "cool" so many times? I'm so glad you said that. Yeah. Everything is dotted with cool and hip everywhere. They just seem so out of touch, almost. They're speaking about the youth like this different species of-- maybe we can be cool like them. It's like if you came home and your mom decided to redecorate your room so it was cool and hip. And she'll do what she thinks you'll like, but your mom doesn't have the same idea of what's cool and hip. Which brings us to this story, about a town in Eastern Pennsylvania that was in such desperate straits that it took some very unusual measures. It didn't just try to bring in broadband internet access. It did what ex-cons do, what aspiring starlets do, what immigrants do, what people in the witness protection program do. It changed its name. It changed its name to the name of a person, a person who actually never set foot in the town. A man named Jim Thorpe. One of our producers, Sarah Koenig, visited there recently. The name change happened 50 years ago. But still, if you ask two people here, people who live just down the street from each other, what's the name of their hometown, you can end up in a discussion like this. You say to somebody, it's like, I go to meet somebody. I go up the Hazelton River. Where are you from? I'm from Chunk. Then they know you're no phony. And you? And you Craig? Oh, I'm from Jim Thorpe. There's no doubt about it. Born 1959-- You work at the Jim Thorpe National Bank, for Christ's sake. But we were one of those places that went from Mauch Chunk National Bank to Jim Thorpe. We changed our name in honor and respect. Chunkers are Chunkers and Thorpers are Thorpers. This place had its heyday in the late 1800s, back when it was two towns, one name each, Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk. It got rich off coal, when people started hauling anthracite to market along the canal. They built a railroad, one of the first in America. And by the turn of the 20th century, it claimed to have more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country. Thousands of tourists came here, and checked into one of the nation's biggest hotels, where five presidents stayed. You could probably get a good view over here. Bob Knappenberger, who's lived here all his life, took me on a tour. We drove to the top of a big hill and looked down on the houses tucked neatly into the valley. Now that road coming down there off to your left, see, that's the Asa Packer Mansion. And so you were saying they called this the Switzerland-- Switzerland of America. If you look down here, you could see why they call it. And there was a big restaurant here, right here. You'd come up here and have dinner at night and sit out on the veranda. The bear would be walking right there. You'd throw some food out to him. Really? Oh, yeah. He tells me Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey got their start playing in the dance hall attached to the dining room. It's dilapidated now, the wooden ballroom kind of sagging. After the Depression and World War II, the coal business started dying here, and a lot of people lost their jobs. And soon the biggest employer, the railroads, started closing too, until they didn't even stop in Mauch Chunk anymore. People say by the early '50s, at 6:00 AM, you'd see all these cars driving away, taking people to work out of town. They'd go to Bethlehem to the steel mill, or to factories in Allentown. And this is where a man named Joe Boyle comes in. Joe and his father owned the newspaper in town, the Mauch Chunk Times News. Boyle died in 1992, but he still holds a kind of mythic status here as a tireless town booster who churned out scheme after scheme in the name of progress. He was ahead of his time. He was just so onto the future, one of those very rare people. Joe could sell us on anything, because we loved that man, admired that man, and he would never lead us astray. Most people liked Joe, but he did have some pretty funny ideas. In 1950, Joe Boyle literally dreamed up a way to save the two towns, to bring in new industry. He woke up at 3:00 AM, he told a reporter, with a crazy idea. He would ask every man, woman, and child to contribute a nickel a week to a common fund for a period of seven years. That's how long he thought it would take to collect enough money for an industrial building. And then they'd get businessmen to fill it. So people went around with buckets and collected nickels. They even put a strip of tape along the main road and asked drivers coming into town to stick a nickel on the tape. The nickel a week fund started making money, and a story about it ran on the national AP wire, and then got picked up by TV. It's at this point that the towns happened to cross paths with Jim Thorpe, or at least the body of Jim Thorpe. He had died in 1953. Thorpe, like the Mauch Chunk towns, had been at the height of his glory almost 50 years earlier. He was a Sac and Fox Indian from Oklahoma who became a legendary sports figure. They made a movie about him, Jim Thorpe, All-American. Burt Lancaster stars. Pretty good, Jim. Very good for a first jump. Let's try it again. Watching Thorpe in succeeding weeks was like watching a magnificent young stallion, untamed and unbroken. The film tells how Thorpe won the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympics, a feat that's never been repeated. And when it was over, the King of Sweden asked to meet Jim Thorpe, to pay personal tribute. Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world. Thank you, Your Majesty. Thorpe was also a football Hall of Famer, a professional baseball player, and a champion in lacrosse, swimming, and skating. He also played hockey, handball, and tennis, boxed, fished, sailed, shot golf, and bowled, and was a great dancer. Basically, there wasn't any physical thing he couldn't do. But a lot of his life was tragic. His Olympic medals were stripped from him in 1913, because he had played some baseball for a little money a few years earlier, and he never really got over it. He lost a child to polio and drank a lot, fouling up his first two marriages. And he couldn't seem to hang on to money. He ended up working sad kinds of jobs, emceeing dance contests, or playing bit parts in movies, or working as a laborer with a pick and shovel. He died in California in his house trailer of a heart attack. He was 65. Patricia, his widow, tried to get his home state of Oklahoma to build a memorial to him. But the governor eventually vetoed the idea. So she came East looking for help and, by most accounts, money. She was in Philadelphia when she saw a TV story about a plucky little town nearby that had amassed a small fortune in nickels. Bob Knappenberger was working at the American Hotel at the time. Now, this lady had come in. I'll never forget it. She had come in, and she had a poodle dog in each hand. And she said to me, young man-- that's exactly what she said. I was a young man then, I'm now 78. She said, do you have a chamber of commerce? I says, no we don't. But the secretary of our borough is right across the street. The Acme store used to be right across the street which is now Anne's Early Attic. Everything used to congregate around the American Hotel there. Within a few hours, talk was around that it was Mrs. Thorpe here. As soon as she got to town, Patricia Thorpe hooked up with newspaperman Joe Boyle. And this was her pitch. The town would pay her for the right to bury her famous husband, build him a memorial, and change its name to Jim Thorpe, PA. In exchange, she said, the town would cash in on his name and Mrs. Thorpe's connections. The head of the NFL was a friend of her husband's. They would set up a national charity foundation in Thorpe's name that she said would raise money for a $10 million heart and cancer research hospital that would be built in town. There was talk of establishing the NFL Hall of Fame there, maybe a sporting goods manufacturer, maybe even a motel called Jim Thorpe's Tepees. Tourists were sure to come, just like in the old days. Boyle initially thought the idea was preposterous, he said. But it grew on him, as a way for the two towns to unite under this new name. He started running stories about it in the newspaper almost every day. He even printed an architectural sketch of the hospital. The notion started to catch on that the very existence of the towns was at stake. On May 17, 1954, a day before the town voted on the name change, Boyle wrote in his column, "the voters will decide whether or not the twin communities will merge and be known as Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, or drop into complete oblivion." Again, Bob Knappenberger. And were there people who didn't want them joined? The older ones. The older ones were, "oh!" But it passed 10 to 1. And I'll never forget the night of the general election. I sent a telegram to, well, I don't know how many major newspapers. That night, I said on the teletype, I said, Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania is now Jim Thorpe. I'll never forget it. Yeah. I thought it was great. Believe me, I did. I thought it was great. So the body of Jim Thorpe was finally buried. Using $10,000, or 200,000 nickels, they built a red marble mausoleum the size of a large bathtub. There are carvings of Thorpe throwing a discus and jumping a hurdle, and the words, "sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world." It sits just off the roadside on the outskirts of town. Eydie Lukasavige, a member of the town council, was about 20 at the time. And she remembers how hopeful everybody was. Are you kidding? We thought it was the greatest thing since the coming of-- you know what. It was wonderful. It was going to do something for the community. It was going to put us on the map. And it just never happened. And people just stopped talking about it. But when you bring all this up, they'll say, yeah, remember? We were promised this, and we were promised that. And what did we get? We got nothing. Nothing. Not one new building, not one new business. And the Football Hall of Fame? It went to Canton, Ohio, where it has gotten more than 7 million tourists since it opened in 1963. Some people blame Mrs. Thorpe. Other people blame Bert Bell, or the lack of him. He was the head of the NFL, and the Chairman of the Jim Thorpe Foundation. And the day he was supposed to go on national television to kick off the fundraising campaign, he was at a Philadelphia Eagles game, and he collapsed and died right on the field. And that was it. Nobody took up the cause after that. And people started to get mad. Ray Hills remembers bringing his boy scout troop to town around that time. During the course of the weekend, we went down to look at Jim Thorpe's memorial. And I talked to scout troops, because I thought it would be pretty good for the scouts to see. And it was like demolished and had graffiti all over the monument. The marble, you mean, part? Somebody had come down there with sledgehammers and gave it a work over. Because all they said they ever had was a dead Indian. They never got anything from Jim Thorpe's wife, when she said she was going to dedicate a hospital or a library, something of that sort in town. And they never got it, but a dead Indian. A faction of older residents were so embittered, they started a movement to change the name back to Mauch Chunk. In 1964, 10 years after the first switch, the town put it to the voters again. They decided to remain Jim Thorpe, but the tally was much, much closer. Things eventually settled down, but the economy kept sliding. By the 1970s, the beautiful downtown buildings began to fall apart, and shop windows were mostly empty. Then Thorpe's children hired a lawyer in an effort to disinter his body and bury him in the family plot near Shawnee in Oklahoma, but nothing ever came of that either. In a scheme designed-- Today, the video for sale in the Mauch Chunk museum refers to the town's name change in a tone that, for a local historical video, seems oddly hostile. In return, Mrs. Thorpe promised the balance of her husband's estate to build a $10 million, 400-bed hospital. While this bizarre exchange received nationwide headlines, it did little to change the town. Only controversy resulted from the name change, controversy which haunts the town to this day. I guess maybe we were living in a dream world. I guess maybe our families were living in a dream world. Eydie Lukasavige, like a lot of people you meet here, thinks the town did right by Jim Thorpe. But she also thinks the whole scheme was half-baked to begin with. Can you imagine that kind of campaign happening now, and people going-- Never. Never. It could never happen now. Why? It could never happen now because I think we're all a little smarter. I don't think we're as gullible as people may have been back then. I think we would do a lot more checking into it to make sure that this is for real. It's like my getting a letter today telling me that I won $670,000. You know, maybe back in the '50s I might have been gullible enough to believe it, but I wouldn't believe it today. No, I don't think you could sell a bill of goods like that today. But my children were all very happy with the name of Jim Thorpe. When I'd say to them, oh, I don't know why we give up the name of Mauch Chunk, they'd say, what's the matter with you? Jim Thorpe's a great name. Well, sure, it's a great name. But I couldn't see Lansford changing their name, or Nesquehoning or Coaldale. None of those coal mining towns would ever change the names of their towns for nothing. For nothing. You know, you've got to be proud of what you have and work with what you have. In the last few years, the town has been doing much better. Jim Thorpe now survives on tourists who come not to see the mausoleum, but to go hiking and whitewater rafting and look at the restored downtown and go to all the nice shops. And maybe all of that's possible exactly because Joe Boyle's plan failed and no industry ever came here to spoil the river and surrounding hills. Because 50 years after the name change, Jim Thorpe still looks exactly like Mauch Chunk. Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our show. Coming up, an engineer's brain and a broken heart. 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 show, Desperate Measures, stories of people in impossible situations trying to invent their way out of them. In this, the second half of our show, we have two stories. And I'm not sure if both of these guys are full-time engineers, but they're certainly engineer types, guys who take stuff apart and think it through. My name is Dave and I put a listing on eBay called Ryobi Router Table, Worthless Junk, No Reserve. Now this story of American ingenuity. Dave and his wife were expecting a baby. And he decided to build a crib for the baby. So he went to Home Depot, and he bought this machine that would help him do the job. The cheapest model that he could find, since really he had no idea when he would ever want to use the thing again. This item is a router table. And it essentially is a support for a router. And what this item does is it will take a piece of wood and put a decorative edge on the piece of the wood. And basically, it just guides you as you're cutting the piece of wood, right? Right. The table guides you or the wood, depending on what you're trying to do. And the router itself, which mounts to the bottom of the table, actually does the work. So the table's used more for precision-type work. If you're making pieces that mate together, then you'd want to use the table to make sure that you got everything perfect. And so that's what it's supposed to do. What did this one do? This one didn't do pretty much anything right. Basically the table was falling apart, and it caused me a lot of quality problems, I guess, with my work. And also, it was pretty much a safety nightmare as well. I've got this router bit spinning at 15,000 RPM, and my finger is three inches away from it. And all of a sudden, it decides to move. Because the legs were falling off, I had to wedge it against the wall and jam my knee underneath it and hold it with one hand against the wall, and my knee and the other hand, I was trying to guide the wood. It wasn't real safe, but I do still have all 10 of my fingers. So you came up with a totally ingenious solution for what to do this. You basically decided to sell it on eBay. Can I ask you to read from your listing that was posted on eBay? Sure. "This Ryobi router table was the worst thing I've ever spent money on. Period. I've wasted money on a lot of things in my life, women, cars, lots of other things I didn't need. You name it. But I never felt like I totally 100% wasted my money on something until I bought this table. This is the most worthless piece of crap I've ever had the displeasure of working with in my life." What I love about this is just how completely categorical it is. Well, it's kind of an anti-description. Most of your descriptions try to tell you how good something is on eBay. And then this one I just decided to go the totally opposite way and explain how bad it was. I'm going to ask you to read some of the next paragraph. OK. "It comes complete with most of the crappy accessories it came with. An example is the plastic pusher mitre thingy that's so sloppy that I don't understand why they even bothered making it adjustable. It's really nice when you're trying to route something at an angle and it slips in the middle of the cut and jerks the work piece right out of your hands and flings it across the room. Or the super anti-precision fence that's almost impossible to adjust and keep in place. Or the slippery painted surface that wears off, exposing the rough surface that mars the work piece as you slide it over. It does come with a power switch that always worked. I'll give it that. It has a really nice power switch. Some of the other small items got destroyed in a fit of rage one day after fighting it for a couple of hours." Then you go on and you say that the best part of it is that it is a three-legged router table. Right, right. Well, it became a three-legged after I was trying to route something one day and I noticed that the table was moving. Then well after a few more pieces, I'm in the middle of a cut and the leg just fell off. So I had to stop to keep from losing any fingers and I tried to beat the plastic inserts back in. When I took the picture, I had the table supported by a beer bottle to keep it from falling over. All right. Keep going in the reading. "This table comes with no warranty from me. I never bothered to try to take it back, even though it was under warranty. I was so ticked off that I knew I'd create a scene when I threw it through the front window of Home Depot." And then you go on and you explain how to ship it and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And so it seems like it was the listing when you first sent it out. And then people started writing you. What kinds of emails were you getting? I was getting all sorts of emails. I think to date I've got close to 1,000 emails on this. But the first ones that came in, I got a lot of requests to shoot it or set it on fire, or make a video of some sort of destruction of the table. Right. And why don't you read the addendum that you added in mid-March based on this emails. OK. "I received some emails. And yes, I am willing to set it on fire, shoot it full of holes, et cetera, and mail a picture/video to you. If the bid gets high enough to cover my costs, I'll be willing to shoot it full of holes with your choice of the following-- 12-gauge slugs, 00 buck, or a 40-round mag from an AK. Then I can make a pile of the remains, douse it in gasoline, and light it on fire. The winning bidder would get pics if they so choose. I could even ship you the charred remains if you like. Hey man, I just hate it. Let me know. Whatever trips your trigger." And then the next day, apparently in response to other emails, you add the following. "Yes, I can drive over it with something. I can drive over it with a Massey Ferguson 620-cubic-inch diesel-powered tractor." At this time I only had one bid. It was for a penny. So I wrote, "again, for Chrissakes, the next bid's $0.02. I'm willing to do all this crap for a penny, so the video's got to be worth $5. Bid and tell me what you want." And then the next day, apparently, people are writing you about the bottle. So you had to make this addendum. "For those who are interested, the bottle does carry a $0.10 Michigan deposit, and it's pre-printed for the other standard deposits for other states, which is $0.05. So yeah, it's like a huge bonus, worth hundreds of times what the table is worth." So how many people looked at this site? At the time the auction ended, I had about 40,000 views. And it kept going around. I noticed it was up on some message boards on the internet. As of this morning, I had, I think, 202,000 views. So you have fans. Yeah, I've got quite a bit of fan mail. I haven't got any hate mail so far, so that's good. But I've had four or five marriage proposals. I hope they're not serious, but-- Wait. Are you-- what did they say in the marriage proposals? It's just kind of really odd. They just said, well, you sound funny, and wow, I want to marry you, and I want to meet you, and so on. But I'm married, and happily married, and I have a son. So I guess I wasn't real interested in those. I'm not so sure I'd be interested otherwise anyway. So who bought the thing. Well, a guy bought it. And I didn't hear anything from him for a couple of days. So I emailed him, and he just responded that he didn't really want the table. He kind of got caught up in bidding on it. So he just paid me for the table, and that was the end of that. Wait, wait, wait. He didn't want it? He just got caught up in the excitement? Well, there are a lot of other fictitious or false auctions on eBay. A lot of people will then bid up these things, and nobody's actually serious about completing the transaction, but it's just kind of understood that the transaction's not going to be completed. It's just for entertainment value. So he assumed that this was that. And I told him I wasn't really concerned about getting the money. But he wanted to pay me for it anyway, because he did win, and he wanted to make sure he got his positive feedback out of the deal. He didn't want you ruining his reputation. I guess. He had a pretty good reputation, just like mine. So feedback's everything on eBay. Wow. I can't believe you actually made money. Well, the interesting thing is somebody also Paypaled me $11 to buy myself a six pack of beer because they got so much entertainment out of reading the auction. So I've actually made more money than what I sold it for. Dave lives in Ann Arbor. He did finish the crib, barely. The price he got for his routing table, $26.22. Jerry and his wife had split up and he moved to this little village, leaving everything behind, his young son, his home. He was about as low as he'd ever been. Thoughts were running around in my head and wouldn't stop. It was like a broken record. And when I lay down at night and tried to sleep, sometimes the most absolutely ridiculous little thing would be running around in my head and I couldn't divert my attention away from it. And I found that walking on the beach, hunched over a little bit, looking for flat rocks, picking up a handful, throwing them in the ocean, and the fact of throwing very hard as well, this relaxed me a great deal. Jerry started skipping rocks at the beach five or six times a day for at least a half an hour at a time. The bay at this beach was shaped like a U. Jerry worked on one side of the U and lived on the other. He had to walk along the shore to get home, and on his way, he'd stop to skip stones. Over time, he began walking less and skipping more. And one night-- it was during the tourist season, which means that this little bitty village fills up with tourists from all over the world. And right at sundown, it was just gorgeous weather and the bay itself was like glass. And I stopped at the base of the U, which is downtown, so to speak, where the main plaza is. And I was in my own little private world of walking and skipping and the stones just were flying. I mean, it was an extraordinary night. I had no peripheral vision at all. No sound occurred to me. And all of a sudden, the stones were flying out to where the boats were moored. In fact, I'm talking 120 meters, a long way out there, and it actually hit a couple hulls and all that. And it just surprised the heck out of me. And at one particular point, a stone just flew and bounced and bounced and bounced and bounced and kept bouncing and kept bouncing and kept bouncing and I'm standing there agape. And all of a sudden, when it quit and just sank, there was just this spontaneous burst of cheers and applause, which absolutely startled me. And it was like somebody slapped me on the shoulder in a dark room or something. I turned around and there must have been 2 or 3 or 400 people about 60, 80 feet behind me in a great big crescent. And you didn't notice them gathering. No. No No, not at all. I didn't have a clue. Did you turn around and take a bow or something? No. No! I was embarrassed. No, I just slinked off down the beach and got out of the way. It was like, whoa. Because it was like a very private moment that all of sudden you realize that hi, we're Candid Camera. So I sort of stumbled down the beach to-- there was a cafe outside. And I sat down at one of the tables and ordered a Coke or whatever and realized that I was shaking so bad that I couldn't hold my drink still. Well then I couldn't go anywhere in the village after that because every night I walked and every night I skipped. But I couldn't find a place where I could skip that nobody could see it. Why was it important to you to try and find a private place? Well because-- I don't know. I guess I'm very shy. And I'm-- that's a good question. I suppose that coming out of a depression and sort of a funk in one's life is sort of a private thing. I mean we all tend to sort of brush that off, don't we, and put on a smiley face with everyone. And it was just at this point in my life things weren't OK. They weren't going well. And what was going well, I enjoyed to do, and I enjoyed to do it privately. And that was throw rocks at the water. And I didn't want to share my pain in other words. And so then I had to make some conscious decisions about was I going to quit skipping because this was not what I had mind. Or do I go theatrical with it? In other words, [INAUDIBLE]? What happened was eventually I would be skipping and children, little German and French kids and Spanish kids, they would come up to me in an absolutely orchestrated order almost stand in line and one by one giving the other one time and room, they would come to me. And they would bring me a stone and ask me to skip it. Or they would bring me a stone and ask if they could skip it and show them how to hold it or whatever. And that went on for a while. And then pretty soon the older people started getting in line as well. This became a nightly ritual. And I was now being introduced everywhere in the village as here's the stone skipper. Over time Jerry learned to enjoy skipping rocks in front of an audience. And a few years later when he moved back to Texas, where he's from, he learned that there was actually a Guinness world record for rock skipping, 29 skips. Jerry knew he could beat that record. And eventually he did with 38 skips. Or at least that's all the camera could catch before the rock skipped out of the frame. Jerry says that back on the night he became the village stone skipper at the beach in Spain, he probably got well over 50 which seems unimaginable. For most people, even getting three skips is tough. Jerry says it's really all about physics. That you need to learn to rotate the stone and get it as parallel to the water as possible, while also throwing it down. It's just like a basketball or tennis ball or something. If you got in a gymnasium and I got one end and you got at the other, and you said throw me the ball, I'd just throw it to you. That's one thing. Now if you said make it bounce 30 times before it gets to me, I'm going to throw it toward you, but I'm also going to have to throw it down at the floor of the gym pretty hard for it bounce that many times before it gets down there. Jerry also says the size of the rock is important. It needs to be almost as big as the palm of your hand and uniformly thick. If somebody said skip an Oreo cookie for 20 times, I couldn't do it because there's not much mass to an Oreo cookie. And I've tried that. You've tried skipping an Oreo cookie? Well actually, I did a program. They came out and wanted to film me skipping a whole basket full of different things from bagels to cans of tuna. And by the way, bagels are best skipper in that food group. And if it's frozen, I can probably skip it pretty well. So you need to have a decent sized stone and be able to throw it down. But probably the most important element in getting a stone to skip far is being able to throw it hard, like you would if you were angry. And anger, after all, is what made Jerry so good at this sport to begin with. When I find myself headed down a road of depression or boredom or whatever else, I look for a pond and some flat rocks. It was something that worked for me once and it'll work for me again. It kind of seems like that perfect combination of a kind of aggression and meditation. Well, I'll tell you something, Hillary. In fact I had four stone skipping events in four consecutive years at one point there. And during the course of doing these events, I met a wide spectrum of people. One in particular was a guy that came up to me and said-- he was from Chicago in fact, by the way-- and he worked with at-risk delinquent children, and had told me this story of how these kids, one of their favorite pastimes was chucking rocks through factory windows from the alleys and all in Chicago. And so instead of round rocks in an alley, he found them flat rocks in a pond, and said it was absolutely phenomenal the effect that skipping stones had on these children. It does seem ideal. For all those times you want to punch a wall or a person, just to take a breath, walk to a place where the water lies still, and there's an abundance of flat, smooth rocks. Hillary Frank. Sh. You can call me The Terminator. You're the only one that knows this. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Everyone in the family agrees. Edie's the youngest, and so she gets more attention. She gets more stuff. Ayla, her 15-year-old sister, puts it this way. She's spoiled. For her birthday last year, she got a scooter, you know, one of those high-tech things, and then I got a CD. And my parents were like, yeah, well, you know, you'll be getting a car soon. But she'll get a car sometime, too, and-- yeah. Even Edie sees it this way. One of our producers, Jane Feltes, is their cousin, and Jane got this out of the 10-year-old under tough, tough questioning. You or your sister, who gets treated better? Me. Who gets more stuff? Me. Who gets punished more? Ayla. But who gets a worse punishment? Ayla. Edie gets more attention. Edie gets more stuff, but she gets smaller stuff. This is Kathy, their mom. Well, you want to treat them exactly the same, but that's hard to do because they're so different. Every kid is different, and with my two kids, they are totally opposite of each other. I mean, you do try to be fair, but you do treat them different. And you know, that's just the way it is. I don't know how else to say it. You know, you don't really hear a positive word about favoritism very often. Most of us think that parents are supposed to treat all their kids exactly the same. But the fact is, sometimes it just doesn't matter. I think what we're finding is what's more important than equal treatment is kids' perceptions about what they're getting. That's Amanda Kowal. She co-authored a study of 300 kids in 135 families, where they asked everyone in the families questions like, is one child favored over the other? Who gets praised more? Who are the parents stricter with? And OK, let's just start with the big news first, America. We are not giving equal treatment to our kids. Very few kids actually said their parents were exactly equal in every aspect. Really? How rare is that ideal? I think we had about five kids. Out of 300? Out of about 300 that said, in every instance it was exactly equal. And all the others said-- Most kids were able to think of a way that their parents did treat them differently. But here's the other news flash. Most kids didn't care. 70%-- 70, seven, zero, 70% of the time-- when a kid said they or their sibling got praised more or punished more or whatever, they said it pretty much made sense to them. It pretty much seemed fair. Most kids think differential treatment is fair, whether or not they're benefiting or their siblings are benefiting. And they felt that way because why? I think one of the most compelling reasons was when they felt that their sibling needed differential treatment or that they did. For example, one child said that his sibling didn't have very many friends, and he felt very sorry for him. So it made a lot of sense to him that his parents would spend more time with this sibling. If one child is older than another, he may have more chores. He may have a later curfew. He may also be punished more, potentially, because he has the ability to maybe get into more dangerous situations. She's driving now, so mom may punish her more when she makes mistakes or gets in trouble because she's more worried about her. So it's important that it's fair. It's not important that it's equal. Exactly. And I guess the basis of it is that each child feels they're getting what they need and what they want. Which brings us back to Edie and her big sister Ayla. Ayla says it doesn't matter to her that she gets in trouble more and that Edie gets more stuff. Ayla's got band and band camp and choir. She loves school. She loves reading. Edie needs more attention from their parents, Ayla says. So she can have it. Like most of the kids in that study, Ayla understands why the two of them are treated differently. And she is fine with it. Well, I don't want them to treat us exactly the same or anything because everybody's different. And I understand the whole age difference thing. I'm at that age where you gotta watch out, I guess. Just troublemaker teenagers. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Today in our program, in defense of special treatment here in the land of the free, the place where all men are created equal, and all kids. We have stories of when some people should be treated more equally than others. Our show in four acts today. Act One, Lunchtime with the King of Ketchup. In that act, Jonathan Goldstein stands up for one man's right to be treated differently than you have ever been treated by waiters, store owners, and takeout delivery guys of every race, creed, and religion. Act Two, Except for that One Problem, It's Perfect. In that act, we hear the story of a woman who is solving something that has plagued prisons for years. And the only thing wrong with her solution is prison guards hate it. Act Three, Mommy's Psychic Helper. One woman gives special treatment to her two kids based on a horoscope given to them at birth. Act Four, The Way to a Boy's Heart Is Through His Stomach. In that act, a nine-year-old who never eats, and what that does to everyone around him. Stay with us. Act One, Lunchtime With The King Of Ketchup. And now the story of a man with a simple mission in life, to give a little special treatment to a group of people whose contribution to society is often overlooked, the men and women of the food service industry, who, when they meet this guy, tend to give him a little special treatment in return. Jonathan Goldstein tells the tale. Howard Chackowicz and I have been friends since we were kids, and so I can say with great authority that almost every day for the past 10 years, Howard Chackowicz has either dined out or ordered in at least one of his meals. Sometimes when Howard isn't sure what he's in the mood for, he'll lift an empty hand up to his mouth and pretend that he's eating. He stares straight ahead, trying to figure out if he likes the taste of the imaginary food he is shoving into his mouth. Sometimes his hand is holding a hamburger, sometimes a fork wrapped in spaghetti, and other times, he's double-fisting either end of an invisible pork rib. Howard's always loved restaurants. He was raised in a Jewish Eastern European household, where the very idea of a restaurant was a ridiculous piece of decadence, something for Cossacks and cocaine addicts who enjoyed flushing their money down the toilet. Restaurants had a transgressive allure, and as soon as Howard was old enough, he started sneaking away to them after school or sometimes on weekends while the whole family was still asleep. In fact, Howard was the very first person I've ever dined out with alone without any family. We were 12 years old, and we ate at Atomics Pizzeria, a place just down the street from us. It was owned by a crotchety, old Greek man named Costa, who served ridiculously large portions of food. We'd get a plate of fries the size of a dead Shetland pony, but right alongside of it, Costa would place one measly packet of ketchup. When we asked for more, he looked at us like we had just asked for more blood from his mother's still-beating heart. Whereas I learned to ration, eating 400 to 500 French fries with a bottle-cap-sized dollop, Howard learned how to talk to Costa, how to win him over, how to make him see that giving us more ketchup was just the right thing to do. Along the way, Howard learned how to say in Greek, "Thank you, kind sir. Bless you for the ketchup," as well as the excellent [SPEAKING GREEK], "Here's many years to your ketchup." Ever since way back then, Howard has had a very special rapport with the men and women of the food service industry, and he has worked very hard over the years to cultivate this relationship. This is my neighborhood here. I've been to every single restaurant in this neighborhood several times, so I feel like I can comment on every restaurant. A couple of weeks ago, Howard took me on a walking tour of the best places to eat in his neighborhood. I've walked into bakeries with Howard where the young girls and old men alike who worked there have dropped their doughnut tongs to cry out with joy, Howard! I've watched him get moved to the front of the line outside restaurants in Chinatown. When he's relating to a waiter or a delivery man, all that Howard sees is one person giving another person food. He talks to them as though they're friends, brothers even. His servers are able to sense his purity of vision, and they bestow on him in every exchange some little bit of special treatment. Let me show you a ghost here. On the corner, there was a place called-- I'm not sure what that was. That used to called Le Defi, which is "The Challenge," and that was a really great place. And then they closed, and they moved right across the street, and they had $1.99 spaghetti meal. I would go there every day, and I brought a lot of friends. But it got to the point where, when I came in, I was actually able to serve myself. That's how close we got. We'd go in. They'd greet me, and they wouldn't even get up. I would go, and I would pour myself coffee, and I would actually serve other people coffee. I'd say,"More coffee, sir?" At first, it was a novelty. Then they got very used it. They actually liked it. The other funny thing is, too, one time they actually let me make toast and stuff there, so make some of my food. That's actually a true story. We come to a little shop on the corner. Like, you wanna go in here? This is my friend. This is my friend Tino. Where are going into right now? This is Chez Vito. It's a great butcher shop, an Italian butcher shop. Howard takes me inside and makes the rounds, saying hi to everyone, even craning his head into the kitchen in the back so as not to snub a soul. Hello. When he's done, he stops at the cash to buy a few things, and the owner throws a small box of cookies into his bag. He says they're on the house. All right, what just happened is that Tino's given me a free box of Lazzaroni Saronno, which I've never even had before. So Tino's saying that I'm nice, but he is the nicest. These guys are the nicest, and that's why I say Chez Vito's the best butcher shop. I haven't gotten free cookies from a bakery since I was maybe eight years old, and that probably wasn't achieved without the use of fake tears. It pays to be Howard. He always gets a little something extra. In fact, Howard is such a beloved figure in the neighborhood that whenever our friend Tucker goes in to get takeout from Sarah's, a local Middle Eastern restaurant, he'll tell whoever is serving him that, in fact, the food was not for him, but that he was picking it up for Howard. This earned him portions that were almost twice as large as what he'd normally get. "Howard, he is the best man," his server would say, as he piled food onto his plate. "You are so lucky to have a friend like Howard." Indeed, he was. But the funny thing is that Howard is so doted upon when he eats in restaurants that sometimes it makes it difficult for him to just sit back and enjoy his meal. He feels he has to balance things out, and so he dotes right back. Because of that, it can be hard to carry on a conversation with him. His eyes will nervously scan the restaurant for any way he can be of help to the waiting staff. Howard's ears can detect the muted clink of cutlery falling to the carpet from clear across the room. And when he does, he'll do a kind of concerned gym-coach trot over to the mishandled piece of silverware and pluck it up off the floor. So as much as Howard loves restaurants, when he really wants to relax, he'll get home delivery. And since it was nearing lunch time, rather than step into one of the many restaurants we were passing, Howard ushered us back in the direction of his house to dial out for our grub. At his place, he pulled open his top kitchen drawer, and I saw the many choices that lay before us. There's about 400 menus in that drawer. I wouldn't say that's 400. I'd love to count it. I'd say if this handful is about 10-- 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70-- As much as restaurant owners and waiters love Howard, it's delivery men who really, really love him. I mean, who among us even knows their delivery man's name? Howard knows their names and the names of their wives and children. When they come to his door, he invites them in and offers them water. And in return, they'll actually call Howard later on to see if his meal was to his liking, that it was warm enough, that there was enough ketchup. 190, 200-- this is very embarrassing-- 210, 220, 230, about 250 menus in here. There are some doubles, for sure, or even multiple copies, but only of restaurants I order from all the time. We decide to order from Howard's favorite restaurant, a souvlaki place called The Greek Village. I'm going to take a Number 10, the two-gyro pita. And I think that's it. Thanks, have a nice day. While we wait for the food, Howard waves me over and opens his kitchen cupboard to reveal physical proof of his good standing with the service industry. Here we go. These are all bags of ketchup, salt, soy sauce. And this is all from takeout? Yeah. And these are like big bags full of nothing but ketchup? Ah, there's some soy sauce. So gone are the days where you had to wheedle out a single packet out of Costa's hands for your French fries? It's true that I have so much now, you know. I have so many packets here. But no matter how many packets I amass, it will never catch up to what I missed as a child: ketchup. Then, with vaudeville timing, our delivery arrives. Hey, Shamir! Howard greets the delivery man like an old friend he hasn't seen in quite some time. Thanks so much, man. Your friend, he's a beautiful man. He's such a nice man, I'm telling you. I didn't get you in trouble, though, right? The best customer in Montreal I have. Each time I come, he give me apple. He give me a juice. He give me everything. When I order in, like most people, I figure these guys want out of my house as badly as a bird that's accidentally flown in down the chimney, and I assist in their passage, usually having the exact change with a tip all ready for them at the door. But at Howard's house, delivery men stay a long time. They seem to want to. Shamir, can I offer you something? No, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so Marvin's not working there any more? No, because I think he find some other job. Oh, OK, OK. Actually, I feel so bad. When I call, I want to ask for Shamir. I feel like, well, we don't know who you're going to get. Well, you don't have to feel bad. I know, but I don't want to get you in trouble. After about 10 minutes of this, I just want to eat. I find myself eyeing the bag of souvlaki lying on the floor like a campground bear. I realize then that I'm just not made of the same stuff as Howard. And I never will be. I can't offer you something? No. Thank you very much. Thank you. So thank you-- Thank you so much, Shamir. I thank you, man. I thank you, Howard. Thank you for your kindness. Thank you. You're the best. It's the best restaurant with the best guy. Thank you. Yeah, you're very kind. Thank you for your time today, Shamir. See you later, man. Thanks, Shamir. He's such a good guy. When we finally sit down to eat, I can't even get Howard to admit that he's doing anything so special with guys like Shamir. We go back and forth on this. Yeah, because, I mean, most people won't go to the extent that you do, which is why you have guys that work the telephone coming by your house to meet you. That probably doesn't happen that often. Well, I really believe I don't really do anything. I'm nice to them. But, I mean, just empirically, you have to see at this point that you're getting responded to differently than most people, so there must be something different, no? You know, if someone's going to come to my door more than a few times and they know my face and they're saying how are you, I'm going to start treating that person like a human being. And most people I think are probably rude to them. Like, most people that I know give delivery men a buck, and I think that they have a harder job than a waiter or a waitress, because here's a guy who takes your food, gets into a car, risks his life, goes into traffic-- Hang on a second. Risks his life? Oh, you know, he's driving a car, you know? Howard's worked all kinds of food service jobs himself, as a waiter, a bus boy, a short order cook. And he says that, as a result, he absolutely loathes the feeling of being served. There's something that just feels embarrassing and unnatural about it. But it even goes further than that. In his interactions with the service industry, he's looking for a particular feeling, a kind of cozy moment where he can palpably sense that the waiter has forgotten that he is a waiter and that they are both simply relating as human beings. And then, once he knows this, once he knows they're both getting along and everyone's happy, he can move on. He isn't looking for anything else from them. His motives are pure that way. But these kinds of special moments don't come without strings attached, and sometimes Howard gets into trouble. Earlier in the day, during our walking tour, there was one place we didn't stop into, a little convenience store around the corner. Howard became uncharacteristically somber and quiet as we walked by the storefront window. The owners, a Greek woman in her 60s named Vula, and her older sister, used to be pretty friendly with him. Sometimes Vula wouldn't charge him the tax on his chocolate bar, and on occasion, she'd have him sit behind the counter with her on a plastic milk crate. It wasn't much, but it was still more than what the other customers got, and it made Howard feel special. But then, at a certain point, things started to get more intense. There had been several holdups there by knife point, gunpoint, and I felt really bad for them. I'd see them really shook up. And they're kind of tough ladies, but they're alone. And I told them, I said, if you ever need anything, if there's any trouble or something, I'm just around the corner. You give me a call. And I really meant it like in case of emergency or, you know, just that there'd be someone they can call, like some kind of community-- some kind of effort at community. But she would call every day. She would call him for all kinds of reasons, to have him come by and fix things or to run errands for her, and he would try his best to be accommodating. She'd even call him just to chat. Even though all of this was more than Howard could shoulder, he was reluctant to put an end to it. It was only after the calls got later into the night at 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning that Howard's friends started insisting he tell her that enough was enough. And against his better judgment, he did so. Howard wonders if it was right to give her his number in the first place. I made that offer, assuming that it would be understood that there's a cutoff point. But to another person, you know, that offer is a real genuine offer. If I need help, I'm going to call you. And she did. And maybe she's the one that's right. So it's ironic that just being nice to someone actually had the adverse effect, the opposite effect, and it ended up being like a disaster, and now two people are not even friendly with each other. There have been other disasters for Howard, disasters where he was the one who went a little too far. Like, there's the time he became so consumed with helping this neighborhood Chinese restaurant that, without being asked, he took it upon himself to draw pamphlets for the place. The owner accepted Howard's flyers but never circulated them. Later, the owner picked a screaming fight with Howard over an order, and Howard never went back. And then there was the time he brought in beautiful framed photos of Lebanon to his favorite Lebanese restaurant so they could be reminded of home, but the photos were never hung up nor were they ever referred to again. But for Howard, those things don't matter, and I know that he'd probably even do them all again. There are so many other moments that make his good intentions feel repaid in full. Some of his favorites are when delivery men he knows pass him by in their cars as he's walking down the street. It shocks him out of his reverie when they honk their horns in a quick, affectionate burst. For a brief moment, it feels like a reassuring slap on the back. Howard thinks to himself that they're the best, and it fills him with so much gratitude that if he had a pear or a peach in his coat pocket, he would wave them over and give it to them. Jonathan Goldstein is currently writing his own version of the Bible. He is the host of a new upcoming series on CBC Radio called Wiretap. Act Two, Except For That One Problem, It Is Perfect. Prisons operate on the idea that if inmates don't control themselves they get consequences, punishments. So what do you do with inmates who don't understand consequences, whose emotions take over? Well, there's this thing called Borderline Personality Disorder. People with this disorder are ruled by their emotions. They are hypersensitive. They demand attention. They mutilate themselves. They attempt suicide. And in prison, they end up spending a lot of time in isolation cells. They require a lot of time from guards and medical personnel. They clog the system. They cost millions of dollars. They are a huge management problem. Medication doesn't work on this disorder, and psychoanalysis only makes them worse. They're too unstable. There is a new program to deal with them, and it's getting some results. But unfortunately, it goes against some of the basic rules of prison life. In particular, it goes against the rule that everybody in prison should get treated the same. Gregory Warner went to Springfield, Missouri, to check out the program, to the oldest and largest prison hospital in the country. It's more prison than hospital, the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners. It was built in 1933, back when they were still designing prisons to look like fortresses. It stands alone in a huge field like something that should be approached on horseback. Inside are some of the more advanced medical services for inmates in the country: a dialysis unit, a cancer ward. But there's still a feel of the prison stockade: bars, guard stations, a wheelchair-accessible chow hall. Another building houses the mental health ward. A few people in Springfield, even the guy who rented my car at the airport, warned me about running into Hannibal Lecter here. But inside the prison, the mention of Hannibal gets only an embarrassed shrug. The controversial inmates are on the third floor in the unlocked unit for inmates with Borderline Personality Disorder, some of the most problematic inmates in the entire federal prison system. The unit is surprisingly calm, given these guys' histories. Unless there's a therapy group in session, we find the men clustered around card tables or reading, or just pacing down the narrow corridor. The whole unit is one L-shaped hallway with brooms and cells off of that. This is where I find Randy Nielsen, 45 years old, he's been in for bank robbery since he was 19. He's tall with graying hair and shining gray eyes. The scars on his arms actually overlap, new scars on top of old ones, from all the times he's tried to hurt himself. I never knew what was wrong with me. And I really thought I was crazy because I would have crying fits in the middle of-- in a chow hall or walking, and somebody would be talking, and then all of a sudden, I'd just start screaming and pulling my hair and beating my face until they sedated me. And why do you think you were doing that? I got attention. And they had to deal with me. One way or the other, they had to deal with me. They've learned that that's the only reason and the only way that people will listen to them, is if everything is a crisis. Keith Smith is a treatment specialist who works with Nielsen and the other guys on this unit. Every headache that he might get, that's a tumor. Every ache and pain, that's a broken joint or cancer or something horrible. He needs very expensive tests. He needs them right now. So today, you might go through a huge ordeal to get him seen for one thing, and you think it's passed. And then the next day, it's something totally different. Same crisis, new ailment. What makes people with Borderline Personality Disorder so difficult to deal with is they can be incredibly hostile and manipulative, and at the same time, phenomenally needy. They crave attention and approval. They can't deal with people, but they can't bear to be alone, and they fear being abandoned. And the littlest things can throw them into a crisis, someone not saying hello in the hallway, or not getting the right amount of food. And once they're upset, they're uncontrollable. They'll mutilate themselves if they don't get their way. They'll threaten suicide, and they'll mean it for as long as the crisis lasts. In prison, they start fights and sew drama. They attempt suicide, and then sue the prison for rescuing them. Generally, prison has two ways of dealing with these inmates. They can transfer them to a new facility with the idea that a change of scenery might change the behavior, a temporary solution that works often enough there's even an unofficial term for it: diesel therapy. Or they could use punishment to deter the behavior: solitary confinement. The hole, it's called. But diesel therapy is expensive and only works temporarily. And the hole for borderlines can often exacerbate the symptoms. Mostly, prisons don't know what to do. They are exhausting. They are difficult. They wear you out. This is psychologist Georgina Ashlock. Two years ago, the Federal Bureau of Prisons hired her to launch the experimental program here in Springfield to stop borderline inmates from mutilating themselves or attempting suicide. It's a daunting task. She didn't have much competition landing the job. Only one other psychologist in the entire Bureau of Prisons applied for it. Why would anybody be motivated to want to take on one or two, let alone 48, individuals who are at high risk of killing themselves or mutilating themselves and who absolutely wear you out day to day as you try to facilitate change? So the experimental program that Dr. Ashlock started uses a treatment called DBT: Dialectical Behavior Therapy. DBT was developed in the '90s, and it's still the only treatment that's ever shown to work on borderlines. What it is, it tries to stop borderline behavior by teaching them techniques to deal with emotions, skills like breathing deeply to relax, or keeping an emotion diary to gain self-awareness. Because mostly this disorder is diagnosed in women, a lot of the skills are specific to women, like taking a bubble bath or painting your nails. The worksheets had to be modified for men, of course, and Ashlock said modified further for men in prison. You cannot say drive in the countryside and look at the leaves, the autumn leaves, or go see a movie, or even one of the suggestions on one of the handouts is something like you can sit in the lobby of a hotel, you know, maybe a historic hotel or building or something and look at the surroundings. So adapting, helping them discover what they do have access to, that's a challenge. What prisoners do have access to are things like photos ripped from magazines of puppies or beaches to focus on. They have rubber bands to snap on their wrists when they feel like cutting. And they also have the distraction of the weight room. DBT also teaches interpersonal skills, like how to ask a nurse for aspirin. A lot of these guys have no idea. They'll demand aspirin, and the nurse will tell them to wait, and then they'll start screaming, and the whole situation just escalates. They don't get the aspirin, and they get thrown in the hall for making a scene. So DBT has all this worksheets on how to break the interaction down, like how badly do I want to aspirin? Does the nurse have any aspirin? Is she really busy? Or is she in a giving mood? And what's the body language of someone in a giving mood? DBT is like a Berlitz guide to dealing with the world. As basic as all this seems, Ashlock says these are skills that these guys never learned, in large part because of abusive childhoods. And all these little skills add up. You learn how to ask for aspirin, people see you as a nice person. Your personality begins to change. Even the big things can start shifting, like one's ability to empathize with others. But sometimes that can cause more problems in prison, where being a nice guy can be seen as a sign of weakness. Acting reasonably can be difficult or even dangerous. It's hard to live in this environment and actually go by these rules. But you want to because you're actually trying to better yourself. This is Edwin Torres. He's 33 and has served two years of a 20-year sentence for drug dealing. Can you give me an example of a time when you faced that pressure? Sure. I had a problem not too long ago, actually. I was arguing with a guy in recreation. I came back to the unit because I was so mad. Normally, I would have just fought with the guy right there. But I was so mad and I'm thinking about the program, so I just walked away from the guy while we were arguing. I just said-- you know, I just walked away, didn't even say nothing to him. I walked all the way back to the unit, sat in the unit for, like, three or four minutes. And then I decided, you know what? I'm going to go back. Whatever happens happens. And I'm fighting myself all the way down the hallway. And then I didn't even get back to recreation. By the time I'm halfway there, I see my buddies coming. And they're like, you know what? It ain't worth it. He ain't worth it. Remember, you can't make decisions in an emotional mind and just-- and I was, like, you know what? It actually made me happy. I started laughing. I'm like, man, guys, thanks a lot for you guys being here. You really helped me out. The inmates throw these terms around. Emotional mind, which refers to an excited emotional state, versus wise mind, which is more balanced. A lot of DBT jargon derives from Eastern philosophy. Here's C.J., a 31-year-old inmate. You know, they got a skill here called radical acceptance. You've just got to accept what the situation is. I'm in prison. These cops have their job. The other inmates are going to do what they're going to do. Because I let little things just work me up. But if I can just look at the thing and laugh and say, wow, that's not a big deal at all, man, then I just radically accept the situation. I know I can't change it. It's just the way it is. And then it just passes for the moment. My interview with C.J. had been rescheduled at the last minute. And in the past, he told me that would have spun him out of control, ruined his whole day. This time, he knew what to do. He went back to his cell and did the things he knew would calm himself down. He made coffee. He changed his shoes. He used his skills. The DBT program's only two years old, and most of the success is anecdotal, but the initial statistics are promising. Out of 21 inmates who finished at least half the program, suicide attempts are down by 94%. And the same inmates are spending 73% less time in the hole. And this is after they leave the program or they go to a new prison. But that doesn't mean all the prison staff is happy with the program, because the operative word in Dialectical Behavior Therapy is behavior. And for it to work, the therapists have to be involved in deciding how misbehavior is punished. And this brings them directly in conflict with the guards, who traditionally have control over that. So DBT has set off a turf war between the corrections staff and the therapists. For instance, sending prisoners to the hole is one of the main tools the corrections staff has as a form of punishment. But under DBT, Dr. Ashlock can actually take an inmate out of a hole. That's a pretty big deal. And she also allows the inmates to voluntarily place themselves in the hole if they feel like it's the only way they can get control of themselves. Instead of acting out to get there, they can just go, like taking a sick day for work. Guards hate all this special treatment. Dr. Ashlock tells me this story about an inmate who attempted suicide. Normal procedure is that the prison guards would strip him and place him in a suicide cell. But Dr. Ashlock spoke to him and decided that the suicide cell wasn't the best place for him. Well, it was very obvious with talking with him that the crisis had passed. So I made a decision clinically that he could return to the semi-locked unit. Oh my God. You would have thought that we had taken the guy out for a steak dinner and bought him a plane ticket home. I mean, the institution went crazy. And they were calling the union, saying just what a stupid decision that was, and that I rewarded his behavior, and that it wasn't safe, and that he should have been, at the minimum, punished by being placed in a stripped cell overnight. It was completely ridiculous, and it was just so destructive to the whole treatment milieu that I ultimately had to ship the inmate out. I mean, it was over. It was just over. There was so much controversy, so much heated emotion about it that it was impossible to even keep the inmate there and continue to work together. Many of these guys are here for being manipulative criminals, master manipulators. Larry Caudle has been a corrections officer at Springfield for 13 years and was president of the guards' union when the DBT program was introduced. He says in prison you have to be suspicious of everything to protect your own safety, and you're trained to resist inmates who want to manipulate you. A lot of them have learned that sometimes if you can't get what you want by verbalizing a problem, stick a pencil in your arm. Somebody's going to listen. Throw a fit. Scream, cuss, carry on like a little kid. Threaten to kill somebody. Somebody will listen to you. That's how a lot of staff view it, that people come here, they get out of a penitentiary where they have problems. They play the game for a year. And a lot of times, if they're really successful, they eventually get their custody level downgraded, and they go to a little bit less restrictive, a less dangerous place. And a lot of staff feel like that they're just manipulating the system. It all just looks wrong, one officer told me. Even the idea of calling inmates "patients" sends some guards into a cussing fit. They're not there to help cure anyone. They're there to keep control. The prison anticipated trouble from officers even before the DBT program started. So they launched a Hearts and Minds campaign to convince officers that DBT would help them control inmates. There was a DBT role-play at the annual staff training, but the message wasn't getting through. The officers asked Dr. Ashlock if the inmates would get flowered curtains and pizza parties. They told another therapist to expect gladiator battles and daily rapes. So then the prison set up a special website with a thing called an Ask-It Basket, where Dr. Ashlock would field anonymous questions to dispel the various rumors, but that just led to more hostility. Officers basically accused Ashlock of tossing out misbehavior reports to make the program look good and said the program was just a cozy hideout for inmates to go masturbate. The Ask-It Basket was shut down after two weeks. Keith Smith has seen both sides of this argument. He was an officer in the prison, and then he became a treatment specialist in the DBT program. And ever since he took the job, his best officer friends won't talk to him. They stopped going bowling with him on Friday nights, and their families don't get together anymore. A lot of officers see you as either you're with the officers or you're with the inmates. So if you take any kind of a position where you're not directly, absolutely against the inmate, you're for them. And that means giving them special favors or being soft on them, not calling them on their incidents or not writing incident reports, things of that nature, letting them get away with things that you shouldn't. Dr. Ashlock doesn't see what the big deal is. She thinks officers should be in favor of a program that helps them handle these inmates, that leads to fewer outbursts and less violence. She says what the officers don't understand is that by giving these prisoners special treatment, by bending the rules for them, she's not giving into their manipulation, she's trying to stop it. She tells the story of an inmate who swallowed a piece of razor blade and was sent to the hole. And then she discovered that he did that so he could avoid guys he owed gambling debts to. I immediately took him out of lockup. Same kind of thing. Backlash, people appalled. Oh, she's rewarding his behavior, and she's not doing what she said she was going to do in the program. But they did not understand that that was what the inmate wanted, was to hide in lockup. And we came in and said you're coming out. We brought him to my office and said you're going to figure out who you owe and how much you owe. You're going to go meet with those inmates on the compound. You're going to work out a plan for repayment. You're going to face your situation that you created. Now, did that inmate stop racking up debts? No, because this is a very long pattern of behavior for him. However, we certainly took away his motivation to use self-harm to avoid that responsibility. So to me, it seems like a very simple solution. The problem is, when a prisoner mutilates himself or tries to kill himself, the guards see it one way, the therapists see it another. There's a jail in Kentucky that reportedly uses something officers call the fingernail test to tell the difference between a real suicide attempt and a manipulative one. The officer basically uses his fingernail to measure if the wound is deep enough to be a real suicide. That's a pretty gross example, but it's an issue that every prison struggles with it and that's at the heart of this disagreement. No one wants a suicide on their watch, but no one wants to be sucker either. Gregory Warner lives in New York. Coming up, mommy knows best, but sometimes she needs the power that comes with cassette tape. 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, Special Treatment. We have stories about the pros and cons of not treating everyone the same. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Mommy's Psychic Helper. When Aimee and Andrew were babies in Southern California, their Vietnamese mom got their horoscopes done by a fortune teller, and had them recorded onto a cassette tape. She listened to this tape all the time. She did? Uh-huh. At one point, she had three jobs, and it was really stressful for her. And we would be upstairs going to bed, getting ready for bed, and she would sit in the living room, and she would listen to the tape sometimes. And if we would go downstairs, sometimes I would hear her listening to the tape, just her sitting, usually lying down. It became a part of our everyday for her to talk about these tapes whenever she would be talking about our personalities. But since Andrew and I can't understand Vietnamese very well, it was just this voice. It was just this deep voice, very somber voice. The fortune's content would change with her attitude sometimes. Really? Yeah. What parts of the fortune would happen in what mood? Well, when she was in a good mood, when she was happy, she would talk about how the fortune said how smart and clever I was, and how independent I was going to be, and how much I'd travel. And whenever the credit card bills would come in and my mom would find out how much she thought I was spending, she would say how much money I wasted, and how the fortune had warned her that I was going to be a money waster, and if I wasn't careful, I would be broke for the rest of my life. And even now-- I haven't lived at home for eight years-- even now when the bills come home, my dad will say that she still blames me. And do you use their credit card? Never. Wait. And she still gets the credit card bill, and then she goes, like, that Aimee? Right. I think I was actually really sensible about money, but I did feel this guilt every month. So basically, all your life, you've been haunted by this idea that you're really terrible with money and you're spending too much money. Can I just run something from the fortune by you? So we had a translator translate this, and we have some recordings of her, and then some parts of this I'm just going to read to you. It says right here, talking about characteristics, you are loquacious and disgruntled, which will cause you back pain. You will be a good treasurer-- which I think means good with money-- and quickly become a wealthy person. And then here's the translator. The five years after 49, she will be very rich. Oh my gosh! So all the money stuff isn't in there. Like, it doesn't say I'm going to waste money. I've never heard that fortune. Maybe she was scared to tell me that. OK, Aimee. I have another clip of tape of the translator to play you. I hope you're ready for this. The reason why I laughed is that she will be very chubby in these years. What years? She must be on diet because too fat. Oh my God! See, this is the thing. My mom's always warning me about being chubby, too. She is? And I'm not chubby! I'm not chubby. And the thing in Vietnamese culture is you're always putting more food on people's plates, right? This is the thing. You have to eat more. You have to eat more. It's like the custom. She stopped doing that and that really hurt me. But Andrew's never had a problem with his weight. He never looks bad. He never has to be watched over for that kind of stuff. Wait. Are you saying that you actually believe in the fortune? Honestly, I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if that horoscope didn't exist I would maybe be different. I wouldn't have problems with money. I wouldn't have problems with work and in making decisions in my life. I know Andrew's horoscope said he was going to be very hard-working. He was going to be like Confucius, very slow and steady, and work very hard for his life, and he would have a good life. And part of me was kind of jealous of that, the fact that his fate seemed to be happier than mine. Aimee Phan has just missed four student loan payments. Her brother Andrew is in medical school, as his horoscope predicted. Aimee has a book of short stories called We Should Never Meet. That will be published by St. Martin's Press in September. At first, they hoped that eventually he would eat, and so they wanted him to know how to eat, and they wanted the sensory experience of eating to stimulate talking. And so he would have tastes of different foods in really small amounts, all different kinds of foods, and he just loved all food. He never rejected any kind of food. but he kept on getting pneumonias, and so we did a swallow study where they let him swallow something and take an x-ray of his throat, and they saw that a small amount of every bite, just maybe 1/10 of it, was going down into his lungs because his epiglottis wasn't closing correctly or fully over the part of the esophagus that goes to the lungs. Now he eats nothing, and he drinks nothing. Every once in awhile, when there's a holiday, he'll chew on some stuff for fun and social pleasure, and then he'll spit it out into a napkin. So he's NPO. That means nothing by mouth. I don't know what it actually stands for, but that's for life. I think it was harder on him when he was having tastes of things because it would get him all excited. And now that he doesn't have anything, he's more accepting, but it just doesn't die. It's like he still remembers what things taste like. And people eat all the time. I never realized how much people eat until I had a kid who couldn't eat, who was looking at me eat. But he wants it all the time, and it's all around, always. It's always there. You are about to hear the sound of every child but one at the elementary school down the road having lunch. The school that he's at now, they've always been just really caring about Wolf. When there's a birthday party, they have toys and stickers and games without the usual cupcakes and food creations. And when they made gingerbread houses for Christmas, they didn't use gingerbread and marshmallows and jelly beans. They used art materials that looked like those things. And now we're on our way down the hall to where the one child has his lunch. And at lunch, when all the kids go down to the cafeteria, Wolf goes to his own private decorated cafeteria, which is in the health office. Hello! Hello! Hi, Wolf! When it's time for Wolf to have a meal, he lifts up his shirt, and there's his little plastic G-tube, which is about three inches to the left of his belly button. And it's like a little plastic valve with a button on it or a snap, sort of like your gas tank has that little cover. And you take the cover off, and somebody puts the long skinny tube into the little hole, and pours the food down the long skinny tube. And it's sort of a creamy color, and it goes down like that, and his meal is done. OK. Good, good. This room where Wolf eats is decorated with all the things that Wolf loves, mainly caterpillars and aliens. There's a couple stuffed animals bought especially for him, his little companions. And I just found out, doing this story, that they built this room especially for Wolfgang. They had it built this summer. They had workers come in and build the structure. I mean, we know what school budgets are like. Can you imagine? They would never say anything, but can you imagine the battles that went on, with people saying-- you know, there had to be somebody on the staff saying, why should this one kid get $7,000 of our budget when think about if that money were to go to something on the playground so that all the kids could learn unicycling? There could be 100 unicyclers out there or there could be one kid whose meal time is a little bit more pleasurable and private. And I used to be a libertarian and a bit of an elitist, which I never recognized until I had a child with special needs. And I don't know how I would have voted. I might have voted for the majority. I might have voted for the unicyclers, thinking where's the bigger benefit with this $7,000? Now, I think that this boy, who is not doing so well on several fronts, deserves to not just survive his school day, but to actually thrive and have a wonderful day, even if that means a lot of effort. And what's amazing is that everybody seems to feel this way about Wolf once they meet him. Every single person that's around Wolf tries to come up with some different creative solution to a dilemma that's not their own. And it's not just school. His friend Sarah, who lives next door, is constantly exerting all this extra effort to be his friend, and she's only 11. When the ice cream truck comes, what do you do? We usually just go and give him some ice or something. Then we put a little bit of food coloring in it so he can eat ice and I can eat the ice cream so we can actually have something, too. How do you feel when Wolf is watching you eat your ice cream? I think it's kind of not OK because he doesn't get to have ice cream. So it's not that easy for him, yeah. I was watching TV the other day, and I saw this Fox News guy talking about the school budget in Massachusetts and how this judge just gave all this extra money-- three times as much money-- to the schools, and that a huge chunk of it was going to special needs. And his gripe with it was basically that we've already been pouring all this money into special needs, and where has it gotten us? Has it made them normal? No. There are stragglers, and there are shooting stars, and that's just the way it is. That's being realistic. But how can you go on thinking that way when you put it in terms of an actual boy's life? How can you say to him, because you can't eat normally, you would cost too much and it's inconvenient to the staff and the other children, so you can't come in. Last year, I was trying to get Wolf into overnight summer camp for the first time, and he was denied due to his G tube. Can you imagine if a kid was not allowed to go to camp because he has a wheelchair? But I think not eating is just so unusual that people don't know what to think. So they're forced to be creative, and that's not always easy, especially in a group setting when you have all these other people to think about, too: campers, staffers, the campers' parents. So I ended up threatening to sue the camp for discrimination, and suddenly, they got over their discomfort. And once they met Wolf, they saw that he's a little boy, and he's not this scary proposition and a drag on their time. So they were all very kind and wonderful to him, and Wolf had a wonderful time. He had to gather around the campfire and see other kids eating marshmallows, but that matters so little against the fact that he now has memories of gathering around the campfire. Sometimes Wolf says-- while he's watching other people eat-- I'm happy for you that you get to taste that. It must be so good, which, of course, I translate to I am so filled with sadness and longing, but thanks for inviting me anyway. It's worth it. Lisa Carver lives in New Hampshire. If you can't get what you want by verbalizing a problem, stick a pencil in your arm. Somebody's going to listen. Throw a fit. Scream, cuss, carry on like a little kid. Threaten to kill somebody. Somebody will listen to you. Management tips from the greats. 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 is another hour of high-minded radio broadcasting distributed by Public Radio International, which is to say, it's This American Life, which is to say, hello. It's post time. It's opening day at Arlington Racetrack just outside Chicago. And maybe because of the rain, maybe because not that many adults can come out to the track in the middle of a weekday, there are just four guys, regulars, in one of the rooms reserved for regulars. Four guys in a spacious room with what have to be 20 television monitors. The way we measure these horses is very mathematical and very scientific. This is Roger Vice. Really, that's his name, Mr. Vice. A guy who makes his living betting on the horses. The kind of disciplined guy who gives the impression that maybe his goatee and his clothes never get messy. What I do is, each race-- you see all these marks on my program? These are a tracking of where the horse was on the turn. OK? So I keep track of where every horse was on that turn. I keep track of the wind-- the direction, the velocity. I time every race. Mr. Vice shows me a product called Thoro-Graph which is basically a computerized analysis and printout of speed ratings and histories for each horse, and a cheat sheet that he made for himself with other data which gets surprisingly precise and technical. So if a horse is three wide, you think about the laws of physics, the horse that's three wide is running a greater distance. OK? We factor that in mathematically. We disagree a lot. In fact, all of these guys disagree with me most of the time. Mike is retired from the Post Office, and his table is the messiest one in the room. Three of the guys here on opening day, Craig, Jeff, and Mr. Vice, all do this very technical analysis to make their bets. Mike is the outcast. I have my own system. My system-- I find that betting favorites, in the long run, you end up losing money. Most of my horses are in the 20, 30 to one shots range. So I don't bet a lot of races here every day. Betting only long shots makes him really different from Jeff, who puts a lot of bets out there looking for a small percentage return. And from Craig, who plays more favorites, and who overhears Mike describing his system to me and then turns to me and says, you ever read the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? That's Mike's system. And in the eighth race, I get to see Mike's system in action. Well, this is my best bet of the day is Intrinsic Worth in the eighth. And why? Why is that your best bet? I like the trainer. Honestly, but I might not even bet on him because he might be too short for me. The odds won't be good enough. Right. If the odds are not good enough, I'm going to lay off the race. We watch the race on the TV monitors. Intrinsic Worth is wearing the number five and comes out of the gate poorly. The five broke bad. Right now he's running-- where is he running, fifth? He's out of the picture right now. I'm sure he's running last. And then, to make a short story very short, in the final stretch number five comes in from 20 lengths back. Right now, it looks like-- Look at this horse. The horse is flying. Here comes the five flying. If he broke bit, he's going to win the race. And then it's over. See? There it is. The five, from 20 lengths back, won the race. Your horse? The horse that I told you. He looked like much the best in the race, and he was much the best. He went off at five to two, which means you get $7 back for $2 bets. Which for Mike was not even enough to place a bet. And this is why he and his system are taking a beating today. He picked the right horse. He was confident. But he didn't get long shot odds. So he didn't put in a bet, and he didn't make any money. These other guys in the same situation, they would have bet. They're like a group of scientists who all look at the same data and then all come to completely different conclusions, which when you think about it, is about as different from the way that regular scientists work as you can get. What I think's most interesting about horse racing is that it gives you a chance for analysis. You're analyzing a group of horses, a group of trainers, a group of jockeys, the patterns that the horses have run, and you make a decision. And every 25 minutes, there's a new decision to be made. And if you're right, you can make money with it. Well, today on our program, people who are using the tools of analysis, the scientific reasoning of real science in settings where scientists don't really belong. It's fake science. We all do it every day in all sorts of situations. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in four acts, "Spook Science," "Government Science," "Beauty Science," and last, but not least, "Radio Science." Four acts of people tossing around questionable data, making logical jumps that they really should think twice about, in short, acting like you and me. And if you've got any question at all about the truth of that last statement, well, stay tuned. Act One, Spook Science. Jake Warga heard of a group in Seattle that is trying to use whatever scientific methods it can find to hunt for ghosts. He tells this story. I've been invited to spend the night in a cabin deep in the woods, no electricity, no phones, with a group of ghost hunters. They've been asked there by the owner who thinks it's haunted. There's three buildings, three or four buildings, on this campsite. The resident has experienced some things, and she sent me some pictures. There's a cemetery near the residence. Patricia Woolard is Vice President of AGHOST, which stands for Amateur Ghost Hunters of Seattle-Tacoma. Ross is the president. Ross and I are the only two people that really know the history of this place. And one of the cabins at one time housed a body for several months, someone who died, that was not able to be buried because she died in the winter. The location is an old mining camp going way back to the early 1900s. At one point, it was a Bible camp during the summer. And there were rumors of child abuse. And in the early '30s, a woman died of TB, but the ground was too hard to break for a grave. They decided to wait until first thaw. So they put the body in a small cabin on the property. They had her children take shifts and stay vigil by the body just in case she came back. They did this for over a month until the ground thawed and, I guess, it became clear she wasn't coming back. I've got them all labeled from EVP. So I have all my tape recorders. I have about three or four tape recorders in there with extra tapes. And then we have our meters case. AGHOST's President, Ross Allison, is going over about seven silver cases he has loaded with electronic gear. Ghost hunters love gadgets. Luckily, Ross's day job is at a photo/electronics retailer. And our wireless infrared sensors. So you believe in ghosts? I would like to. There's a part of me that, yes, I do believe in ghosts. Inside of me, I really want to believe that there's something out there, that death is not the end. Being in this field and wanting to be able to pursue it in the correct manner, you do have to be skeptical. We basically just go in, document everything that's happened, and state our case on the website, and let you decide for yourselves. Well, could this place be haunted? This place is like a horror movie set of itself, complete with creaking doors and wind chimes. And just like in the movies, it's starting to get dark. All right, as everybody gets ready, make sure they have a flashlight on them. Because again, there's not going to be any power. So it would be interesting to find out if we get any EMF readings up here. Because I don't even get cell phone reception here. EMF, by the way, stands for electromagnetic field. Spirits are apparently energy that can be detected with devices that measure electricity in the air. The EMF detectors they're using are sold as devices for telling where the wires in your walls are. But cameras are the most popular ghost hunting tool because they can capture orbs. Orbs are the little circles of light that sometimes show up in photographs or videos. Most people think they're particles of dust or stray light hitting the lens. Ghost hunters believe they might be the energy of spirits. And most everyone is wearing a cassette recorder to record the voices of the dead. The theory is that deep in the background hiss of a recording hide unexplained voices. Basically, if I went out to a cemetery, started recording and asking questions out into the air that, upon playing back the tapes, really cranking up the silent spots, I should get responses. Let's see. This one was when I got-- I was up by myself, and I asked out in the air, is anyone still here? And I get a response. Is anyone still here? I'm here. Is anyone still here? I'm here. The voice is saying, I'm here. Is anyone still here? I'm here. What are you doing here? OK, we are hooking up a mike. I'm hooking up my microphone because I record everything that I say and do. Stephanie is our psychic, but not like you might think. No crystal balls or late night TV commercials. She's studying for her real estate license. She's just a part of the group and sensing things is her role. We don't tell her about the history of the site. I do get the sense that somebody died on this property. But I haven't determined if it's by their choice, or if it's natural or-- I'm waiting outside the small cabin, listening on a wireless mike I have on Stephanie. I try not to pee myself because they're in the cabin that has the body. And we don't mean you-- This door won't stay open. --any harm. I am sensing a very foul odor in this area. Very foul. Not now, but-- No. Is there anyone here with us? Is there anything you'd like to say? But I still get that really foul odor in here. OK, I'm ready. They leave the cabin and start up a path into the woods. Huge pine trees surround us. I want to stop here please. You know what? I know this is really crazy. I totally got a vision of a body. That never happens to me. Like an actual body. She describes what she sees. Short woman with curly hair in the style of the 1930s. Later, going through old photos with the owner, Stephanie points to one photo. "Fern [? Killins," ?] it reads. That's her. That's the woman. It turns out that Fern is the woman who died of TB, whose body was left in that cabin for a month. Stephanie is confused about why she saw the body until she discovers, just around a bank of trees, the cemetery where Fern is buried. I'm hearing the voice of a little girl that continuously says something about playing. Are you coming to play? Or did you come to play? Who blocked the camera? I did, sorry. I would like to ask who's in spirit to come forward please. And you need to know that you are very safe right now. I got a reference to a guest house, an immediate guest house. I feel like we're not alone right now. Patricia's taking photos at the other end of the small cemetery. Well, you kind of get used to being in the dark. Out in the woods, you have to deal with animals and stuff like that too. I mean, I can handle a chipmunk. But seeing a body? I mean this is so Blair Witch. We are tromping through the woods. I know it's like oop, uh oh, be careful. Oh, be careful. Oh my God. You're going to kill yourself. I'm not very graceful. It's all right. My father dealt with dealing with MS, and it was a progressive illness that incapacitated him. He died a year ago in May. This is Patricia. We'd talked a little bit about ghost hunting. He'd ask me questions. He was very open to that. And my mom is too. But I asked him, if he had a chance to come back to please come back and let me know that he was OK. And when he did pass away, I was there. And being a part of this group, even in that short period of time, changed my perspective on death. I used to think about death and be afraid. I don't have that fear anymore. But he's been back since. I was home, and I was up late. And I turned the light on, and it went off a few minutes afterwards. And I said, hi daddy. And it went right back on. I've been startled awake before. But having a psychic sleeping on the sofa next to me in a haunted cabin bolt up at 3:00 AM crying, there's someone coming, well, that's just scary. People grab whatever gear they fell asleep with. Somehow, I remember to put on my headphones and start stabbing at buttons on my recorder. 3:00 AM. You know what? Something just moved right there. Outside? No, right here. Right along this way right here. Right where Kendra is, but through that door. Not going that way, but going this way. That was really weird. We all shuffle around together in a tight bunch. She guides us to the kitchen. OK, that was definitely something in the kitchen. Definitely. Does anyone have any recorders going? You have one with you right now? Oh, you're recording this? Yeah. OK. Get in the middle. Oh god. Over here, will you? Don't be afraid. In their panic, no one had strapped on their tape recorder. They look at me and my big mike. I'm pushed into the dark kitchen. They can see me and my trembling microphone in the night vision camera. But I can't see a thing. Is there anyone here with us? We need confirmation please. Would you tell us your name please? Can you give us a physical sign that you're here with us please? I feel my left side lift, all the hairs standing up. Is this a seizure? Wow, they say. What? I say. There's an orb near your left side. Point the microphone at the floor. A presence over there. I'm hoping that you'll get a female's voice when you replay that. You have to really listen. But I'm hoping that you'll pick something up. Because I sure felt it really strong right in there. We go into the main room. Stephanie points at the ceiling. Upstairs, video cameras and a computer monitoring system are running. Everyone is leaving, afraid, she says. I point my mike up to the ceiling. Everyone listens closely. Then we hear it, a mouse. I hit pause on my recorder. Kendra's walking towards the front door taking EMF readings. Then Stephanie, in a frightened and direct voice, tells her to, stop, someone's coming. This is when the front door blows open. I hit record. Relax. Cool. Just relax. OK, I just got a big chill. Everybody just wait a minute. Please let me just gather myself. I have a definite male presence right there. And I feel really afraid right now. Possible orb? I have a really, really, really strong male presence here. Gone. I don't want anybody to move. Kendra, he just walked right by you. Just don't move. Don't move. Please don't move. Stephanie, don't move. He's still walking by us. Right here. He seems like he's looking for something. Just a minute please. The whole house is unsettled with this presence. I feel like the whole house is staying quiet for a reason. Like nobody move, that's what I feel like. And I totally feel like he's right here. Like right over in here. He doesn't want to talk to me because I'm female or something. I don't know. He doesn't want to talk to me. By this point, Ross and I have told Stephanie about the history of the cabin. And she thinks, maybe this is the man who was here 70 years ago, the one who people think abused the children at Bible camp, a spirit stuck in a routine. He's gone for sure. That's crazy. Dang, that was harsh. That's terribly sad. He's not ready to deal with it. He's just not ready to deal with it. Shutting the door. In the diffused light of morning, all is well. I'm woken up to giggles. Stephanie is having a really fun time tapping on Steph's sleeping head. That was so funny. Did you knock me on the head? We've been laughing at you. Because then you looked up and thought it was Ross. Kendra, how'd you think it went last night? Kind of odd to hear the noises that I heard. But then again, it could have been my mind playing tricks on me too. We all stumble upstairs to see what clues the ghosts left us. The scrabble pieces we lined up in the attic had not been moved. They've had luck in the past. Once the pieces were moved to spell cat. The EMF detectors never went off. There were no unexplained voices on my tapes. The strangest thing to happen was that the video recorders and computerized motion and temperature detectors we had running in the empty attic shut off an hour into the two the batteries were supposed to last. And I did see a lot of orbs on the video monitors, plus a couple in my photos. So do you think this place is haunted? I don't know. But I mean the stuff on the video was pretty weird. Haunted, I don't know. What do you think? It's really hard to say. What do you think that whole thing at 3:00 AM was when the door opened? When it flew open? I don't know. It felt like the wind to me. Yeah, I was going to say, it could have been the wind. But before it happened, again, we had a lot of things building up to that. But not like, that's a ghost. No. Not enough for me to support that it was a ghost because we did have a lot of wind that night. And that door is really hard to latch. The week before this trip, my mom's best friend-- my Auntie Mame as I called her, she even called me Patrick-- died. I was shocked, still am. This is the first time I lost someone close to me and wasn't unable to say a proper goodbye. When each of my parents died, I was with them. I want to believe in ghosts. I want to say goodbye to my Auntie Mame. And I want to believe that my parents and grandparents, who said they'd always be there for me, in fact, are. I'm going to join Amateur Ghost Hunters of Seattle-Tacoma, pay my $30 and get my badge and T-shirt. So maybe someday, during some investigation with AGHOST, chasing around a haunted place, or after midnight in some cemetery, I'll see or hear something that will make me believe that there is life after death, that ghosts do exist. Are we all here? Yup. We need to thank all spirit for allowing us to have the experience that we did last night. We want to make sure that you stay here. This is where you need to be right now. We'll be back. Jake Warga. His story got some support from hearingvoices.com and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Act Two, Government Science. A couple months ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a report condemning the Bush administration for what it called "distorting and censoring" scientific findings which contradict administration policies. One of the cases cited in the report involved something called the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning. This committee is one of about two dozen in the Centers for Disease Control. Its mission is to advise the CDC how best to deal with the threat of childhood lead poisoning. The advisory committee has existed, in one form or another, for 30 years, starting in the '70s when the battle was to get the lead out of gasoline. Alex Blumberg has been following the recent fights over who's going to serve in this committee. Each side in the fight thinks the other is practicing a kind of fake science. Here's Alex. Dr. Bruce Lanphear is exactly the type of person you'd expect to find on something called an Advisory Committee for Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention. He's been the lead researcher on numerous studies investigating the effects of lead on children. He's a scientific consultant to the National Center for Lead-Safe Housing. And he's the author of a whole stack of scientific articles with titles like, "The effect of soil abatement on blood lead levels in children living near a former smelting and milling operation." So it's no surprise that the CDC got in touch with him. Sitting in my office in a research building, now about the three years ago, I received a call from a CDC official who asked whether I'd be willing to be nominated to be a member of the CDC Lead Advisory Committee. And my name along with, I think, three other people at that time was submitted to the Secretary of Health. Serving on a CDC scientific advisory committee is the elite, scientific version of serving on a task force at your local school board. Committee members aren't paid a salary. They keep their old jobs. They're just private citizens who meet a couple of times a year and offer their expertise and energy to help solve problems. They have no regulatory authority. They don't even set policy. But because they are some of the leading experts in the field, their recommendations carry weight. The CDC told Dr. Lanphear that he should expect to begin work on the committee in a couple months, after the largely pro forma approval of his nomination was complete. But this was an election year. The Bush administration took power. And it took roughly a year and a half after he was first contacted for Dr. Lanphear to get another call from a CDC official. Saying that he was a bit concerned that the representatives of the lead industry had put forward their own nominations and argued against the three people who had been nominated by the CDC officials. About a month later, the appointment was denied for me and, again, my two colleagues who had expertise in lead poisoning prevention. And the nominees who had been put forward by the lead industry were approved in place. There was some nonsense that I was somehow a Republican or something. That's craziness. And as a matter of fact, I voted for Bill Clinton. Dr. William Banner is the man who was appointed to the committee instead of Dr. Lanphear. And if you've ever wondered about that scientist industry trots out to say, all this research is wrong, smoking doesn't cause cancer, the climate is not changing, and lead paint isn't dangerous for kids, here he is. A liberal pediatrician in Oklahoma. Dr. Banner runs a children's hospital and is the medical director for the Oklahoma Poison Control Center. He doesn't want to loosen the current CDC recommendations about how much lead in kids' blood is safe. From my hour-long conversation with him, he seems to care deeply about the welfare of children in this state. He's an ardent supporter of Head Start. And he told me that the greatest threat to children that he saw was a recent change in the welfare law which kicks families off of government assistance. But he has also, on many occasions, been an expert witness for the lead industry, that is, companies like paint manufacturers who are being sued over the lead content in their products. They hire him because he's willing to say on the witness stand that none of the studies connecting lead and children's cognitive development are conclusive. Who called you to be a member of this committee? Well, I don't remember who it was. It was somebody that is involved in public relations, I think, for probably one of the national lead-- probably somebody from one of the companies. And I didn't hear anything more about. And I forgot about it. And then, the first thing I knew was that I got a letter from Health and Human Services asking me if I wished to submit a nominating letter. Dr. Banner went to his boss, the director of the hospital where he works, said, hey, the government wants someone to nominate me for this committee. And his boss said, sure, we'll send a letter. And so now, when you call the government, as I did, and ask about Bill Banner, he sounds great. Medical Director of the Children's Hospital at Saint Francis in Tulsa, the Oklahoma Poison Control Center Medical Director. And he was recommended to us by the head of the hospital. This is Bill Pierce, the media relations guy for Tommy Thompson, the man appointed by George Bush to run the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, which runs the CDC. Bill Pierce assured me that, contrary to what everybody I talked to told me, it was very common to overrule specific CDC nominations and appoint different people. Let me ask one other question about Dr. Banner. He has testified several times on behalf of the lead industry. And at the time that he was appointed, you had Dr. Weitzman and Dr. Lanphear, both of whom have just pages and pages of publications to their name, dealing with the very issue of lead poisoning. And then you have a person put on the committee who hasn't really published anything about lead poisoning and whose name was given to HHS by representatives of the lead industry. That's the claim made. That's not true. Again, he was recommended by Robert Scott, executive vice president of Saint Francis Hospital, the hospital that he works in. Again, this is stuff made up by people. But this is from when I talked to him. He said that the people who first asked him if he wanted to be nominated were representatives of the lead industry. Hey, again, it's a free country. Anybody can talk to him and ask him whatever they want. I could ask you, for instance, all kinds of questions. Does it mean anything? I guess-- It truly doesn't mean anything. We were not contacted by anybody in any industry regarding Dr. Banner. So you're saying it's a coincidence that somebody called him up from the lead industry and said, we want to nominate you for this, and then he got nominated? I have no idea. I don't know anything about that. We don't know anything about that conversation. Alex, again, I just-- you and I could probably talk and find out six connections we have. Doesn't mean anything. We've never talked except for this week. Doesn't mean anything. Right. I guess it just seems-- can you understand, though, how that might seem suspicious? No. You can't? No. Again, I deal in facts. I deal in reality. I don't deal in conspiracy theories. So it doesn't matter what anybody else said to Dr. Banner on their own. He is well qualified to serve on this committee. The question of whether Dr. Banner is qualified to serve on this committee is an interesting one. On the one hand, he has some very sensible opinions about government policies on lead. For instance, he didn't agree with the federal recommendations in the early '90s that said every child in the country should be tested for lead. In his rural state of Oklahoma, far away from old, deteriorating housing stock and big industrial smelters, lead wasn't the problem for children, he thought. Poor nutrition and a low immunization rate were. He didn't like having to spend what little money he had on a problem that, in his view, didn't exist. On the other hand, he hasn't done any research on the effects of lead exposure on children. And his opinions of other people's research run counter to what pretty much every scientist in the field would say. Do I believe the studies, these epidemiological studies that have attempted to correlate IQ with the lead levels? No. What he's talking about is this. Over the last 10 or 20 years, many researchers working in many different countries with many different populations, have done studies investigating the link between elevated amounts of lead in children's blood and loss of IQ. They take a sample of children, measure their lead levels, give them an intelligence test, use a bunch of fancy statistical techniques to control for other factors, like parents' IQ. And in every study, they show a link between higher blood lead levels and lower IQ. But Dr. Banner says, they prove nothing. They can't, he says, by their very nature. They're statistical studies. Even when they show a correlation between lead and IQ loss, it could be coincidental. They tell us nothing about cells in the brain and what lead does to those cells. I think they fall far short of science. And I take issue with the way they have done. And frankly, I think they have reached the conclusions that they wished to conclude and ignored the alternative hypotheses. And it has become very politicized. Epidemiology itself is an infant as a science. And I think the rules are ill-formed at this point. Dr. Banner presents a compelling portrait of himself, a maverick scientist with common sense bravely telling the emperor, in this case multiple regression analysis, that it has no clothes. But to most experts in public health, to deny this research is basically denying the mathematical basis of all modern epidemiology which studies the spread of disease by applying the same techniques in the blood lead studies to hundreds of other health areas. Dr. Michael Weitzman has worked for 30 years doing field epidemiological research on children's health issues. For him, it's like denying that the earth is round. Is it possible that there are limitations to epidemiology? You bet. It's very difficult to develop a causal argument when we show associations between things. But when you have dozens, if not hundreds, of studies in different countries using different methods with different techniques showing the same thing, then how can you say that you question it? Especially, he says, when epidemiology gets results. Using only mathematics, epidemiologists have eradicated a number of diseases without any understanding of the basic biology. For instance, Reye's Syndrome, which killed a lot of school-aged children in the 1970s. And epidemiologic approaches found that the thing that these kids had in common is that virtually all these kids either have had chicken pox or the flu at the same time that they had taken aspirin. And so that led to the federal government making all sorts of recommendations that children under the age of 12 not take aspirin. And you know what? The disease has gone away. It's completely disappeared. Bill Pierce, the spokesman for HHS, didn't want to talk to me about any of this initially. He was convinced that I, like every other reporter, had an agenda. I'd been spun by the Union of Concerned Scientists and by a webpage put up by Representative Henry Waxman, which attacks Bush administration policies regarding science. He said that these things all made mountains out of molehills and ignored something much more fundamental. All the claims made by the naysayers out there, the conspiratorial theorists-- if these people are appointed, somehow bad things are going to happen-- haven't come true. These committees are serving. These people are on these committees. These committees are meeting. Advice is being provided. So I ask them, where's the beef, as the old cliche is in the old commercial. Where's the beef? There is no beef. I ask and challenge the media. I ask and challenge all of you. Do that. Take a look. What's the point here? What is the point of these arguments that are being made? He's right. Even experts who got rejected from the committee agree that they probably wouldn't have done much different from the current committee members. But there is something at stake. And that is, how do we view science? Bill Pierce said to me, listen, there's Democratic scientific experts, and there's Republican scientific experts. Democrats appoint the Democratic experts. And when Republicans come in, they appoint the Republican experts, Dr. Banner notwithstanding. But this is actually a fundamental shift. Consider J. Routt Reigart, a professor of pediatrics in South Carolina. He drafted the very first document the CDC ever issued about lead poisoning back in the 1970s. He's been involved with the CDC on one committee or another ever since, from Nixon to Clinton. And he says, in the past, appointments were not political. That part was definitely a change in that nominations were going up from CDC and were being not only rejected by the secretary, but the secretary telling the center who should be on the committee, which was quite a different event than I was familiar with in the past. And this is going back-- Oh that's going back as far as I can remember. That's back to the '70s? Yeah. The Bush administration suggests that science is just like politics. Dr. Banner has his opinion, Dr. Lanphear has his, and they're both valid. But that's not actually how science works. Science is based on the premise that there are not two equally valid points of view on all issues, that there's a verifiable truth to things. That one side is right, and one side is wrong. And science has a process in place to figure that out. And so, Dr. Reigart says, there is an objective difference between Dr. Banner and Dr. Lanphear. Dr. Lanphear, every time he submits a proposal, he has to justify everything he wants to do, why he wants to do, what his preliminary data is. So he can't get the money unless he has a scientifically defensible point of view. Whereas Dr. Banner's statements about lead poisoning-- if he has research that refutes those studies, then he should publish it. And then we have something to talk about. In other words, Dr. Banner can raise his concerns about experimental methodology in courtrooms all over the country and to reporters on the radio and at public advisory meetings for the CDC. But science has already settled those questions long ago. Of the 12 members in the current Lead Advisory Committee, only one could be considered a leading researcher on the effects of lead on children. And he's rotating off at the end of the month. It'll be a science advisory committee without any scientific expertise. In the case of lead, this might not be so dangerous. The science concerning lead has been settled, more or less, for years. But on dozens of other committees appointed this way, committees which investigate global climate change, for example, or the effects of pesticides on human health, committees where the issues are much less clear, we need every expert we can find. Alex Blumberg is one of the producers of our show. Coming up. I hear dead people, part two, more real recordings. And how to determine whether you, yes you, are objectively as beautiful as the stars. Facts, details, analyses. That is 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. We bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Fake Science, stories of people employing scientific logic, scientific analyses wrongly. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Beauty Science. There's a whole-- I don't even know the word-- there's a whole tendency in certain people to try to apply objective standards, find objective standards, pseudo-scientific standards, to things that, frankly, are never going to be objective. You know what I'm talking about? You've seen those scholars who write books explaining why comedy is funny. That's what I'm talking about. Some things are really better off left unexamined, far from the groping, sweating, parsing, greedy hands of fake scientists of all kinds. And for an example of this, all you need to do is look at this article that's on the website Fametracker.com. It points out a recent attempt by a famous magazine, one that is on newsstands right now, to dive into this area. Adam Sternbergh is the co-founder and co-editor of Fametracker, and he has the story here. Yes. It's that time of year. People magazine has once again graciously taken on the task of whittling down the hundreds of blindingly brilliant, gaspingly gorgeous, eye-searingly spectacular celebrities to a final, chart-topping 50. How do they do this? Can you imagine the arguments? Benjamin Bratt. Rodrigo Santoro. Benjamin Bratt. Rodrigo Santoro. Benjamin Bratt. Rodrigo Santoro. Then some poor, unfortunate associate editor gets a letter opener to the eye. And Rodrigo Santoro, the quote Brazilian actor and health-buff, gets page 142. This annual culling of the perfect may seem an arduous and arbitrary task. This year, though, People's given us a peek into the process. These selections aren't just the ephemeral whims of overworked editors, their eyes blearied by beauty. No, these selections are made based on the rigorous rules of science. Science, damn it, science. It's about 2/3 the width of his mouth and a perfect 1/3 of the length of his face, and his wide cheekbones and square jaw balance the width. No, this isn't Keats writing another ode, this is Dr. Steven Pearlman, a Manhattan-based plastic surgeon quoted in People. And he's lovingly describing Orlando Bloom's nose. Oh yes, let us see that perfect 1/3 baby. Bloom's nose is featured in a section titled, "Most Wanted," which details the most wanted lips, eyes, nose, or cheekbones of the stars. The possessor of each perfect feature is described with a snappy, verb-centric sentence. For example, of Nicole Kidman's skin it says, "She glows." Of Johnny Depp's cheekbones, "He smolders." Of Bloom's coveted nose, "He commands." That's right. Orlando Bloom's nose commands. To do what? It's not entirely clear. It turns out, beauty is not, in fact, in the eye of the beholder, as some olden days person wanted us to believe, whoever that was. Caesar or Jesus. Beauty can be reduced to a mathematical formula. And it's fun to try at home. Let's turn to Dr. Francis Palmer, founder of the Beverly Hills International Center for Aesthetic Surgery and co-director of Facial Plastic Surgery at University of Southern California School of Medicine. And with each paragraph-hogging list of professional credentials, you can picture that poor People fact-checker, phone stuck to her ear as the aesthetic surgery doctor in question reads his resume very slowly over the phone, as though speaking to someone who is developmentally delayed, "Beverly Hills Internat-- yes. Aesthetic. OK. A-E-S--" Dr. Palmer has quote devised the following point system to determine true beauty. You get 75% of the points for your cheekbones, 10% for eyes and eyebrows, 7% for lips, and 2% each for jaw, chin, and neck, sleek nose, clear skin, and quote general harmony of features. So who scores the highest among, say, recent reality TV babes? Why, it's Survivor's newly minted millionaire, Amber Brkich, with 97%. But where do we, the regular folk, fit in? It's easy to find out. Here's the formula, as printed in People magazine. To do a self-analysis, draw an imaginary line from the pupil of your eye down toward your jaw. Draw a second line from the nostrils across your cheeks. The bottom of your cheek bone should fall at or below the intersection of these lines. If it is higher, your face may appear flat and masculine. So she glows. She sparkles. He smolders. You suck. Hey, that's not our opinion. That's science talking. Adam Sternbergh. Read his analyses of both the famous and the very famous at Fametracker.com, where this story first appeared. Act Four, Radio Science. Fake science can be fun, and it can bring people together. Brent Runyon has heard it happen himself in the middle of the night. Most nights I have a hard time going to sleep. I worry a lot when I go to bed. I worry about money and if I should go and work at the movie theater again. I worry that we're not going to be able to stay in this house. And I worry that if we do move, everyone will be miserable. After that, I worry that the Red Sox will never win a World Series, and that Nomar's Achilles is going to require surgery, and that the Yankees will always win no matter what the Red Sox do. I know a lot of people who have trouble going to sleep. Walker, who is 12, needs to have the dishwasher on to go to sleep and the dryer. Grandpa Jim used to count upwards through the prime numbers. I remember when I was a little kid, I used to lie in bed and listen to my parents talking through the wall. Their voices sounded muffled, and I couldn't make out the words. But I liked listening to the sounds. Now at night, I turn on the radio, so I can hear voices when I'm going to sleep. It's tuned to the same station the Red Sox games are on, an all-talk station. They have some local guys in the morning and Rush Limbaugh in the afternoon. But at night, they have this program called Coast to Coast AM. I remember the first time I heard the show. It was 1:00 in the morning, and I couldn't sleep. So I turned on the radio. And there were people talking about recordings from beyond the grave. And then they played the recordings. And at first, there was just a lot of tape hiss and a kind of angry grumbling. I was laughing at how silly it was. And then a voice seemed to say, I found the link. Except that instead of saying it in a normal voice, the voice said it in a creepy, David Lynch, Twin Peaks, little man in the red room backward, kind of voice. I sat up in bed and turned the light on. It freaked me out. I was freaked out by some weird voice on a radio show in the middle of the night. And still, I would rather listen to that than worry about money. So I turned the light out and closed my eyes and listened until I fell asleep. Since then, I've barely missed a night. It's hard for me to fall asleep without it. I travel with an AM radio. I wait to go to bed until 1:00 AM when the opening music kicks in. And when it does, I don't want to go to sleep anymore. From the High Desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good afternoon, good morning, whatever the case may be in whatever time zone you're in. That's Art Bell, the weekend host of Coast to Coast. He's a ham radio operator in his spare time. He's got a bad back, and he does the show out of his house. The whole program runs like an amateur scientific society from the dawn of the Enlightenment. There's a sense that there's this stuff out there that's barely been studied, and we don't even have good procedures for studying it yet. But if we all sit down and reason together, we can probably make some sense out of it. Aliens, Mars, time travel. Listeners call up to talk about shadow people and this ghoulish figure called the old hag who sits on their chest while they sleep. But there are ground rules. Art lets the callers discuss whatever they want as long as they follow some system of logic and can back up their claims with a little evidence, with some kind of facts, or at the very least, a coherent story. If not, well, there's going to be trouble. East of the Rockies, you're on the air. Hello, Art. Hello. My name is Carl. Hi, Carl. I am the Antichrist. Really? How can you be sure, Carl? I was born with six fingers on each hand. Well, that's still-- that doesn't nail it right there. I mean, it is unusual, Carl. But that doesn't mean you're the Antichrist. There's a lot-- I understand that. OK, what else? I sent-- No, wait, wait, wait, Carl. What else? So much more, Art. Well, fantastic claims require fantastic evidence. I understand that. Let me make a statement to you and to the audience. What would that be? I am going to save at least one third of the life on this planet. That doesn't sound like an Antichristy sort of thing. I understand that. You've got to understand that what you say is held somewhat suspect based on the fact that you've announced yourself as the Antichrist. I certainly do. All right, thank you very much. And West of the Rockies, you are on the air. Hello. Hey, Art, how are you? In the Coast to Coast universe, nearly everyone shares some basic assumptions. We know that aliens exist because so many people call up and talk about seeing them. And if aliens exist, then there has to be a shadow government covering up the aliens. And if the shadow government exists, who is controlling it? Well, that's what we're trying to find out. Ghosts exist too. Also, life after death and reincarnation and time travel and prophecy. One night, a truck driver called in and said he'd eaten at a '50s style truck stop in Ohio that was filled with pretty waitresses and good food. And then when he tried to go back a few weeks later, it was gone. Not torn down, it had never existed. Art sounded like he'd heard that one before. All he said was, phantom truck stop-- the way you'd say the Eiffel Tower, like we all know what that is-- and then went on to the next caller. Much of the data presented on the show falls into the category of experiments that would be difficult for other scientists to reproduce. For example, the recording of hell. Someone sent Art this tape, which was supposedly recorded by scientists who were mining in Siberia. They drilled down nine miles until they smashed through into earth's hollow core. They measured the temperature at 2,000 degrees. And then they dropped down a super-sensitive microphone to listen to the tectonic movements. But they accidentally recorded the moanings of souls in hell. In case you've ever wondered what that sounds like, here it is. So Art plays this tape on the air, and people call in to discuss the breakthrough because there are questions of methodology to be discussed. They're not saying, well, maybe hell doesn't exist, or even if hell exists, it's probably not in the center of the earth, or it would be easy for anyone to fake this. They're discussing the logistics of drilling a nine-mile hole and then dangling a microphone into it. The sound quality of this next clip isn't the greatest. Now look, I'm not a geologist. But in my opinion, if you drilled nine miles down and you came to a pocket that was 2,000 degrees, you're talking about molten rock. Virtually. And aren't you going to create a volcano? Now, what I'm thinking is-- But they didn't mention, in this story, pressure. They mentioned a horrid little being that came flying out. Then they mentioned the drill bit turning wildly, and they mentioned a high temperature. But they also mentioned that they lowered a microphone into it. That's right. OK, that's a pretty long extension cord. But anyhow-- Not unreasonable. It could be done. Who says they lowered the microphone to the final depth? And so they may have lowered it just low enough to get the sounds. OK, granted. I don't know. I have an open mind. When I think about it, one of the really surprising things about Coast to Coast is how little disagreement there is. You turn on the radio any time of day, and people are arguing about politics or sports or whatever. When there are disagreements on Coast to Coast, they're about whether aliens are truly from another world or are simply human beings traveling through time to harvest our DNA. Or whether the pyramids were built by people from other planets or if they were built by giants. I think, just from listening every night, the sheer volume of it, four hours of Coast to Coast whether I'm awake or asleep, I've totally stopped being skeptical about it. Now I just let the ideas wash over me like chemtrails. You know when jets fly over and you can see the vapor trail, the misty exhaust line that goes away after a few minutes? Those are called contrails. Well, chemtrails look the same, but they hang in the atmosphere for much longer. According to a Canadian journalist, chemtrails are a government-sponsored climate modification experiment. Basically, military jets are spraying large amounts of microscopic particles into the atmosphere to counteract global warming. When I first heard about chemtrails, I thought, quartz particles suspended in midair to reflect light and heal the ozone layer? That sounds pretty far-fetched. But then guests and callers kept bringing it up, and I heard about it so much, it just became part of my normal life. Then NASA just released a study saying that contrails may be affecting climate change. And now, I can't look up into the blue sky without thinking about chemtrails. On Fridays, George Noory, the other host of Coast to Coast, does open lines. And sometimes he asks for stories from people around a particular theme. Last week, the theme was "I was cursed," and he got calls from all over. One guy talked for a long time about these creatures that were following him. A woman called and said she'd been cursed for over 20 years by a former roommate, and that everything had gone terribly for her until she'd hired a good witch to remove the curse. And then George got this call from Bob, east of the Rockies. On any other radio show, Bob would just be another sad story about depression, and the toll it takes on you. But on Coast to Coast, if you're depressed and have had a hard time, then you must have been cursed. I wasn't going to call in tonight, but after hearing some of the stories and-- I just started going, wow, a lot of that stuff has happened to me. And I've got to tell you George, I credit you and your show for saving my life. What happened? Well, I'm just one of these people who has this dark cloud over him. And I almost decided that I was going to just do it all in. No. Because things just weren't making sense. And I just couldn't seem to get a break anywhere. And I've listened to your show and listened to the people. And there was just such a connection there. At 1:00 in the morning, I understand what he means. We're all up in the middle of the night, we can't sleep. We're worried about things we can't really do anything about. It's all just so much easier to deal with if there's a reason. We're cursed, or it's the shadow people, or demons, or chemtrails. If there's some bigger, powerful, controlling force, then everything makes sense. It's easier to stop worrying. It's easier to go to sleep. Tell me about the cloud. Is it still there? The cloud? It seems to be dissipating a little bit because I'm beginning to understand about the world around me a lot more. Good for you. Because there was just so much I didn't understand. But now I do because there's more to this world than we really can see with just our five senses. Brent Runyon lives in Cape Cod and is the author of the memoir, The Burn Journals, which will come out this September. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Will Reichel. You know you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have Public Radio programs, best-selling books, even The New York Times all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Mr. Torey Malatia. Every time he wanders by my office or I pass him in the hall, I can hear him mumbling to himself. OK, I just got a big chill. I have a definite male presence right there. I don't want anybody to move. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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William is part of a team that's rebuilding one of the power plants outside Baghdad. And for everything that you've probably heard about how dangerous it is to be in Iraq, and how difficult much of the work is, here's one occupational hazard you probably haven't heard of. Working seven days a week, it's very easy to lose track of the time. There's no difference in a Monday, or a Friday, or a Sunday. It's all the same day. Well, we jokingly refer to it as a groundhog day. Jerry's training Iraqi police. Because you're not sure what day it is. And when you come right down to it, it's not much different than yesterday. And it's going to be the same as tomorrow. Visits to the Green Zone, some business in the palace, some business at the police stations. Don works out at the airport for a private security firm. He says everybody loses track of time. We had a guy in a vehicle that hit a landmine. And miraculously, nobody got hurt. And when they brought him to the doctor, the doctor asked, what day is it? I can't tell you what day it is most days, and I haven't been hit by a landmine. That was kind of an unfair question. Today's radio show came from a simple set of questions. We keep hearing about these private contractors who are working in Iraq. These are civilians, doing everything for US troops from serving meals and building housing to maintaining weapons systems. Private contractors interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. Other contractors are the people who are actually rebuilding Iraq's sewage, and water, and electrical infrastructure. And here at our radio show we wondered, who are these people who signed up for this, who decided that the very best job that they could get was going to be in the middle of a war zone? Should we just see them as mercenaries? Are they motivated by feelings that are more idealistic than that? Civilians are part of this war in unprecedented numbers. They're an important part of the war effort. They're part of what is going to determine if we're successful in Iraq or not. Nobody knows for sure, but it is at least 20,000 people in Iraq, working just as soldiers-for-hire, escorting convoys, protecting stuff. That's more than any of the countries in the Coalition of the Willing have sent. Britain, who sent the most, only sent 9,000 troops. Private contractors, in a sense, are our biggest allies in Iraq, the coalition partners that nobody ever talks about, partly because they're private companies, who don't usually give access to reporters, under no obligation to give access. As a result, we don't even know how many of their employees have died. There's a website called icasualties.org, which lists 243 confirmed deaths, actual names. This is far more casualties than all of our allies combined. About a year ago, April 2004-- this is right at the moment when the violence in Iraq was really heating up-- one of our contributing editors, Nancy Updike, headed into Iraq, and managed to spend three weeks with employees of several different companies who are operating there. We're devoting our entire program today to her report. From Chicago Public Radio, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. And we start at the airport. The US military and the private security contractors working in Iraq, who are often ex-military themselves, usually get along. But not always. I was driving around Baghdad International Airport on a Tuesday afternoon with Dave Shoe, a six foot four, former middle school social studies teacher, former Army Sergeant, current employee of Custer Battles, when he pulled up next to two guys jogging in gray t-shirts that said, ARMY. Hey, guys. Got a minute? You're not supposed to be running back here, fellas. Says who? Well, number one, says me, OK? You're not even my boss. Well-- My boss is Major General Dempsey, who's in charge of the five million people that are in the city of Baghdad, you included. Well, Major Dempsey then-- Major General Dempsey. Well, Major General Dempsey, then, is the one who informed us. And a matter of fact, MOTC, ministry of transportation-- Well, [BEEP] the ministry of transportation. Dave climbed down from his truck, and this became a 10-minute argument, complete with finger pointing, getting in each other's faces, almost touching chests. There are tens of thousands of US soldiers living on the airport grounds, which are huge, 11 square miles. And many of them don't realize that even though the airport is used by military helicopters and planes, it's also a civilian airport, guarded in part by a civilian company. And some areas are off-limits, even to US soldiers. So Dave spends a lot of time kicking people out of places. Very few respond graciously. Number one, I ain't in your army, OK? I know you're not. Now, I came up here and said, hey, how about you doing me a favor. Now you want to make it an issue, we can make it an issue. OK, make it an issue! First of all-- Now, let me tell you something, Major. No, you let me tell you. Go ahead! Tell me! Let me tell you! I pulled up to you. I asked you politely. You got an attitude. You're damn right I got an attitude! I've got civilians that have been here a couple months-- I've been here since freaking July, pal. Oh, whoopdedoo. How long you been here? I've been here since March. Good for you, you're doing your job! But let me tell you something. I asked you politely. Now if you got to make an issue out of it, why don't we take it on up to Mayor [? Seller. Well, right now, I'm practicing my right! Right now, I'm telling you, you are unauthorized to be here. You got that? I got that. You're really stressing me. Move out! [BEEP] you! As we drove away, Dave put the incident in context. That's the kind of bull [BEEP] I put up with all day long. Right there. Because it's not clear who controls-- No, it's clear. --what area? No, it's clear. That guy's an ass [BEEP]. So is there generally tension between you guys and army guys? No. That guy's an ass [BEEP]. Of course, almost any job involves dealing with a few people you wish you could eject into deep space. But most jobs don't have, on top of that, the stress of daily shootings and bombings, and being thousands of miles from home. So I asked everyone, why come to Baghdad? A couple of reasons, and I'll be honest, money is one of them. Don Ritchie oversees Custer Battles security operations at the airport. When he retired from the military at 43, he needed to find a job. 19 and a half years in the military, two master's degrees, only job I could find in real American business was as a clerk at Blue Cross in South Carolina. $17,000 a year. I started as a clerk. Humbling experience, very humbling experience. I would say the main reason is money. The main reason is money. Adam McCall does patrols at the airport. He says he took 9/11 personally, and got himself a job for a while at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington. He still wants to make a difference, but the money is better here in Iraq. Do you have debts that you're trying to pay off? Absolutely, yeah. Who doesn't? Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to America, yes. Yes, I have lots of debts. $30,000, $40,000. That's a big chunk of change. Exactly. And frankly, I wasn't making it when I was Department of Homeland Security. I just wasn't making it. So, you know, I had to come here. The median income in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, is a bit over $40,000 a year. In Iraq, Americans working for private companies usually start at around $80,000, tax-free. Some get more for overtime or hazardous duty. Security guys make over $100,000 a year. Again, the first $80,000 isn't taxed if they stay outside the states for 330 days. Housing and meals are free. If you can tolerate the tension, heat, long hours, uneven phone service, loneliness, sexual frustration, and fear, Baghdad can be a good place not just to make money, but also to make enough money to maybe turn your life around. People told me they now have savings for the first time. They'd be able to send their kids to the universities they want. Or put that divorce behind them. Henry [? Bosarge's ?] job is repairing guns for Custer Battles at the airport. He was in the military for nine years, and puts it in perspective this way, bringing up one of the biggest private companies in Iraq, KBR, Kellogg Brown & Root. A specialist who has to climb under a truck and work 12 hours a day makes $1,500 a month. In the military. In the military. The same guy, working for KBR, the same guy across the street from him, is making $10,000 a month. $10,000? Yeah. How on earth are we saving money with private contractors when you guys are making so much money? You're not. You're not. Money, the idea that private contractors will save taxpayer money, is just one reason behind the boom in hiring civilians to do these jobs. The other reason is that the military is shrinking. There were two million active duty US military personnel in 1990. Now it's 1.4 million. Private contractors are filling in the jobs that the old, bigger military used to do for itself: peeling potatoes, fixing equipment, building housing. The idea is to free up soldiers for what the Pentagon calls war-making, combat. The line's gotten blurry, though. More and more, private contractors are hired to guard, patrol, escort people and food and equipment through dangerous places, jobs that end up putting them in combat. Military commanders have said they're afraid the vastly higher salaries in these private companies, essentially for-profit armies, will drain the military of experienced people. Steely-eyed, flat-bellied professionals. It's possible Hank came up with this description by looking in the mirror. He's a 49-year-old man with small blue eyes, a former paratrooper and ranger, the son of a decorated soldier, married to the daughter of a soldier, father of two soldiers, one of whom was in Iraq and is now in Afghanistan on a mission he can't talk about. Hank is cryptic. He doesn't want me to use his last name. He won't even tell me what rank he achieved. I looked it up later. Lieutenant colonel. He's done private security work overseas before, he won't give details, of course. But he will-- and this is the thing about Hank-- he will poke fun at it. So you've got to be the look, the security guy-look: serious, I'm dead serious about this business; I'm steely-eyed, and I'm scanning the horizon constantly. And usually when you go to, like, if I go to Africa or someplace like that, and you're on some kind of security mission, it takes you about two seconds just to get off the plane, look around, and say, oh, there's somebody else on a mission. And you kind of saddle up to them and you go, SAS? And they go, they nod and then they go, rangers? And you go, you kind of nod. And then finally you ask, who you working for? Of course he can't tell. He asks you, and you can't tell. And then you-- [LAUGHTER] wander off, you see? But you had that initial, like, dogs sniffing each other, you do. But it's very easy to pick the guys out. They all got the look. So he wants his PSD guys to have to look. Steely-eyed, flat-bellied professionals. And he walks around doing that look, but he also knows it's all a bit of a put-on, a man dance, as he calls it. And with tens of thousands of American military and ex-military and private military in Iraq right now, it's very possible that we are standing in the middle of the largest man dance on the planet. Tomorrow at 7:00, we gotta get on the range. And then we've got weapons training we'll do when we come back in the afternoon-- Hank has called a meeting of the personal security detail guys to go over the week's schedule and work out solutions to some of the problems they've been having. The meeting is in a long room off the main dining area of their hotel. The guys are sitting scattered around the room, mostly Americans, a few from other countries, England, Ireland, Nepal. They're all on year-long contracts as shooters, armed protection. Hank is roaming the room and occasionally clicking to change the slide on the projector. A lot of the meeting is about cars, because a lot of PSD work is just driving people safely from A to B: Baghdad to Mosul, Mosul to Basra. Safely in Iraq, by the way, means driving as fast as they can at all times, to avoid getting shot or blown up. All the security companies do this. And Custer Battles, in order to keep their security guys free to scan the road and shoot, if necessary, uses Iraqi drivers. Baghdad Bob, AKA Hustler, sees a problem with this, because it seems the Iraqis they've hired, very understandably, have been balking at some of the driving instructions they get. These guys own their vehicles. They're not going to ram anybody. They're not going to run anybody over. And the guy told me, quote, unquote yesterday, I go, go! Woo woo woo! "My vehicle." OK, that told me volumes. He ain't going to hit a bump, he ain't going to go, he ain't going to ram somebody. The PSD guys, meanwhile, depend on aggressive driving to protect themselves. If they're surrounded by a hostile crowd, for instance, or if other cars try to box them in for an ambush. But, as Baghdad Bob points out, driving aggressively at the wrong time could also get everyone shot. We should have the training with the Iraqi drivers. Us sitting in the seat next to an Iraqi driver, this is what you do when you hit a roundabout, this is what you do when you hit a military convoy. Because this is three days in a row I almost got shot by GI Joe. Man, that ain't a good feeling. It becomes clear that the US military is just as much of a danger for the PSD guys as the Iraqi insurgents. Finally, Hank interrupts the discussion with a decision. We tell them to ram somebody, we tell them to move over, we buy, we pay for the repairs. Problem is, we haven't had a good track record. Hank is trying to change some things about the operation. He's here to establish rules and procedures. One result of America's sudden and unprecedented reliance on private security in this war, is that Custer Battles, like many security companies in Iraq, hired a lot of new people very quickly. And Hank is trying to transform them from a bunch of ex-military guys assembled ad hoc to a smooth, standardized workforce, where everyone gets first aid training and regular target practice, good weapons and ammunition, a cell phone, and a uniform, khaki pants, and a navy polo that says Custer Battles on it. Hank believes in America's mission here in Iraq. He believes private security work is the linchpin in that mission's success. It goes like this. Security guys protect the businessmen trying to start companies in Iraq, and the contractors rebuilding the infrastructure. If the contractors get the work done, the economy takes off. The average Iraqi looks around and says, we're better off. Kids are going to school. They're making some money. They're buying a used, beat-up Ford Taurus, but they're getting one in their family. They're going to start turning on these, I think, mostly foreign elements. Maybe I ought to contact the authorities. And we're going to find them and root them out, and we're going to make this country great. Hank is not just out to fix Custer Battles. No opportunity for instruction or improvement is missed. I was paying for my lunch one day, and Hank was talking to the hotel's wait staff. And all of a sudden, Hank and one of the Iraqi staff were gripping hands across the counter and trying to pull each other over. Hank finally grabbed the guy's other hand, so he had both of them, and dragged him halfway across. I stood there watching in amazement. Oh my God. Do you do that with him every day or something? We have a game of some kind. Reach across the counter and just try to pull each other over? That was a new one. That was a new game. It was a little disturbing to watch. Usually we arm wrestle, or you know, you had a balance game, where you yank the other guy off balance. This game of Hank's is not just a game, it's one of his projects. Iraqi men need to work on their upper body strength, he told me more than once. It's very American to say, as George Bush has said, we're not here to change you, we don't want you to become Americans. But we can't help ourselves. Look at Hank. He wants to help, and he knows what will help you. His generosity is interventionist in nature. In the elevator, he explains, it's OK for men to touch each other if they're trying to haul one another over a counter. What's not OK is what he sees Arab men doing every day on the streets of Baghdad. I'm trying to train the Arabs to be less effeminate and quit holding hands, and get to the culture where they-- Jesus Christ, let them be! I love that they hold hands. The guys walk around arm in arm. Yeah, it's not right. Don't train that out of them. Don't you think that that's not right? No, I don't think that that's not right. OK. [CLEARS THROAT] Well, let's go down to 314. Every Saturday night, Custer Battles PSD guys gather at what they call the viking table in the dining room of the Sinbad Hotel for a big dinner. Tonight, a new guy nicknamed Elvis, because he sings and his last name is Presley, brought his guitar. The table is only half-seated, maybe 15 people out of Custer Battles' 60 PSD guys. I end up sitting near Scott, AKA Grumpy, a heavy Vietnam vet who smokes tiny cigars called Swisher Sweets. Scott's been in Iraq for five months. I'll probably stay a year. I was going to stay another year, but I don't think my wife's going to buy that. I've been either in the military or law enforcement or security since I was 18 years old. I'm 57 now. So everybody thinks I need to grow up and come on home. What do you think? I'm not sure I'm ready to hang up my guns yet. As long as you feel like you can do the job and make a contribution, then you should be here. It's not all about the money, he says. And the guy across from him nods. Most of the PSD guys I talked to said some version of this, the money's good, but I'm also here to help. A few said, I'm here for the adventure. Only two fully embraced the word mercenary. A man named Rob who told me about a mercenary bar in the jungles of Cambodia called Sharky's. They get good bands, he said. And a British guy named Richard who said, I'm here for the money, and so is everyone else. I asked the PSD guys if they think we did the right thing by invading Iraq. The responses-- and this ended up being true with everyone I talked to, not just PSD guys-- the responses broke down like this. Around 20% were completely gung-ho: yes, we should have invaded exactly when we did, no questions. Maybe 10% expressed some doubts. And the rest felt like David, an earnest man in his mid-30s with gold-rimmed glasses. You know what? I don't care. It's over. That part of it's over, it's done with. We're here now. The best thing that we can do is to help these people. And why we're here is over and done. I talked to Tara, a tiny blonde from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who screens passengers out at the Baghdad Airport. An honorary viking princess, Hank calls her. Before coming to Iraq, she'd never been away from home for more than two weeks. She had breakfast with her mom every Tuesday. And while Hank is trying to eliminate physical affection between Iraqi men, Tara has stumbled into her own cheerful project to spread American values. I talked to one kid today. He was a cleaner. He cleans the floors at the airport. His wife wears a burka. And it's his choice. He wants her to wear one. And he wanted a cigarette from me. And I said, I'll make a deal with you. I'll give you a cigarette if you let your wife go a week without wearing that. And what did he say? He thought about it really hard, and he agreed to it. Oh my God. And did you see her without the burka? Did you confirm that he held up his end of the bargain? Yes, yes. And she came in for a week without it? It actually hasn't been a week yet, but he said, I like it without it. I like her without it on. Before I started doing a story about Custer Battles, a few people advised me against it. That company doesn't have a good reputation, a person pretty high up in the Coalition Provisional Authority told me. I ran all this by Hank, who copped to it immediately. We got a bad reputation, probably as gunslingers. In some circles. My guys I'm riding with right now are coming back soon. I want to have Custer Battles back. But that's within, you know, the last month. Before that, there was some concerns. Gunslingers was only part of what I'd heard. I told Hank a rumor someone had told me, that Custer Battles had engaged in a huge gun fight at their old hotel, the Al Hayat one night. And when the smoke cleared, it turned out they'd been firing at each other the whole time. No enemy, just Custer Battles guys hearing their own continued gunfire, and believing that meant they were still under attack. Hank confirmed that an event like this had taken place, but it was started by an initial RPG attack on the hotel. He told me what he'd heard from the guys themselves. He got to Iraq after it had happened. There was over 3,000 thousand rounds that were launched from the hotel, except for an RPG attack. Everybody seen everybody in the streets, and everybody was hanging out their windows, emptying magazines into the shadows. And then the report was that we had four dead guys out there that we'd gotten. And of course, I always ask-- I wasn't here then-- I'd say, did you bring the bodies in? No. Did you get a blood trail? No, they dragged him off. They scrubbed the blood trails up. Damn those people, those bastards. How are we going to win this war? They're so quick to sterilize the scene. Answer was, opening day jitters. Everybody's seeing shadows, everybody else is shooting like crazy. To be clear, all this shooting, those 3,000 rounds fired from the hotel, went out into a residential neighborhood in Baghdad. It's likely that, as Hank believes, no one was injured or killed, in spite of all this firepower. Nobody came forward with bodies. But, and this is an important but, there was no formal investigation of the incident, not by the Iraqi police, not by the US military. And Custer Battles, though it did its own internal investigation, wasn't required to report it to anyone. The Custer Battles people I met seemed to be steady men, not trigger happy. Hank, for instance, has never shot a person in his life, even after years in the army and months in Iraq. But all of them, like the employees of every other security company in Iraq, are operating in a context where the rules aren't clear. This is all so new, having over 60 private security firms, some with their own helicopters, their own heavy arms, operating in the middle of a war zone, not subject to the same rules as the military, but not necessarily subject to any other rules. Right now, the US government is trying to invent some new guidelines. But they're not in place yet. In Iraq, there are no clear consequences for making a mistake, or for being reckless. People are shooting and not being held accountable for shooting people? Ah, I suppose there's a lot of that going on. And I think in this brief period of time, just like in the Wild West, you control your own company. You can assert a little bit of control in your own little world and hold people accountable there. I guess, to answer your question, I'm not that concerned about it. Hank's handle on the walkie talkie system is Krom, K-R-O-M, the god Conan prays to in Conan the Barbarian. Mighty Duck is the operations manager. Mighty Duck, Krom. Just got a call from Rock. There's about 2,000 protesters at gates 1, 2, and 3 into the Green Zone. Break. Roger. They expect the crowd to get violent and to increase in size. Can you get word out via Arachna to our teams that are out? Roger. This protest on April 2 was the beginning of the violent struggle between the US and followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr, the beginning of the deadliest month for US forces since the start of the war. It was also two days after four private security guys from a company called Blackwater were killed in Fallujah, and parts of their bodies hung from a bridge, a grinning crowd of Iraqis surrounding their burnt car. If they got Blackwater, a Custer Battles guy told me, it's scary, because Blackwater's the best. Is there anything that could happen, that you know now as sort of that's your enough-is-enough mark? Me personally? Yeah, you personally. No. You mean as far as things getting so bad I want to get out of here? Yeah. That would be cowardice, if things got bad and you wanted to get out. Wouldn't it? So even if I really wanted to get out, I probably wouldn't admit it to myself. In the weeks after I left, right after Fallujah, the violence escalated, not because of the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, Hank told me. Those weren't the turning point. Even before the pictures were made public, there were three weeks, Hank said, when it was hard to go anywhere without getting shot at. Americans hunkered down in hotels, including security people. When there were missions, his men would ask about whether they were really necessary, and the quality of the available intelligence. Four different times, men refused to go on missions, Hank said. And there were casualties. Elvis, who played guitar at the viking dinner, was shot in the leg when the hotel was sprayed with gunfire. Dave Shoe, the guy you heard at the beginning of the show, who got into that argument with the major at the airport, was ambushed in his car and shot in the head. He's OK. And one of their British guys was killed execution-style, pulled from his car in a crowd and shot in the back of the head. People were badly shaken, Hank said. But no one's quit so far. Nancy Updike. In the year since we first broadcast this program, Hank says that 11 Custer Battles security guys have been killed. And Custer Battles itself has been banned from getting government contracts in Iraq, after federal investigators found that it billed for all kinds of work that it never did, defrauding the war effort of at least $50 million, allegedly. The company denies the charges. The case is in court. Other private contractors face similar charges. Halliburton has $1.8 billion, that's billion, in disputed billings in Iraq. Coming up, when is a shovel not a shovel? 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. Today, we're devoting our entire program to Nancy Updike's report on civilian contractors in Iraq. She was there in April 2004, and we first broadcast her story a year ago. But the situation with private military contractors working in Iraq hasn't changed that much. It's still one private contractor for every six US military personnel. To give you a sense of how unprecedented that number is, having that many civilians working alongside the US army in the middle of a war zone, back in the first Gulf War, it was one private contractor for every 60 military personnel. By some estimates, a quarter of all the reconstruction money for Iraq will go to these private security firms. We resume Nancy's story at the Green Zone, which at the time was where the American operation in Iraq was based, A four-square-mile area in Baghdad, surrounded by 15-foot walls and barbed wire, with US soldiers guarding the only entrances. Lots of private contractors live or work there, alongside thousands of soldiers and government workers. Here's Nancy. The Green Zone is a sprawl, like Los Angeles, a big, hot, paved sprawl full of humvees and SUVs, and men and women jogging along the wide roads in shorts. You never see that anywhere else in Baghdad. There's a disco at the Al Rashid hotel on Saturday nights in the Green Zone, karaoke on Friday's, taekwondo, an internet cafe, and a long outdoor flea market with Iraqi kids selling CDs, or movies and porn on DVD, fanny packs, makeup, satellite dishes, also a variety of Saddam-themed lighters and watches. It seems the final stage of a brutal dictatorship is kitsch. A few restaurants have also sprung up in the Green Zone, including a Chinese place that is so obscurely located, it's like the gay bars of the 50s. You have to go with someone who already knows where it is. Otherwise, why would you ever walk through the chipped opening in the stone wall next to the hospital, and go down the long, rubble filled alley? And if you did, how would you know to make a left into the small, crab-grassy courtyard with plastic chairs and tables with boxes of tissue on them? In any other part of the world, this place would not survive. In addition to its difficult-to-find entrance, the restaurant is right next to a helipad. But this place is thriving. It is a monument to the power of word of mouth, and to the desperation created by the fact that daily fare for most Americans in the Green Zone is meals at a cafeteria where food is prepared for thousands of people at a time. Dragon Chinese restaurant is also a testament to the axiom, which I'm coining here, that Kung Pao chicken will always find a way to exist wherever Americans are present. I want the Kung Pao chicken. Number eight? Yeah, number eight. I've come to the restaurant with a group of guys who work for Fluor Corporation, which is under contract to the Army Corps of Engineers to help rebuild the electricity system in Iraq. Fluor asked me to use only the first names of their employees for their safety and that of their families. Everyone here has had a long day, mostly sitting at the airport in Kuwait waiting for a military transport plane to Baghdad. We begin drinking immediately. Perhaps in the spirit of imagining ways to unwind, the Fluor guys start talking about whether it's true what they've heard about there being a brothel in the Green Zone. And if that's true, is it possible that a person could, as it were, order in? You were told that for $50-- Might have been $20, I don't know. I'd have paid-- I don't do it, but, somebody said it was either $20 or $50, you could have them brought to you, to your trailer. [LAUGHTER] Do some investigative reporting. And you let us know! And if you do find one, let me know what the address is. By the time I was listening to this conversation at this restaurant, I had been in Baghdad two weeks. And I'd stopped counting the number of times a day when I thought, wow, it really is all men here. Mike from Texas starts out on a small tear. He's 30 years old with dark blue eyes, and a blonde moustache growing down the sides of his mouth. He instigates the brothel conversation, then orders a bottle of Captain Morgan rum, for himself. But the evening surprisingly gets less rowdy as it goes on. It turns out Mike is a geek, though a kind I've never encountered before, a power plant geek. He's really, really into what he does: the job, the tools. Absolutely, I want to see the kind of equipment they've got. Not only plant equipment and power producing equipment, I want to see what kind of cranes and logistical equipment we've got on site, and that sort of thing. He wants to see the cranes. The conversation gets more and more inside. Shim stock. Couplings. Pipe guys versus mechanical guys. And then you got civil guys that want you to set the pipe and set the machinery to the grade of the concrete. It's like, no, it don't work like that. There are guys who come to Iraq who know guns, and do guns. And then there are guys who come to Iraq who are technicians, or specialists, in some area. Geeks. Sewage geeks. Water geeks. Refinery geeks. Electricity geeks. These kids are standing and waving and giving you the thumbs up. Does this happen every time you come by? Oh, yeah. Yeah. When you don't see the children, there's a problem. If you don't see the kids that you normally see, you need to stop and find another way to it, because there's probably something out there that you don't want to get into, whether it's an IED-- IED, improvised explosive device. --an ambush, one of 100 different things it could be. Lee is unflappable. I know this, because 40 minutes before we saw these kids waving, we were in a traffic jam leaving Baghdad and got ambushed and shot at. It happened fast. My tape machine was off because Lee had been telling me about Fluor's security procedures and I'd agreed not to record that in order to keep them secret. As he was talking, we both saw a black BMW weaving aggressively in between the cars. We noted, without alarm, that this was, according to the private security guys in Iraq, the typical bad guy car. And it was driving in the typical bad guy way that private security guys were always warning about. And then, suddenly, it cut right in front of the first car in our convoy, the one just ahead of us, and stopped short. And we heard the fake sounding pop pop of real gunfire, and saw Fluor's security guys in the car ahead of us get out and start shooting. OK, OK. You're fine. You can hear Lee and his driver reassuring me, OK, OK, you're all right, you're fine. The driver even tapped the glass to remind me we were in an armored car. I'd forgotten, but I don't think I would have been less frightened if I'd remembered. Cars were stopped all around us, ordinary Iraqis caught in a shoot-out. We were trapped too, until the BMW sped off and disappeared into traffic. Then we drove off. We never found out where the car went, who was in it. I saw them come in front of us and stop. You're all right. You're fine. [LAUGHTER] It ain't going to bother me. [LAUGHING] Why, why are you laughing? We just got shot at. I've been here for nine months. This is probably the hundredth time. You've been shot at? I've had RPGs across the roof. I've had 62-millimeter mortar rounds hit in front. I've had the back end blown out of two vehicles. Some IEDs. Are you a drinking man? Nope, nope. Doesn't bother me. Just explain that. I've worked in too many countries that's been in violent conflicts. East Timor. Vietnam. Cambodia. Chad. Peru, during the Shining Path. I mean, this is just a common occurrence. Is this better or worse? This is more intense here. We've not had any incidents with our people. We've had none of our Western ex-pats have been hurt. Have any Iraqi workers been hurt? Well, that's another story. That is, yes, that is a fact. Lee asked me to turn the tape machine off again, though he said I could write down what he was saying. Six of Fluor's Iraqi security guards were killed when they blocked a suicide bomber's car. His own secretary, an Iraqi woman, was gunned down and killed in front of her house. He doesn't know why. He assumes it's because she was working for an American, him. A power plant is magnificent. If you ever get a chance to walk around inside one, do it. It's a world on another scale. 60-foot fuel tanks and hundreds of yards of huge metal tubing. A transformer that looks like a multi-armed robot on its way out to crush houses. Cranes, just like Mike from the Chinese restaurant wanted to see. This is a 450-ton crane. Biggest crane in Iraq. Right here. Right here. You know that thing in your house that kind of works but is really falling apart, and needs to be just taken out and replaced, or at least given a total overhaul, but, unless it breaks down completely, you're just going to keep it the way it is? That is Iraq's entire electricity system. Lee spent over an hour spelling out its problems for me. Even before the war, electricity would go on and off. Very little of the power grid was damaged during the war, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. The bigger problem is that most power plants in Iraq are at least 20 years old, and were starved by Saddam Hussein of money and parts for years. During sanctions, the plants fell apart even more. Iraqis who were glad to see America get rid of Saddam Hussein, now don't understand why, more than a year after the US invaded, promising to make their lives better, they're still dealing with blackouts every day. Electricity, after security, is the number-one frustration for a lot of Iraqis. Lee knows this. Fluor employees are working seven days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day, trying to fix six plants at once, at each one, cramming work that should take a year or more into seven months. Everything is a problem. Every one of the 28 power plants in Iraq, like a snowflake, is a unique apparatus, jerry-rigged and retrofitted and carefully taped together by Iraqi workers for years. This means repair at every plant must also be unique. All parts and equipment need to be imported. There's no manufacturing inside Iraq. There's also a worldwide shortage right now of exactly the big machines that are the guts of power plants. Plus, there's the looting, which everyone talks about, but it's hard to picture just how devastating it must have been, until you're standing in a 320-acre power plant, in which every gauge, valve, wire, small motor, and scrap of metal that wasn't nailed down or too heavy to move, was carted off. Rick Moore, the site manager, a tall, thin man from Oklahoma who needs to use more sunblock, says anything left behind was junky at a very special and rarely seen level of junkiness. You know, even something as simple as a shovel, when we first got here, a shovel would be wore out, if you could really think that you could do that. But the metal would actually have been wore almost all the way down because they'd used it so much. Karen Hahn is different from most people you've heard so far. She doesn't work with big equipment. She's never been in the military. She's from north of the Mason Dixon line. She's a she. And she loves being in Iraq. She loves it so much that she sounds happy, even if she's talking about screening bags at the Baghdad airport, which is the first job she had when she got here last summer. Here's why Iraq has made her so happy. A year ago, she was a divorced, underemployed single mother who was deeply in debt and felt cursed. She'd get a job, and a few months later, like clockwork, the company or branch would go under. This happened six times. She got to the point where she would say in job interviews, if you hire me, your company is doomed. She was broke. She was depressed. Finally, she got a job as a screener at the Greater Rochester International Airport. She'd only been doing it a few months when they asked for volunteers to go to Baghdad. Her hand shot up, to her own surprise. She flew out 10 days later, leaving her 11-year-old daughter with her ex-husband. Working for Custer Battles has changed her life. She's been promoted three times in the last year, and is now running their human resources department in Iraq, living a life she couldn't have imagined a year ago, and making bank. It's incredible to me. I can't imagine my life getting any better than it is now with work and life experiences. Wow. Yeah. Well, that's why I wake up happy every day. Some people wake up and they go, oh, it's another beautiful day in Baghdad. But I mean it. That's another thing. My boss likes to tease me about the Baghdad weight loss plan, because I lost about 25 pounds since I've been here. Get out. No. That's amazing. Why do you think that is? Well, the lack of depression-eating. That always helps. Doesn't that sound funny? [LAUGHTER] You came to Baghdad to relax and lose weight. Yes. My Baghdad spa. Karen knows it's a luxury to feel this way in Baghdad. She's living at the airport as well as working there, and it's a big, protected American enclave, like the Green Zone, surrounded by walls and guarded by soldiers, mostly insulated from the hazards of the rest of Baghdad. She tells a story about an Iraqi woman who flew into the airport. Her husband, child, and mother-in-law had just been killed. From a car bomb, Karen thinks. She flies in. And we're just trying to get this woman, this horribly, horribly distraught woman. I don't know how she did it. A cry I've never heard before in my life. We just, you know, got their vehicles airside, and helped out with immigration quite a bit, and we sent somebody to go get their bags, and made it so that she hardly didn't have to move and had some privacy. Oh, I was crying. I was crying so much. But I still have to do my job. But I'm just doing it crying. And they came back a week later to thank me, stopped to thank me. And I wasn't even working that day. And I got called down from my office to go and talk to them so that they could all give me hugs and kisses and thank me. And they said, I couldn't believe it! They said, I'm looking up and I'm crying, and all of a sudden, I see this tall woman wearing a gun, crying like a baby. And I said, I'm so sorry, I'm just so sorry. And I hugged and kissed all of them. And I'm glad I'm here. I'm glad that was me. The major crimes unit in Baghdad is in a small, grungy yellow building, like an old public school, with corridors dotted with small offices, each one with a desk, and a chair, and a guy, no computers. Jerry Burke is here for an inspection. He's a 57-year-old former Boston beat cop and detective, hired by the Department of Justice to be a mentor and adviser for Iraqi police, to help them build a modern police force. He's exactly the guy you'd want to be in Iraq, doing his job and meeting Iraqis. He respects and understands police work and human rights laws. He's patient, knowledgeable, and, frankly, cuddly. Unannounced, they don't know I'm coming. The kind of cuddly, though, that believes in surprise inspections. The Iraqi police guarding the jail open a locked metal door and show us into an area that opens to a filthy bathroom on one end, and has two rooms off to the right, stuffy, but relatively clean, each with about 50 men sitting on blankets on the floor, staring at us. This here is the most serious criminals: murderers, rapists, robbers, carjackers. What are you looking for? Just generally appearance, make sure none of the prisoners have been beaten, or seemingly injured while in custody. They do seem to be intimidated by the staff. They are getting on their knees. Yeah, they are sort of getting in cross-legged position. So what do you take from that? That the jail staff probably are sometimes forcing compliance. And what do you do about that? At this point, we talk to the General, just make sure none of them are being beaten. And I don't see any obvious signs of beatings, no bandages, no black eyes, no bloody scars or anything like that. I mean, this is good compared to before. When he first got to Baghdad, Jerry says, beatings were common in jail and food was not. If your family brought you food, great. If they didn't, too bad. Now Baghdad jails are providing two meals a day, he said, the Red Cross standard. Overcrowding can still be a problem, sometimes over 100 men packed into a room that's full at 50. Jerry checks in with the commander, General Rod, confers about the prisoners, and we head to the next station. So how did that inspection go? How do you think that station's doing? I think it's doing very well. The prisoner count is down. The prisoner conditions are not as bad as they were. Station's cleaner. There seemed to be a patrol returning when we were leaving, there was a group of IPs coming back in-- IPs, Iraqi police. --coming back in, that seemed to be coming back in off patrol or prisoner transport, perhaps. Under the previous regime, under Saddam's regime, they were discouraged, actively discouraged, from doing proactive policing, from getting out on the street. And the police did not do much in the way of investigations. They had no training, very little experience at it. A couple of bombings, the Jordanian embassy, the UN bombing, even the bombing at our hotel, when the police arrived at the scene of these bombings, they pretty much didn't know what to, except pick up the injured people, and then stand around. They had no sense of forensic investigations. There's more. Iraqi cops would never get weapons training under Saddam Hussein. They'd just get a weapon. No target practice. So they don't know how to shoot. Corruption was endemic, and many older cops see no reason to change. Jerry has the tiniest translator possible, with a tiny voice. Osma is 27, but can, and sometimes does, pass herself off as a teenager. She has long, straight brown hair, a small face, and is draped in what looks like a massive, sleeveless shawl, but is, in fact, Jerry's special lightweight bulletproof vest from home. He had it sent over for her. She's too small to support the weight of a regular vest. They have a routine. Jerry keeps trying to set her up with his driver, [? Hatten. ?] She amuses herself by making up stories that she tries to convince Jerry are true. For instance, an April fool's joke she played on him, which Jerry explains, with Osma shaking her head and correcting him. She told me that she got engaged to someone she did not know, that her family had arranged the engagement, and that she was going to be leaving Iraq. I called her bluff on their engagement. You knew that it was a lie? Yeah. No, no. Of course I did, you're always-- I swear, Abu Matthew. Osma calls him Abu Matthew, father of Matthew, his son's name. It's a term of respect and endearment. This is not testimony. It's not testimony? I knew you were lying. No, you didn't. Because you would not go in to an arranged marriage. You told me you would not let your mother and father pick your husband. But, Iraq is going to be changed. You told me that you would not do that. I will be changed as Iraq will be. The whole country will be changed, so you don't think I am going to change my mind? I just don't think you would let your mother and father pick your husband for you. This is a new democracy. She has freedom now to do whatever she wants to do. Yeah. This is a new Iraq. This is the idea of democracy as it's filtered down to the street, Osma said. Iraqis doing things they know probably aren't right, like driving down the wrong side of the highway, for instance, and saying, well, this is democracy, this is freedom. It's graduation day for the first batch of Iraqi police recruits to complete the new eight-week training program at the police academy in Baghdad. Almost 500 men and a few women in bright blue shirts and navy pants. They're heading into the most dangerous job an Iraqi can have, Jerry says. Nearly 500 Iraqi police have been killed in attacks by insurgents since the war ended. Two officers Jerry knew, leaders in reforming the police, were murdered. Some police officers have joined the insurgents. Some refuse to fight them. One tried to suicide-bomb the chief of police. The recruits march around, then stop and stand at attention in front of a raised platform with a canopy over it, where Iraqi and American dignitaries are sitting. Jerry is up there, also Paul Bremer, who gives a speech that's translated into Arabic as he goes along. He starts out with the Arabic greeting, peace be upon you. The men and women who are standing before us today are the line between civilization and barbarism. Bremer is delivering this speech the day after the killing and mutilation of the four private security guys in Fallujah. He has to address this, and he does, over and over again. Yesterday's events in Fallujah are a dramatic example of the ongoing struggle between human dignity and barbarism, that have put to shame the human jackals who defiled the streets of Fallujah. The cowards and ghouls who acted yesterday represent the worst of society. The central idea of the speech, that the people who mutilated the bodies of four Americans in Fallujah represent the worst of Iraq, and you, the new police recruits, represent the best, isn't a bad point. But by framing every compliment as a contrast to Fallujah, and by never mentioning how big a risk these recruits are taking by putting on police uniforms, Bremer makes clear he's speaking more to the home audience, to the cameras that will replay clips in America, than he is to the people standing in front of him. Taxpayers of the United States are providing almost $19 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq. We are spending billions of dollars to create-- The Marshall plan for Europe, George Marshall started writing that in 1942, even before we knew we were going to win the war in Europe. He was prepared for the reconstruction of Germany. So we didn't have that detailed a plan for the reconstruction of Iraq. Jerry is frustrated at the pace of reconstruction, both overall and in the police system. It took six months to get the Coalition Provisional Authority to buy guns and bulletproof vests for Iraqi police, he says. Not enough Americans were brought in to work with the new cops. And there's still a lot of corruption among the old cops, not just bribery, but cases of rape, murder, and kidnapping. Just last month, shots were fired at his translator Osma's house. Rather than take it to the police, she decided to resolve it with a tribal mediator, which even Jerry thought would be more effective. How's it going, men? It's a great day to be an American. I'm going to shoot some weapons. The last day I spent with Hank, the Custer Battles guy from the first half of the show, we pulled up to a soldier who was guarding the entrance to a shooting range where Hank and the Custer Battles guys were heading to get some target practice. Just before we stopped to get out, Hank said-- We are the frontier freedom. We are the centurions that stand post on the long frontier of freedom. This ended up being the theme of the morning, though it's the kind of thing Hanks says all the time. Once again, in this small perimeter, freedom has been advanced. You can smell it, can't you? Right here. If nothing else, our time together, Nancy, you should learn to smell the freedom. Freedom is the smell of good loads that have just gone down range, the wafting of a powder burned in the cause, a noble cause. There was a question I'd been trying to ask Hank the whole time I spent in Iraq about exactly this, the frontier of freedom, and his relationship to it. But I could never quite get it right, so I tried once more. And the question amounted to, do you ever have doubts about what you're doing here? I mean, a soldier's got a pretty perfect world, because he just takes his orders. And at the end of the day, you just say, maybe, maybe they were a little crazy with that order, but I did my part. You know, I held the barricade. Right, but that's, I mean, that's soldiers, and that's being in the army. And you're not in the army anymore. You're a civilian in a democracy. Don't you have questions along those lines? Well, not right now, because I'm actually kind of back right now. Back in a military mindset. Yeah. But yeah, on a daily basis. I've got a son that's in the army. So you sit back at a TV screen when you're not here, and you're going, God, I hope they know what the hell they're doing when they send my kid in harm's way. And the sad part is, you spend your whole life with a kid protecting him, keeping him out of the street. Get out of the street! Put on your bicycle helmet. What are you doing? Then, next thing you know, you're watching him deploy to combat. You're going, God, what have I done? So you've got an ambivalence, because he's out in the middle of the street. And you just hope, somewhere, that there's some tremendously bright guys that are sitting around a whiteboard and figuring it all out, and they have a plan. Unfortunately, every once in a while you meet one of the guys. And you should say, tell me you're his double. I'm coming. I've only fired 20 rounds. I'm getting all 20 of those. Nancy Updike. Well, our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer's Julie Snyder. In the year since today's program was first broadcast, the number of Iraqi police and military killed has climbed from 500, as Nancy said, to at least 2,200. And in fact the real number may be more like 3,000. 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 by Mr. Torey Malatia, who is not afraid of your guff. I've RPGs across the roof. I've had 62-millimeter mortar rounds hit in front. Back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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An apple, nobody gives their teacher an apple anymore. In her first year of teaching first grade, here are the sorts of things that Mindy got from her kids. A typical first grader will bring me things that would range from students that wrapped up their old McDonald toys, a pencil from the dollar store wrapped up. Some people sent in homemade cookies, which is very sweet. So last Christmas, the day before vacation, she has all the kids sitting on the carpet. And some of them have presents for her that they're all excited for her to open. And she has treats for them. And all the kids want to be picked. And they're raising their hands. So I have one student sitting so quietly and so anxious. So I call on him, and brings me up this bag. I start opening it. Like, oh, this is great. I pull out these black slippers with little silver speckles. And on the top, there's that puffy fssh, fssh kind of material, the real soft and feathery type of thing. And on the front of the slipper, in bright red cursive writing, they say "Playerette," with a little Playboy bunny on the back of the slipper. So I pull these out, and I'm like, oh, aren't these fancy? And they all start chanting, 27 six-year-olds, put 'em on, put 'em on, put 'em on! And they're all just cheering and shouting. And the kid's face, he was so proud and so excited about the slippers. But in my head, I'm thinking, did the parents have no idea? Do you think, from a kid point of view, when they saw the slippers, they just read them as fancy? Oh, absolutely. That's what it was. They had no idea that they said Playerette. They had no idea, at least, I don't think that they had any idea what the bunny would have represented. All they saw was fancy black slippers, silver sparkles, fuzzy things. That's what I love about this so much, is that it wasn't just one kid's judgment that this is the perfect present, that it's the entire class of six-year-olds. Like we might disagree on other things, but there is one thing that we can agree on. Oh yeah. It wasn't just a boy or a girl or a couple of kids. It was the whole class shouting, cheering. After school that day, as you might expect, Mindy nearly runs down the hall with her new slippers, eager to share the magic with a fellow first grade teacher. So I'm walking down the hall, knock on her door. You're never going to believe what one of my students gave me today. I walk in. I put the slippers on. She says, oh yeah? She pulls out her little lovely gift, some lingerie. And I literally, hhhuu, gasp. The actual lingerie? Yeah. What was it? A thong and a little tank top. Wait, a first grader gave her teacher or his teacher a thong and a tank top? Yeah. Yes. Was it sexy? Or was it cotton, like, cute girl? I would say cute girl. I say this as if it makes any difference at all. It's still a thong. Yeah. At what point, exactly, are you in the store, or shopping online, whatever you're doing, at what point is that something that's OK to give your teacher, is what I'd like to know. Do you agree? Am I a little bit out of line? No, I think all of America, well, not all of America, but I think many people are with you on this, including me. OK. Because at that point, when she held them-- and then I'm thinking, when they're looking through the sizes, are they checking you out? And that's clearly something that the parents helped order, yes? Oh yeah. The parents were in on that. I would say the parents completely ordered that. It seems like that would be kind of an uncomfortable parent-teacher meeting after that. If I was dating somebody, and they gave me a thong, and I hadn't known them that long, or we'd only been dating a short period of time, that would be like, OK, how inappropriate, right? OK, maybe this is the kind of etiquette question that we should all already know the answer to, but I have to say, I found it kind of a stumper. You're a first grade teacher, and the parents of your students buy you a thong, or slippers that say Playerette on them, not the right kind of gift for a teacher, you think. So is it impolite to actually say something to them about it? Or do you just accept graciously? Both teachers, in this case, accepted graciously. So I, yeah, when I was writing out my thank-yous to my students, I just said, thank you for the thoughtful gift. It was greatly appreciated. And I leave it at that, I guess, not really make it more of an embarrassing or strange, awkward situation. Perhaps there was a time when social rules were clear, when people knew what to say and do in certain situations. But the world changes fast. There are constantly new situations out there that leave us all improvising, inventing our own rules of propriety. And that's the subject of today's program. We have three stories of people forced to figure out how to maintain some decency and dignity in the face of some very unsettling situations. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our program today, Governments Say the Darnedest Things. In that act, government officials who want nothing more than a little civility, thank you very much, even when the facts contradict a lot of what they're saying. Act Two, Dems Gone Wild, in which a Republican tries to run for local office in a very Democratic district in New Jersey, evoking some rather disturbing behavior from his friends and neighbors. Act Three, Swiss Near Miss, a woman follows the rules of propriety. A man does not. Stay with us. The Wall Street Journal called me the preeminent scholar of profanity. And the Boston Globe called me Dr. Dirty Words. His other name, the one his mom gave him, is Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology and author of academic books with titles like Cursing in America and Why We Curse. A warning to listeners that in his interview, we mention directly and indirectly a number of curse words. He turns out to be very familiar with the basis of this FCC ruling. Our whole obscenity law is predicated on this idea that exposure to obscene material will deprave or corrupt children. And we've had that in our law since the 1600s. But there's no evidence that a word, in and of itself, harms someone. So what studies exist? What do we know about children and curse words, and what it does to them? I've done a number of studies over the years where we've gone into daycares, and we've collected what kids say to each other, kind of unobtrusively. I've also had informants go who worked in summer camps, and we just write down everything that happens. We carry these little 3x5 cards around and write down the who, what, where, and when. And by and large, every normal kid knows how to swear. As soon as kids learn how to talk-- we've got two-year-olds in our sample saying four-letter words. And a lot of times, they don't know what they're saying. But they are repeating what their parents and siblings say. Reading Timothy Jay's studies is the kind of experience that simultaneously makes you feel hopeful and hopeless about the very idea of social science. The daycare and summer camp data are broken down into pages of charts, listing dozens of curse words, and breakdowns of who says what at what age, and what kind of situation they're saying it in. The single most popular curse word, by a huge margin, no other word is even close, among children age 5 to 12, is the F-word, starting around age 5, followed by the S-word, when they are about 7. Suck, damn, and Jesus get a lot of play in the summer camp data. Hell, bitch, bum, and ass do pretty well in the daycare data. I just did a sample of 200 college students and asked them about what their parents did when they swore, and how they learned how to swear, and whether they were punished or not. And 96%, 97% of these kids grew up swearing. And most of their parents had rules against swearing, but most of their parents swore anyway in the house. And so everybody knows how to do this, swearing, and almost all kids do. And it goes on day after day with very little consequence, very little harm. Let me just read to you from the recent FCC decision about Bono using the F-word. FCC Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy said about the decision against using the F-word at the Golden Globes, she said "Today we take a strong stand against indecency on our public airwaves, and a significant step in protecting our children." What's your take on that? Most seven-year-olds already know what that word is. Most four-year-olds have heard it. I don't know what you're protecting them from. And most kids use this kind of language. I'm not going to lie. I've said some of them out loud. I hear it all the time in the hall and stuff. And I guess I'm used to it. When one of our producers, Lisa Pollak, went out and talked to kids around Chicago, aged 9 to 12, in their schools, they pretty much confirmed everything that Timothy Jay had seen. Bad words are everywhere. I get mad at my parents sometimes when they say it, because I have two younger siblings. And I think that it's just better if, for little kids, they don't learn it when they're younger. What age do you think when you say little kids? What age is OK to know those words? I think that around when you get in, maybe, third grade or fourth grade, that's a good age to actually know what the words mean. Because you're smarter. Do you think there are any kids today who haven't heard these words? Probably a newborn baby, like a new newborn baby that's still in your mom's stomach, but well, the babies that can't talk probably know it but just can't talk, I think. Now to be clear, these are very simple studies. They don't follow the kids who use more curse words for years, and then try to find out if their lives turned out differently than the kids who use fewer curse words. All the research can show so far is that most kids use these words, even if they think that it's wrong to use them, even if sometimes they aren't totally sure what certain words mean. And the research also shows that kids use the words in exactly the same way that adults do, in moments of frustration, or for emphasis, or in moments of surprise, or in jokes, or in anger. No difference. Like when I get into a bad mood, because my cousin, he broke something of mine yesterday, and I had got mad. And I didn't mean to curse and it just slipped out. And I said, you F-ing idiot, you broke my D stuff. And then I had got in trouble. When you're in an argument with somebody, and they take it too far, and then you just want to say, dude, what the H is your problem? Or there's just things you want to say. I think I used the first curse word when I was eight, because someone got me real mad and I was in an argument with my friend. And then I was like, you F-in' B, why don't you get out of my F-in' face? What did it feel like to use those words for the first time? Well, sort of, I felt relieved, because she actually listened to me. She actually got out of my face. You cuss when you hurt yourself and it really hurts. I'm sure you cuss, don't you? Do you? I have been known to cuss. Because you can. You're an adult. You have to let yourself free sometimes. This has great relevance to the law. In the past, the Supreme Court has said that the FCC is right to keep words off radio and television, if hearing the words could, quote, "enlarge the child's vocabulary in an instant." And that's one of the justifications cited by the FCC in the Bono decision. Quote, "We believe that even isolated broadcasts of the F-word in situations such as that here could do so as well, in a manner that many, if not most, parents would find highly detrimental and objectionable." I'm not even sure that most parents would find it detrimental. If you've got 60% of your parents using this kind of language in the home, why would it be more detrimental to hear it on TV than to hear your mom or dad say that kind of stuff? Has anybody studied the actual thing that the FCC is regulating, which is, what is the effect of seeing certain words or seeing certain things referred to on television and radio? What is the effect of that on children's development and behavior? The closest we've come to that, there's people who have been studying the effects of kids watching violent television and playing violent video games. And the closest they get to language is looking at rap music and the lyrics in rap music. And those studies show it doesn't have harm like watching violence. That's been clearly linked, correlated with later incidents of verbal or physical aggression, but words, no. The Commission in this decision said-- I'm reading from their decision-- "The F-word is one of the most vulgar, graphic, and explicit descriptions of sexual activity in the English language. Its use invariably invokes a coarse sexual image." The implication of this is that when Bono says F-ing brilliant, the five commissioners of the FCC actually are picturing penises and vaginas. "Its use invariably invokes a course sexual image." Is there any evidence that when people say F-ing brilliant, or use the F-word in this kind of way, that anyone else in America is picturing a coarse sexual image? Well, no. I have done my Master's thesis and dissertation on how people interpret taboo words. And usually, we think of them connotatively. So you do think of the emotional overtones of the word. You don't think of it in its denotative meaning. That's one of the unique things about this word. If you said, the F-ing good convention, people wouldn't think it was a convention where you had intercourse. They would think it meant it was a really good convention. F-ing brilliant doesn't bring up what the word denotes. It brings up the emotional feeling behind it. That's why we use this kind of language, because it's emotional. Do you have any sympathy for the idea that there's a general coarsening of the culture that's happened, more graphic stuff on movies and television and on radio, and that that is not an entirely desirable thing? I have no sympathy for that whatsoever. I've been asked that question for 30 years. It's the same question, aren't we going to hell in a handbasket because somebody said the F-word. But I don't know what people thought the common people talked in Chaucer's time or Shakespeare's time. I think this language has been around forever. On the other hand, I think we're a more civil society. We have laws now against harassment at work and discrimination at work, where racial minorities and women were excluded from a lot of places in our culture. Wait, you're saying there's more civility now than there was 100, 200 years ago. Yeah. I don't think swearing is part of some coarsening trend. If Timothy Jay is right, what it means is that most of our current law and Supreme Court decisions about indecency are based on some very unscientific notions of what bad words and images do to kids. And we wanted to discuss all this with one of the FCC commissioners, or FCC Chairman Michael Powell. The commissioners that we contacted declined our invitations to appear. But Chairman Powell's legal adviser, John Cody, said, sure. And we started with the studies. If there's no evidence that even repeated exposure to bad words hurts kids, I asked him, why ban these words? You know, Ira, I think you're right. At the end of the day, we haven't, as a Commission, or nor do I think, as a government, seen very many studies that have documented the causal link between indecency and its impact on children. It's kind of hard for the Federal Communications Commission to have to weigh what its actual impact is on children. And that's more of Congress's job. For us, we have a law that's been in place for 70 years that we, by statute, are forced to implement. And our hands are a little tied in the area, and in all areas in which our job is to enforce the laws that Congress writes. Let's talk about the Golden Globes decision. And I understand that you can only talk about this to a limited extent, because you guys have a kind of appeal that's up in front of the Commission still, right? OK, just to review for people what happens in that case. Bono gets this award at an awards show. He uses the F-word. And the FCC says, basically, the F-word deserves special treatment and special restrictions in its use. And the reason that it gives in the decision is this. "The F-word is one of the most vulgar, graphic, and explicit descriptions of sexual activity in the English language. Its use invariably invokes a coarse sexual image." It seems like what the commissioners are saying is that when Bono says "F-ing brilliant," they're saying that the problem with this word, and the reason why it deserves special scrutiny under law, is that literally, they're picturing an actual act. Right. I don't know that it's what they picture. I think part of that decision, though, is that the word in and of itself, maybe for the young who think about it, that's what it means. But the rationale is so strange. They're saying that the reason why it's important to do it is because the use of this word in any context invokes this coarse sexual image. And if you think about how it's used, for example, Pat Tillman, the football player who was killed in Iraq, his brother at a memorial service, saying, he's F-ing dead. So that clearly does not invoke a coarse sexual image for anyone. And so the premise of the ruling seems to be questionable. Well, part of that is, to be frank, as I think NBC argued, and some of the recon petitions argued, and we will have to look at again, when these words are used as intensifiers, as opposed to in a sexual context. But I think you're right. The Commission, at that point, felt, boy, when you use this word, and you're a kid, I don't know that there is such a thing as an intensifier. I think it is the utmost, it is the word at the top of the list. And that is kind of the basis of the decision. It's kind of a weird justification. Again, and that will be the subject of the recon. The recon, that is the petition for reconsideration. As you point out here that the FCC's own staff initially ruled that when Bono said "F-ing brilliant," it did not have any sexual connotation, and for that reason, it was not indecent. And it was the commissioners, the guys at the top, who went back and reopened the case, at the urging of a lobbying group, declared that "F-ing brilliant" means sex. We did ask the 9 to 12 year olds we interviewed around Chicago what Bono might mean by the phrase "F-ing brilliant." None of them saw it the way the commissioners did. Well, I think he meant that it was a really great award that he got. Yeah, I think he was just really happy and wanted to express his feelings. It's a word that you use when you're either very something. If you're very happy, I guess you'd use that. If you're very sad, or very angry at someone, you'd use that. He was very proud of his award. And he was exaggerating brilliant by just using F-ing. Recent decisions by the FCC are about more than just the F-word. In the Bono decision, the FCC explicitly puts broadcasters on notice that it is changing the legal definition of profanity. In the past, the Commission gave some weight to the idea of context. The F-word and other potentially offensive material could sometimes be allowed on the air, if it was in a context that had some redeeming value, if it was in a news report, for instance. But with these recent decisions, the FCC has moved the line on where context counts. Now they're saying the rule is, if a word is deeply offensive to some members of the public, or the Commission thinks that hearing the word might enlarge a child's vocabulary, that could be enough to overrule context. So the line has moved, though exactly where it has moved to is not totally clear yet. For instance, the Bono decision declared that now even euphemisms for the F-word, which presumably include the phrase "the F-word," are probably illegal most of the time. In our interview, John Cody of the FCC made a point of saying that context does still count lots of times. He pointed to page five of the Bono decision, where the commissioners specifically say that if there is quote, "political, scientific, or independent value," the stuff you're broadcasting might be OK. There is still wiggle room now. For instance, we did not overrule the Branson case, which is an old, I believe, NPR case with the Gotti tapes, in which he uses the F-word over and over, and-- Yeah, let's just explain what that is. That's a case where NPR had a wiretap of John Gotti, and used it in a news report-- this is back in the '80s-- and didn't beep out the F-word. And someone complained to the FCC. And the FCC said, no, no, no, it's OK in this context, because there's a clear news value to this. And you're saying that this decision did not overturn that? That's right. That's still good law, in fact. And I think what the decision really stands for, at the end of the day, is gratuitous uses that don't have a newsworthy reasoning behind them are more in the indecent camp than not. One of the things that's happening is that I think a lot of broadcasters are having to guess what's going to be OK under the law since the Bono ruling. Recently, another public radio show, Fresh Air, faced this decision where there's a singer named Nellie McKay who uses the word "suck" in a song, and not in a sexual connotation, more in a connotation like, that sucked, sort of thing. Yeah. And the producer of Fresh Air went to the lawyers for, you know, and they basically said, are we OK? And they said, absolutely not. That's just too risky. Yeah. My personal opinion is, I think that's a little bit of an overreaction on the broadcaster's side, while understandable. Again, they take these things very seriously. And they have to first and foremost think about their audience and their licenses. And they don't want to put them at risk. And I understand that. You know, I hear this a lot from the broadcast community, which is, just tell us what the rules are. Show us, give us bright line rules. But I don't know that you want the government to write a Red Book on what you can say and not say. I just think that that gets into a very dangerous situation. But on the other hand, not issuing a Red Book and saying-- it also does a kind of damage, because people are forced to guess and tend to-- they'll overreach, as in this case. Well, that might be right. And like you said, it's overreaching. I think with time, what is likely to happen is you're going to see the Commission do the opposite, which is it's going to deny some of these cases and give broadcasters more and more precedent by which to go by over time. When the decision says political, scientific, or independent value, could independent value also be literary value? Of course, of course. That's funny, because there's a David Sedaris story that we ran on our show years ago, that takes place in a bathroom, that violates all three of the FCC criteria for indecency. It's explicitly graphic in talking about excretory activities, which is one of the criteria. He repeats and dwells on the descriptions at length, because he's trying to be funny. And he absolutely means to pander and shock. That's the joke of it, in a way. So it violates all three standards. And my understanding was that today, we really could get in trouble for that, because context might not protect us. Well, again, I think we would look at the context. But I think you might have given away the-- again, I'm not familiar with it-- but you might have given away the context, in that he's trying to be funny, as opposed to be-- is he talking about Irritable Bowel Syndrome in a health-conscious way, or is he just trying to crack jokes? I think that's the distinction, that-- Can I play this for you? It's only two minutes long. And if at the end of it, you feel like, oh, you can't actually-- Yeah, I'm not going to be able to. But again, I'l let you play it. All right. Let me play it and then see if you have anything you can say about it. Here we go. We had Easter dinner at John's house, a big afternoon meal which we ate in his backyard. Everyone had taken their places at the table when I excused myself to visit the bathroom. And there, in the toilet, was the absolute biggest turd I have ever seen in my life. No toilet paper or anything, just this thick and coiled specimen. I flushed the toilet, and the big turd [? rousted ?] around. It budged and bobbed a little, but that was it. This thing wasn't going anywhere. Just then, someone knocked on the door, and I started to panic. Just a minute! At an early age, my mother sat me down and explained that everyone has bowel movements. "Everyone," she said, "even the President and his wife. Everyone in the world. Everyone but me." And I could picture them all, everyone from Red Skelton to Ladybird Johnson. But something this big-- just a minute! And I seriously considered lifting this turd out of the toilet and tossing it out the window. I honestly considered it. But John lives on the ground floor, and a dozen people were seated at a picnic table 10 feet away. And these were people who would surely investigate and gather 'round. And there I'd be, trying to explain that it wasn't mine. But why would I bother throwing it out the window if it wasn't mine? No one would have believed me. Just a minute! And I scrambled for the plunger and used it to break the turd into manageable pieces. And even then, I had to flush twice just to get rid of it. It was Janet at the door, and she said, well, it's about time. And I was left thinking that the person who left the huge turd had no problem with it, so why did I? And later, at the table, I examined each guest, trying to figure who was capable. Anyway. It's hard to say. But it goes back to that it's an area in which there is a lot of gray. See, but I would argue this one on just straight-up literary merit. If you think about the mission of literature, it's to describe situations that we all can relate to and have had some feeling of ourselves, or can imagine having a feeling of. And that seems to be what he's doing. I don't disagree with you. And we would take that segment that you had just produced. And the reason you add it is for, in part, news value, right? You're conducting an interview with a public official, and you're trying to explain to your audience the state of indecency law. Again, that would be factors we would have to take into consideration. Those are the types of things that I think the Commission has, and will continue to take, in consideration when we talk about context. We're outside of the isolated word, gratuitous use of the F-word here. We're in that gray area, and I would say in an area of the gray that traditionally has been more on the not indecent side than indecent before. But also thinking about what the Supreme Court says, the Supreme Court says, well, another problem is teaching a kid a word. If we teach a kid a word, then that's a problem. But in this, I don't think any kid would be learning any words from this. And in fact, I have to say this is a little monologue that a seven-year-old would love. There's no question. Again, you're right to be questioning. At the end of the day, what I think you're really questioning is the foundations of these rules, and do they make sense for that medium? And I think that's the right question. And my personal perspective is, I stand not just beside you, but behind you on that one, and in front of you. Well, so in a way, the best thing that can happen for the status of the law, and I sort of hate to say this, is that people would write in right now at your website, would go to www.fcc.gov and basically complain against me on this Sedaris thing. And that's the only way we would get a ruling that would define the law. Certainly on that particular incident, I think that's right. If the Commission were to come out and say, no, that wasn't indecent, then that would go in the ledger of those cases of, OK, well, this is seemingly OK. Are these things more like this case, or are they more like the Bono case? It seems the most likely outcome if listeners complained about this story is that the FCC would not rule at all. The current commissioners are much more exercised about sex than about bathroom humor. And the fact is, we did play the Sedaris story as part of a policy discussion, which makes the whole thing much more of an open-and-shut case for the FCC. It would fall into a more questionable area, and set more groundbreaking precedent, if we just played it on its own, no policy angle at all. There's no telling how that would come out. So. There is a bigger question in all this. And it's a question that, weirdly, Timothy Jay's cursing research is no help at all with. The question is this. Let's say that you agree with Timothy Jay's findings that show that cursing does not hurt kids. Well, then what do you do? I think most of us still would not feel very good cursing around children. Even Timothy Jay tries not to curse around kids, or his students, or strangers, for that matter, even though he's sure that it harms no one. In the same way, I think most of us wouldn't want wall-to-wall unregulated profanity all over radio and television, day and night. The kids we talked to were unanimous, by the way, on this point. They did not want more cursing on radio and television. It gave them an odd feeling, the swearing. Listen to how a group of seven of them reacts when one of the kids, in front of an adult and a microphone, simply refers to a swear word that her mom said. She doesn't even swear. She runs a day care. And then she had said go upstairs before I bust your S-H. Seven kids look at each other, hands over mouths, eyes wide open, in disbelief, embarrassment, giddiness. Then-- When these 9 to 12 year olds talked about how they thought that swearing was bad, it was not in a way where it seemed like they were parroting things adults told them. Well, I just don't see what the horrible deal is with swearing. But in my opinion, I wouldn't want my grandparents to hear swear words. If we were in a car, and the radio, I wouldn't mind it. But I wouldn't want my grandpa, my grandma to hear the lyrics and the music that I like to listen to. Why wouldn't you want them to hear it? Because it's inappropriate. It might upset them. It might, you know, why does he know these words? Why are we listening to this music? So it kind of comes down to being polite? Yeah, because some people are really offended. There's a lot of people out there who take that really, really, really strongly. A more sensible FCC policy might start right here. Instead of getting all hysterical about the harm that bad words are supposedly doing to innocent young psyches, we could all just agree as a country that some channels on radio and television should be as curse-free as possible. Not because it's healthier for anyone, not because we want to avoid teaching these words to minors who apparently already know them already, but because it just feels like good manners, because it's polite. Coming up, if Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev could be polite to each other, send each other handwritten notes, joke around, why can't Democrats and Republicans in New Jersey do it? Or men and women, well, lots of places? 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 in our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, propriety, stories of people trying to keep a sense of decency and decorum in new and difficult situations. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two: Dems Gone Wild. Ken Kurson had been around politics, but he had never actually run for office. He works with Rudolph Giuliani, co-authored Giuliani's book, Leadership, with him. And last year, Ken Kurson entered the political mosh pit himself. He ran for state assembly as a Republican in New Jersey's 34th district. Democrats dominate Jersey politics in a way that seems almost quaint to most of us who live in other states. Democrats control both houses of the state assembly, and the governor's mansion. And there hasn't been a Republican senator from New Jersey in over 30 years. Ken Kurson's district is overwhelmingly Democratic. It includes the town of East Orange, where Al Gore beat George Bush by a 40 to 1 margin. I knew this race would be just about impossible. Not only have I been personally unpopular my entire life, but the registration advantage alone was insurmountable. When Rudy Giuliani wrote a check for the campaign, he asked me, who should I make this out to, sacrificial lamb? So I wasn't getting into the race with any delusions about winning. But I did welcome the opportunity to shine a light on what I thought were some overlooked issues in New Jersey: property taxes, illegal campaign contributions, and public officials who hold multiple public jobs. Going in, I realized that if I managed to make it a race, my opponents would do whatever they could to make things difficult. I expected disagreement, apathy, maybe even anger. But what I hadn't realized was how darn uncivil my town could get. The vitriol and nastiness that would come from my own neighbors caught me off guard. In my own hometown, Montclair, plenty of residents are so sure of the correctness of their opinions, so convinced that their little voices in the wilderness are the only thing protecting this great democracy from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Aschroft-Wolfowitz-Scalia cabal, so righteous in their indignation over the fact that a town son would dare call himself a Republican, that the gloves are way off. In late August, I campaigned at the train station a block from my house. Now if you ever want to feel like a douchebag, I recommend concluding eight years of anonymously riding the train by suddenly interrupting your neighbors to talk New Jersey politics. By that point, I'd done this kind of retail campaigning hundreds of times in all five towns of the district, from the scariest all-night chicken joint in East Orange to the toniest country club in Glen Ridge. I'm not someone who finds it easy to introduce myself to strangers. Yeah, I know, a liability for a political candidate. Luckily, everybody was polite and even interested in talking over some issue or other. Plenty of people asked tough questions or challenged my positions. Most voters in my district are Democrats, after all. But I never, not even once, encountered anything uncivil. Even those who clearly had no intention of voting for me were courteous. And I was genuinely grateful when someone would say, no thank you, and save me the time and money of handing them a piece of literature or a Kurson for Assembly pen. But that day in August at the train station, one woman saw me standing there and started yelling at me. I mean top of her lungs, pop out crazy eyes. "Republicans are evil! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" Stunned, I managed to stammer, "Why are you speaking to me like this?" She pointed to the embarrassing little name tag that all candidates wear and said, "You wearing that badge gives me the right to yell at you. You're killing innocent Iraqis!" Um, I guess you won't be needing a pen. I wish I could report that this was an isolated incident. But it wasn't. The next time was at the Bluestone Cafe, a home away from home where I'd have breakfast several times a week. In the middle of September, the Sunday New York Times ran a long profile of my candidacy, headlined "One Montclair Republican Looks Strong." The piece was a total Valentine. The photo even managed to obscure my bald spot. It was a home run for the campaign and the day after it ran, my team met at the Bluestone to savor it. A bunch of the regulars congratulated me on the coverage. And then a woman sauntered up to our table and said, "Are you the one who's running for office?" "Why, yes, ma'am, I'm Ken Kurson. And I'd like to earn your support on November--" "I would never vote for you. And I can't believe there are Republicans in my town." She pronounced the word "Republican" the way one describes symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. All of these attacks on me were one thing. But when people started to question my wife, it became downright bizarre. One time, the woman who heads the Democratic Party in Montclair called our home and yelled-- yelled-- at my wife. "Your husband is a liar. He's trying to trick everyone by not saying he's a Republican. Are you so ashamed of it that you can't even admit it on your mailings? We're disgusted with your lies." Click. This tirade was prompted by one of my mailers that reprinted the Times article in full on one side, an article headlined "Montclair Republican," and on the other side featured a picture of my family with Rudy Giuliani. I'm not sure how I could have proclaimed my affiliation more overtly. But to be honest, I can't tell you how punk rock it felt to set off these little tizzies of outrage: the guy who took my little handbill at the train station and theatrically shredded it in a silent, heroic gesture of defiance, the woman who told my campaign aide that she cannot accept that a Jewish candidate would ever belong to the same party as a Nazi like George Bush. Montclair prides itself on its reputation as a bastion of liberalism and tolerance. Montclair voluntarily funds its own busing program. And Chris Rock joked that a newspaper called Montclair the nation's best place for mixed race couples. The worst place was everywhere else. So what kills me about this particular form of nastiness I encountered in Montclair, and only in Montclair, and only from white liberals, is that it came from people who would be mortified to hear themselves described as intolerant or hostile to those unlike themselves. In my campaigning in blue collar Clifton and minority East Orange, I experienced many polite no-thank-yous and plenty of passionate disagreements, which tended not to be about Iraq or President Bush, but over the actual stuff New Jersey assemblymen deal with, like tax rates and the state's notorious Department of Youth and Family Services. But not once, not a single time, did anyone stray close to the line dividing discourse from abuse. My campaign even made inroads into Montclair's minority community, especially after I was endorsed by the leader of the town's enormous Christ Church and was the only candidate to address its largely black congregation. But when it came to white liberals, how about the aging hippie who lectured one of my campaign's black volunteers on the obligation minorities have to support progressive candidates? When I asked an artist friend, someone I'd been very close to for 10 years, to design a t-shirt for me and my crew to wear in Montclair's 10k race, she refused. She explained that a cartoon elephant was a powerful symbol she could not abide. We're not friends anymore. I didn't win. I did far better than I was supposed to. And almost 2,000 voters crossed party lines to cast a ballot for me. But in the end, the district's two seats both went to the Democrats, as everyone knew they would. The incumbent, a man so dedicated to public service, he also holds three other jobs on the public payroll, and a woman whose chief attribute seems to be that she only has one other public job. Look, there are really nutty people on all sides of American ideology. And I'm not suggesting that Democrats have cornered the market on incivility. That's obviously not the case. Anywhere one party has numerical dominance tends to breed bullies. So the Democrats are bullies in New Jersey, and the Republicans are bullies in Texas and Utah. What's galling is when the Democrats doing the bullying pride themselves on their tolerance, or when Republican bullies cloak themselves in their religious faith, a faith founded on notions of forgiveness and turning the other cheek. Montclair is a beautiful town, but it's not for me. After the election, my family moved out. Ken Kurson is Director of Communications at Giuliani Partners and co-author of Rudy Giuliani's book, Leadership. Act Three, Swiss Near Miss. Samantha Hunt has this story that, among other things, is a story of manners, of one person acting with complete politeness and good manners, and another person not doing that. Actress Claire Beckmann read her story for us. My mother lowers her voice to a whisper, even though we are speaking across a telephone line from her empty house to my empty apartment, barring the slimmest chance that anyone might hear our conversation. Still, she quiets herself, as if to say, the story you're about to hear is too dangerous for broadcast on the regular frequencies. My mother has never been good with secrets. She used to think keeping them was akin to lying, so the secrets she did keep were special, only for her and my father, kept as a hedge against their children, as a private world for just the two of them, as a reminder of their lives before six kids invaded. This story was one of those secrets. She decided to tell me out of the blue recently, and she behaved as though it was no big deal. "Haven't I told you this before?" she asked. She had not. But things have changed since my father died three years ago. Now it seems the doors to mystery have blown wide open in my mother's life, as if proximity to the greatest secret of all, namely where my father went, diluted the power of the secrets she once kept. Now she'll tell anybody anything. In 1964, my mother was a 26-year-old divorced woman living in the town of Pleasantville, New York. In the months leading up to my mother's divorce, her first husband had plowed through dates with a humiliating tally of local women. My mother's first remedy, smashing her car into his when she found him engaged in a passionate Lover's Lane moment with a woman from the Episcopal church, failed to produce helpful results. So she left, joining the world of single women again. Single, but in 1964, not unstained. The divorce was painful. Her ex became abusive and so she needed a distraction. My mother convinced her friend, [? Kappy, ?] a lady with a large and fierce laugh, that they had to travel, they had to escape. Europe would be a good start. Switzerland seemed safe. Both women were itching to flee. However, Kappy's father, a Catholic, stood in the way. He would not allow [? Kappy ?] to be in the company of a divorced woman until he had first interviewed my mother. This unbearable interview included repeated uses of the verb "to know," employed in the biblical sense. Despite the odds, my mother passed his test. That's how they found themselves in the spring of '64 in Geneva, where waves of relief and sudden joy swept over them at each sighting of non-American packs of chewing gum, each pair of funny Swiss shoes, every syllable from a foreign tongue, all the small things that proved the world was not at all small in 1964. "We ate fondue every night. We'd never even heard of fondue before," she says. It was at the end of one such dinner when a waiter interrupted their hilarity. "Excuse me, mademoiselles. The gentlemen seated by the window there," and he pointed to two young Swiss men, "have insisted on paying for your meal." "We tried to protest," my mother says through the telephone, "but the men had already paid. And the waiter refused to return the money to them. So we shrugged and invited the men to join us." There's a twist in my mother's voice that is audible through the phone line. "They were extremely polite, manners that American women could only dream of finding back home then. Maybe a Midwesterner could have been this polite, but there were no men like these men on the east coast," she says. "These men held the doors, pulled out chairs, listened intently, paid for everything, and stood each time [? Kappy ?] or I even considered visiting the ladies' room. These were very different times," my mother clarifies. "After coffee at the restaurant, the four of us decided to go out dancing. They took us to a magnificent night club. And by this time we had coupled up, [? Kappy ?] and I having decided that she preferred one man and I preferred the other. I got the handsome one. His name was Hans. He knew how to tango beautifully," my mother recalls across the long-distance line. "The men were engineers working for an American company in Switzerland," she says. "Their relationship was that of business colleagues only, not friends. Still, we were all enjoying the night, and so continued drinking and dancing until 2:00 in the morning, when it was decided that what we needed was some fresh air. We thought a walk near Lake Geneva could provide that." The four set off on an early morning stroll. [? Kappy ?] and her date had a seat on the bench beside the lake, while my mother and Hans kept walking down to the end of the pier that jutted out across the surface of the water. "This was back before you just rushed into a hotel room and slept together," my mother clarifies yet again. Out on the pier, Hans stood directly behind my mother. The thousand lights of the city reflected off the lake. Romance was nigh, my mother felt. And again, a moment of relief passed through her, thinking of her ex, and then thinking of the exotic Swiss engineer who was just then no doubt preparing to kiss her. She exhaled, and at that moment, Hans placed his hands around my mother's throat. He squeezed. He tightened once. He crushed the cavity of her trachea. Hans wrung her neck thoroughly and effortlessly, as though he were a soldier trained in the exact art of compressing an enemy's jugular. No air could pass in or out of my mother's body. She could not move. She could not yell. She could not breathe. She stood staring out across the lake, her arms dangling by her sides, her feet nearly lifted off the ground by the vise about her throat. She thought, "This is unbelievable. A Swiss stranger is about to kill me." And then she thought of her life up to that point, as if to see how it could have led her here. She wondered, "Are these the wages of my divorce? Do I deserve this?" By the shore of Lake Geneva, my mother noted the moments that passed. Hans said nothing, only continued to squeeze, as if in answer to her question. Yes, this is exactly what you deserve. "The strangest part," my mother whispers, "is I remember the superb mental clarity I achieved as I was choked. In that clarity, I thought, I am going to die now. And the lights on Lake Geneva are beautiful. How sad, I was thinking, that beauty ends here. You really study these things when you think you're going," she says. Time, that all night had been a torrent, slowed to a drip. After a minute or two of strangulation, she was losing consciousness. She was staring down into the water, when finally, silent Hans spoke. He asked my mother, "What would you do if I didn't let go?" His breath was on her neck. And she thought, "He's breathing." He held the choke a moment longer. He let go. That part of the story is awful, being choked by a stranger in Switzerland. But both my mother and I believe that what came next is far more sinister. Rather than screaming bloody murder when she caught her breath, my mother, perhaps out of fear, or even scarier, perhaps out of fear of impropriety, simply turned and walked back to the bench, where [? Kappy ?] and her date sat talking. My mother said nothing. The four of them regrouped, walked back to their hotels, and politely said goodnight. 40 years later, my mother still has Hans's business card. She keeps the card in a bureau drawer filed beside a buffalo nickel her grandfather gave her, a clutch of two-dollar bills she saved, and a tiny red bean filled with miniature carved ivory animals. When I asked her why she kept his card, a reminder of how she almost died, she sounded surprised. "To get revenge?" I asked. "Oh no, not at all," she said. "I keep it because it's part of my life." That story from Samantha Hunt. Her novel, The Seas, comes out in the fall, and is published by McAdam-Cage. The story was read for us by Claire Beckmann. You F-in' B, why don't you get out of my F-in' face? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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How exactly is it that a person who is not gay comes to believe, really believe, that they are gay for two years? Well, one of the contributing editors to this very radio program, Nancy Updike, had that experience herself. And she says, she did not just turn itself into any kind of gay person, no, no no. In her case, it was total, complete, full-hearted unambiguous commitment. Completely completely and utterly. I worked at a gay newspaper. I only hung out with gay people. In my spare time, I read about gay history. I dressed like a dyke. You know me now as kind of a femmy person. Yeah, kind of a very femmy person. Yeah. I cut my hair short. And I didn't wear any makeup. And I sort of dressed to hide my body. I had male friends that I called Mary. And so was there any kind of limit to your gayness? Yeah. The limit was that I really kind of couldn't bring myself to actually sleep with women. So that's seems like that would be kind of a problem. It was. It was. I mean, at the time, it was sort of like, well, I'm in this difficult transition. And I'm sure I'm just about to do that. You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, I'll get to that. You know, it was like a loose end I hadn't tied up yet. It's like that squeaky door to the shed. You keep meaning to fix it. And every weekend it's like, I guess I forgot to fix the squeaky door. I mean, I just didn't want to. I just didn't want to. So how does somebody who feels that way come to think that they're gay in the first place? When Nancy had just gotten out of college, she moved into the city. Her parents were going through a bitter divorce. All her college relationships with boys had been disasters. That's how it felt at the time anyway. I was really unhappy. And I felt that this must be the explanation. I can't make these relationships work. They seem so awful. Part of what was awful is that I never trusted them. All my close friends are women. And I love my women friends. And it just seemed like sort of a short leap to like well, maybe I'm in love. Maybe that's what's going on. Maybe that's the problem. Right, you had heard stories about people like you where their relationships hadn't worked out and they were unhappy all the time. And it turns out they were gay. That was the problem. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like a snowball rolling downhill. Once you get the ball started you start to accumulate evidence in your mind that that's in fact the case. Remember that little friend you had in fourth grade, well maybe you loved her. You guys were so close. And maybe the fact that you like to wear pants, well that's part of it. You were a little butch. You liked to wear pants in high school when other girls liked to wear skirts. You really start to-- or at least I did-- really start to sort of put everything together to make that the story. Because I really, really, really wanted to believe this story. Do you remember the first step you took? Oh, well the very first step was probably breaking up with my boyfriend. But the step after that, I joined a lesbian feminist reading group. And it was just like history, herstory, and humanity, and huwomanity. I mean, I knew at the time this is not helping me. So for two years, this is how it went. Nancy was a reporter for the Philadelphia Gay News. She thought of herself as gay. Gay men and women would talk about how they grew up feeling like they were so different from their families, biding their time until they could leave home and be themselves. And Nancy felt like that was her story too. It had her story, except for the gay part. Nancy had never wanted to marry or have kids. And she loved that now she was surrounded by people who didn't want to marry or have kids. After a while, she did start to go out with a woman. But it was awkward and it was terrible. And reality started to set in. Little things would happen that would make her question what she was doing. One day one of her coworkers, a gay man, was heading out of the office for lunch. He came up behind me and he started rubbing my back, giving me a shoulder rub. It was kind of like the plug in the socket. It was just electric. It was the first time I had been touched on my skin by a man in a couple of years. In my head, I was just like Nancy, you've got to give this up. Within a week, she started going around to people she knew. She'd already come out as a homosexual to family and to friends, which is a tough thing for anybody to do. And now, incredibly, she had to come out again as straight, which is even harder because she was so embarrassed. And it was hard not being part of a group anymore. I felt so sad to leave that. I felt alone. I felt like, you know, I'm really on my own. From WBEZ Chicago, It's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, My Experimental Phase, stories of people who are very unhappy who decide to become somebody different, and love being somebody different, and then have to choose whether to go back to being the person they once were. Act One of our program, Funny, You Don't Look Jewish. In that act, a man who's living essentially like a very devout, 19th century Polish villager, jumps forward two centuries, starts watching TV, and changes very, very fast. Act Two, Miami Vices. In that act, a middle school students switches schools and tries out an entirely new personality. Stay with us. Act One, That's Funny, You Don't Look Jewish. This story takes place in Williamsburg, a neighborhood in Brooklyn where different worlds collide, or at least wearily orbit around each other. There's hipster Williamsburg, which is filled with galleries, and studios, and restaurants, and night spots, and lots of aspiring artists and musicians. And then there's Hasidic Williamsburg, which is pretty much stuck in the 19th century. You've probably at least seen pictures of the Hasids at one point or another. These are the religious Jews who shun just about everything modern. The women all wear long dresses, most of them wear wigs. All the men wear identical black suits, white shirts, black hats, and they have that hair thing, you may have noticed, something called payes, the long curls that fall near their sideburns down their face in front of the ears. These two Williamsburgs don't interact much. They hardly even acknowledge each other except on very rare occasions. David Segal is a staff writer and the former rock critic at the Washington Post. And he tells the story of one of those occasions. It's hard to imagine this about a group of people living one subway stop from Manhattan. But the Hasids of Williamsburg know next to nothing about the world outside their enclave. And that's the way they want it. The bible, they say, tells them to keep separate from everyone else, to build boundaries that are as thick as possible. Their outfits are meant to set them apart. And then there's the language barrier. Though nearly all of these people are born and raised here in the US, Yiddish is the only language most of them truly know. None of us know English. We don't talk English at home. We study English class one hour a day. This is Chaim. He didn't want us to mention his last name, for good reasons as you'll find out later. Boys and girls are completely divided. There's no movies. We don't know anything about the world. We don't know any celebrities. Had you heard of MTV? Not even close. We didn't even know radio. We never heard radio, not even AM. You know what I mean? So if someone had mentioned the Rolling Stones, or U2, or other rock bands, you would not have recognized those names? Rolling Stones, I would think it's something that injured somebody. I wouldn't know what Rolling Stones mean. At the time this story begins, one night, years ago, Chaim is 20 and single, which in the Hasidic community, is a problem. The problem though, has a highly ritualized solution. Through matchmakers, the groom-to-be is sent on what sounds more like a job interview than a date. The guy meets the father of the potential bride and he peppers the young man with questions. If the father likes the answers, the guy meets the daughter. And after a brief meeting or two, the pair decide whether to marry. Well, Chaim has been on a few these outings. And he kept flunking the father interview. On the night in quesiton, his would have been father-in-law asked Chaim if he would stay in school, in yeshiva and study full time. It would be prestigious having a scholar in the family. But Chaim had told him the truth, that yeshiva didn't interest him much. When he was rejected, not for the first time, his family thought he'd screwed up again. When I got home, everybody was telling me, why didn't you tell them at least that you would? Then you don't have to do it. Everybody was on me. And I was not very happy because most of us go at the age of 18, 19, 20, 21. Most of my friends were married already. Some of them had kids. I felt like the blame was on me why I am not married or something like that. Now to understand what happens next, you have to know that Chaim was the Hasidic version of a rebellious teen. He snuck away to watch an American movie or two, and had recently become a baseball fan. And on a few occasions when he felt especially hassled by his family, he headed to a bar for a beer, which is what he did this evening. A local bar, called the Right Bank where a man named Billy Campion happened to be performing. Billy was jumping up and down on the bar like a gorilla in a cage bellowing at the top of his lungs playing a guitar. Chaim watched and he was amazed. It was just loose. It was just, you know, fly. Everything was rocking. He was performing while he was jumping on chairs and throwing all kinds of stuff. It was cool to see how somebody was so free. And that's exactly what I wanted. I was so tight at that time. I wanted to get loose a little bit. So during the break, I see this very tall, Hasidic guy sitting at the bar, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, and watching the baseball game. This is Billy Campion, known to the world and indie music fans as Vic Thrill. On the night that he was pogoing on the bar, Billy lived a few blocks and several centuries away from Chaim in the other Williamsburg. Billy wears space glasses and secondhand tuxedos, and his hair is spot dyed a different color every couple weeks. But he's one of these guys who greets everyone on his block by name, from other scenesters, to cashiers who worked for bodegas. So it's bugged him for years that there's this huge population in his neighborhood, the Hasids, whom he knew nothing about and never spoke to. And a few weeks prior to the show at the Right Bank, he decided to do something about it. I actually asked God if he would introduce me to a Hasidic Jew that wouldn't mind showing me about the culture. I wanted to relate, you know what I mean, to people who seemed so different. You actually prayed to God about this? Yeah. I was standing in my place looking out my window. It faces south towards the Hasidic community. And I thought to myself, well, I need to bounce it off a satellite, you know what I mean, to get it over the top of the neighborhood. I figured I had to come in from above to get in there. The night at the bar, though, Billy wasn't really thinking about any of that. He just spotted Chaim and introduced himself. So I started talking to him. And I didn't realize this is a godsend yet, you know. And I was like, how's it going? He's like hey, nice music. And I was like, thanks a lot man. I was like, you really liked it? I was surprised, you know? I used to also make music, so you know, Hasidic songs. So when I saw Billy that night, I felt like OK, now I have a connection. There was never a Hasid that ever became a rocker. I was like, I have a recording studio up the street. I would love to have you by some time, you know, if you really want to get these recordings down in a quality way. And he's like, oh, maybe I'll take you up on it. So I gave him my phone number and I forgot about it. My fans didn't really show, I didn't feel, appreciation from my songs. My father never gives me a compliment. He doesn't even know how to take one. He's a very nice guy, my father. But he just doesn't know how to give a compliment. So when I had somebody that I was able to talk to, you know, I was totally for it, for him. And the first chance that I had to come to the studio, I snuck in here I was here. I got a phone call one day. He said yeah, hello. And I was like, hi. He was like, this is Chaim. We met down at the bar the other night. I wanted to come check out your studio. So I was like, I would love that. You know what I mean? And he came here and next thing you know, he didn't leave for a year and a half. The here that Billy's talking about is a converted industrial garage, which served as the apartment, recording studio, prop warehouse, and party headquarters for Billy and a group of his friends. They called it the Vic Thrill Salon. It's here that Vic Thrill's musical debut, CE-5 was recorded. And if I can editorialize for a moment, it's really superb, one of the best albums of 2003. Sci-fi pop with lots of hooks, deadpan humor. Like Devo, but a little more raw. The Vic Thrill's Salon is sort of a thrift store version of Andy Warhol's factory. In any given moment, musicians with names like Trance Pop Loops or Saturn Missile could be jamming on the couch. People's with video cameras came and went. Rock and roll manager named Mary Mayhem who dealt cocaine from her purse was a regular. Into this chaos walked Chaim wearing a buttoned up black suit and a rabbinical beard. If he'd been searching for the polar opposite of his Hasidic life, he couldn't have done better. But what intrigued him the most, was something found in about just any den in the US. It was the television. He watched everything, everything from like cheesy Aaron Spelling shows to like five straight hours of MTV. I would be able stay there about five hours or more. I would sit here. I was a heavy smoker. I was there for hours just watching, soaking in television. His favorite channel, of all the channels he watched, was MTV because of the years he'd spent writing songs in his spare time. His stuff was mostly biblical prayers set to melodies he made up, sort of like this, his rendering, in Hebrew, of the 23rd Psalm. MTV caused Chaim to give up the Old Testament as a muse and starting writing pop in English. But the guy was the cultural equivalent of an unfrozen caveman. Everything was new. Nothing had context. You take someone like that and expose him to daily and lethal doses of music television, something strange is bound to happen. He would not differentiate between Britney Spears and Eminem. He just thought music. Like that's good. That's not good. I like that. I don't like that. He didn't yet know anything about genres or what kind of demographic is into that. He just didn't care. So he was writing music that went from like very sensitive love songs about the show Pacific Blue. [SINGING] Midnight blue, you're so sweet when you come true. Pacific Blue. I had this one song. It goes like this. [SINGING] When I wrap my arms around you I feel your heartbeat. It's a time bomb to explode. Love is the ammunition. Sparkle, sparkle, beautiful eyes. Twinkle, twinkle beautiful lips. Warm me, warm me, beautiful body. Oh you're such a hottie. The meal is being served, but you know what's being observed. A little touching under the table, whoa, who needs cable? And a lot of the stuff doesn't make sense like Welcome to the Millennium. [SINGING] And heals our wounds. A happiness, I never pretend. Like, stuff wouldn't make sense. The problem was that my lyrics, usually when I did write, because my vocabulary was so small and my English was so poor, it was funny. Like any kid who discovers music for the first time, this guy was blossoming at such an incredible rate of creativity, the most prolific being you've ever seen your life. And he's saying to me, he's like, you know, I'm on my way to Yeshiva and I'm singing these melodies on the sidewalk. And I have these melodies. And I have these good verbal ideas. But I go into Yeshiva and I start the class and I forget them And I just need a way to remember these things. So I said, well, it would be good if you had like a portable cassette player or something like that. But he wasn't going to have one anytime soon. And his allowance is small. So I was like, you know what I do in a jam, I call my answering machine. And he heard that, man, and that was the solution right there. And he was like, oh, that's a good idea. Well I find that he doesn't have an answering machine. But, of course, I do. [ANSWERING MACHINE VOICE] Message one. [SINGING] Got no time, got no time to do it. Got no time, got no time, got no time to do it. It got to the point where I couldn't even check my own messages anymore because he was filling my answering machine with new song ideas from pay phones all over the city. Here's trucks whizzing by in the background. This guy is like [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. That's the keyboard line for the second verse of Midnight Blue. And then he hangs up the phone. [ANSWERING MACHINE VOICE] Message six. [SINGING] She comes from nowhere. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. I had become aggravated by him. Because he was coming around every day for no less than six hours a day and watching TV. I said, if I didn't have a TV, would you be coming over here? Is it my friendship that you're totally looking for or are you looking to watch some tube here. All right, all right, I've got to admit it. A TV, I'm addicted. I'm definitely addicted to the television and I need to do something about it. And he had been pestering me to write music with him. And I kept putting him off and putting him off. This guy's a pain in the ass, whatever. And then it dawned on me. That's when I said, I was like, this is the moment. Yes, I'll definitely write some music with you. And I wanted to make it as easy as I could on myself. I just grabbed my guitar. I said, sing some of those lines to me there. Welcome to the Millennium was the first song that we ever wrote together. And I said, sing the first verse to me. So he's like, OK, here's the first verse. The verse is: [SINGING] Here comes the night. There is no lights. It's so dark it looks like the end. A cold wind blows. A scary noise. A situation I'd never pretend. So I was like, OK, that's the first verse. So is that, [SINGING WITH GUITAR] Here comes the night. There is no light. It looks like the sun came down to earth. So I just like put chords like directly to the vocal line. And this is like how I proceeded from that point on. [SINGING WITH GUITAR] A cold wind blows. A scary noise. A situation, I'd never pretend. Welcome to the Millennium. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] for the Millennium. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] So that's what was happening. And then finally I had to start booking shows. The first gig that I got him, the first gig was at this place Joe's Pub, which is like a high profile joint. It's like what I would consider to be like a double velvet rope affair. I mean, you have to be somebody to get into the place. I mean there's like James Iha, the guitarist from Smashing Pumpkins, standing on line with some kind of supermodel. These are the kind of people that are standing on line to get in. On the night the performance, Vic and the band headed onstage in their regular, outlandish gear. Chaim is dressed in traditional Hasid clothes, black pants, white shirt, yarmulke. He was introduced at the craziest Jew since Goldberg, the professional wrestling star. I felt like that scene in Young Frankenstein. Ladies and gentlemen, the monster. And then this guy comes out on stage. That's what it was like. He came out on stage. People were just like, what the hell is this? His performance was like a mixture between Eminem or Snoop Dogg, you know like pointing in people's faces, just the most demonstrative hand gestures you've ever seen in your life. And then throwing kicks up in the air like a Hasidic wedding. He's mixing like this Jewish dancing with what he's seen on MTV. And it was so over the top. At first people were like a dog that had just been shown a card trick. Like people were baffled. And then all of a sudden, I was like, ladies and gentlemen, this is a real Hasidic man. And then the place just out of their seats hit the dance floor and went ballistic. They loved it. They flipped. And he became like an instant star. He was like this underground star. Coming up, putting the Sabbath back into Black Sabbath. The life of an underground Hasidic glam rock star, 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, My Experimental Phase, stories of people who take on a new identity as a lark and then start to face some serious choices. David Segal's story about Chaim continues. A warning that they mentioned the existence of sex in a general way in what's about to follow. The story at this point, by day, Chaim was a typical young Hasid living with his parents. By night, he was on the rock scene, the underground rock scene. Here's David A typical day went like this. He'd get up in the morning, tell his mom and dad he was going to yeshiva, cut class, and head to Billy's. He'd watch TV, eat, talk, hang out, watch more TV, go home for dinner. Then on nights when he was performing, he'd head out again, this time with his concert outfit tucked into a bag. He was really getting into the costumery of what we were doing. So the only costumery he had was Purim clothes, which is, you know, the Jewish Halloween basically. They get all dressed up. And so he had all of his Purim clothes. So that became his gig outfits, like this gold sequined cape with gold tinsel. This big almost like Hebrew Flavor Flav style necklace. It was like superman style. He would show up Hasidic with a little bag or something like that. And then he would go into the bathroom and just transform. He said to me, I need a name. You guys got a name. You're Vic Thrill, you got Saturn Missile. Everybody needs a name. So I was thinking about maybe I should have one. I said, that's cool. Have you thought of anything. I thought of a couple. I got this one. I got this one that sounds kind of cool. I was like, what's that? He says, Curly Oxide. Curly Oxide. It came in to me. You know I have payes, curls, curly. And then I wanted something like edgy. From what I've seen, the culture of music has to be some sort of a little edgy. Oxide came into me. I don't know why. So, Curly Oxide. And I go, that's great. I played down my reaction. That's great, man. That's great. Why is it great? He was like already suspicious. Hasids are suspicious, man. They look right through you. Why is that great? He said, what does it mean? Well curly, you know. Yeah, I know what curly means. I got the payes. What about oxide? Oxide, oxide is rust. It's like on metal. If you leave it out in the rain, it turns orange. I don't know if I like that. Oxide is oxidation. It's about something undergoing change, a transformation from one thing into another thing. I like that. I like the sound of that. Because I'm undergoing a transformation. I am undergoing a transformation into Curly Oxide. Ladies and gentlemen, Curly Oxide. So then you began performing pretty regularly with him? Did he get a reputation? Did people find out about him? Oh yeah, yeah. He would perform then regularly down at the Right Bank. And then we would have him come up and play for the bigger Vic Thrill shows, Mercury Lounge, Bowery Ballroom, the WestBeth Theater when that was still around. And people loved it. This is Curly Oxide on a typical night at the Right Bank in a video recorded for the Vic Thrill Salon. The Right Bank is a cramped little club without a stage. The crowd gawks and dances. And Curly holds the microphone with both hands like someone's going to try to steal it from him. On nights like this, women occasionally threw their underwear at him. He had a song at a club jukebox. He'd become a local phenomenon. He stood out and at the same time began to fit in. I witnessed an accelerated adolescence with this guy. In the course of a year and a half, I watched the guy go from 13 to 20 years old. Deep inside a lot of people have, I would call, the beast of within. When you see sometimes people get drunk [UNINTELLIGIBLE], there's a moment that now they can be what they really want to be and nobody will accuse them of being that image. They would just do it. They would just be like crazy and throwing stuff. I would be insane. I would like doing certain sounds and stuff and dancing. I felt like doing whatever I intend on doing and nobody can stop me, and being appreciated for it. Was it satisfying? Absolutely. Hell yeah. He inspired everybody. He lit a fire under everybody's ass in this place. He was so unafraid. And I think you envied that. He hadn't been told yet that he was going too far in any way. And I think that a lot of people over the course of their lives, if you started at 13 years old, you may have been burned by some extremes here and there. And he hadn't been. And these are all little horses that we fail to get back on when we've been hurt. And he hadn't experienced that yet. And it definitely caused me to get back on some horses and not be so embarrassed and self conscious about the way I performed. But the life of a Hasidic rocker has some built-in complications. Chaim dreamed about singing Welcome to the Millennium for a crowd of millions in Times Square on New Year's Eve of 2000. But he dropped that plan when he realized the date fell on the Sabbath when work was out of the question. For a while, for more than a year in fact, he nurtured Curly Oxide. But he was a Hasid too. And he knew he couldn't be both people for very long. He began dropping hints to his parents about his secret life. And he got sloppy about concealing the evidence of his alter ego. His mother found lyrics in English that he left lying around. His father found a fan letter in the pocket of his pants. Plus he was coming home later and later, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00 in the morning. Sometimes his parents would be up waiting for him, distraught. My parents were like, you're killing me. You make me have a heart attack. It's not good for you. You're going to regret it. They tried to talk because they knew they couldn't go on in a strict way. Because they knew that any strict thing then do, I'm out. My dad wouldn't say anything. I would just dump myself into the bed. It would bother me. What am I doing. I would try to turn them off against those feelings. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. I started to actually get phone calls here. I had caller ID and I saw his last name on it. And he was here. And I was like, wow. I guess it's just started. Because I've seen Hasids go down to the Right Bank and pull Hasids out of there saying, you shouldn't be in there. And then argue with the people in there, non-Hasidic people arguing on behalf of the guy who was in there. And they say, you stay out of this. Stay out of this. This is none of your business. And I felt like, uh oh, this is about to happen with me. Chaim's parents never confronted Vic. But they weren't about to lose their son without a fight. They began a massive hunt to find Chaim a wife as quickly as possible. They called everyone they knew, took recommendations from relatives. They networked with matchmakers. But Chaim was inching further and further away. He'd saved up some money. He was taking bartending classes. He had an exit strategy. Basically, the race was under way. His parents were trying to find him a wife before he actually left into the secular world for good. Oddly enough, the secular world seemed to be rooting for his parents. The one point he was going to cut the curls. He told me, he wanted to move in with me and he wanted to cut the curls. Jokingly, but with serious undertones, I said, if you cut the curls you're out of the band. I was like, I'm telling you man, if you cut the curls, we have no act. That's what I'm saying to you. Do you know what I'm saying? As the managerial type, as the music business type, the talent manager, I was mainly worried that the act was going to lose its luster if he became like us, and that it was going to turn to bad music. And the innocence, I think another big thing is that the innocence would be lost. And the innocence is where he was creating from. I just didn't want him to cross over entirely. I didn't want to be responsible for that. I could have gotten him on Howard Stern. Stern would have eaten that up. Part of me, like a selfish part of me, would have liked to have seen that. Stardom, of being a character, he was a prime candidate for that. But I didn't want to. I've heard that if a Hasid decides to cut the curls and leave the sect, I think they sit shiva actually. I think the parents sit shiva as if he's dead. So I didn't want to be the arch enemy of his family. Chaim, as it happens, had reservations of his own about abandoning the Hasidic world. I was very torn. I was just torn. All along I knew that what I was doing was not in line with my upbringing, with the Hasidic way, with the Torah way of life. So I knew that I wasn't doing something right. But I liked it. And I felt that I was accepted. So I had these two paths. And I said, I can't choose. I don't know. I love both. As he said at one time, my parents are desperately trying to find me a wife. And I really want a record deal. But if they find me a wife first or if I get a record deal, it's God's will. And I'm going to do that. A record deal or a wife. If Chaim thought the choice was in the hand's of the Lord, he'd underestimated his mother, who called him one night while Chaim was in Manhattan getting ready for a show. A certain young lady would be at a certain wedding that evening, she told them. Maybe Chaim could swing by and take a look. At first he said no, and begged offed with a few excuses. But his mother then sounded so sad. He felt a wave of guilt and reconsidered. Chaim changed back into his Hasidic clothes and went to the wedding, where he eventually got a quick glance at this young lady from a distance in a parking lot. Chaim was not impressed. I was like, for this they made me again come. OK, another bust. So I went home. I said, for this? Next time before you send me somewhere get information on what we're talking about. So I went back down to the basement. I got back dressed. And I went to perform that night until 4 o'clock in the morning. But the girl felt differently. It turned out that she liked him. And that softened him just a little, enough to get Chaim to agree to a date, a Hasidic date in her living room surrounded by family. My parents were sitting in the kitchen and there was no door. And I felt totally uncomfortable. They were talking about for maybe 45 minutes. This is the first you'd spoken to her? Right. There's not too much to converse. You went to the yeshiva. And when do you want the kids? And what do you want your kids to go to the yeshiva, and to which yeshiva? Because there's like all kinds of yeshivas and stuff. I wasn't crazy over it. Because I was in a totally different world at that time. Obviously I was Curly Oxide. And all of a sudden I'm put on back into this other personality. I was totally two different persons. The matchmaker goes in and talks to my mother and says, they want to finish it, tell me the girl wants me. That was it. I'm married. I have two beautiful children. Now wait a second, wait a second. Let's back up. It was that quick? Yeah. We spoke Saturday night. And we became engaged. There was an engagement party the next day. They were indeed married three months later. This might sound incredibly fast, but in the Hasidic tradition no one marries for love. That comes later hopefully. And Chaim had spent far more energy dreaming about the Billboard Charts than about being a husband, even in the back of his mind that a day of surrender was probably inevitable. And that it meant returning fully to the fold. No more rock star, no more carousing, the end of the beast within. But you knew that you were killing Curly Oxide at that moment you agreed to get married? I knew that this character is going down, yeah. We knew that it was just like a show. We knew that the show is going to be up. And then there's going to be time to close it. Were you sad that that show's going to be over? I can put myself back in the moment, and I didn't think-- because my whole life can tumbling, because these two years, it was like so shaky. All of a sudden, OK, I came back. They're like, oh, you you are normal. You are getting married like everybody else. And I couldn't think. I didn't even realize what was happening. Were you relieved? To an extent. Billy, for his part, was kind of relieved too. And now having chaperoned Chaim through his world, he wanted at last to get a glimpse at Chaim's, which would be tricky. You know, the toughest part of the whole thing was that he wasn't going to be able to invite me to the wedding. Because non-Hasidics are not allowed at the wedding? Absolutely not. But we found a solution to that. We found a loophole to that soon enough, which was he hired Cass, Chris Cassidy, who was our videographer at the Vic Thrill's Salon, to film his wedding with me as the assistant. At the time, I had a green mohawk which I had to stuff under a hat. A yarmulke would not have concealed this thing. So we went in there and we shot the wedding. And the wedding, that was really like the third stage on the divine gift of his friendship was to witness a Hasidic wedding. It was like nothing I had ever seen in my life, the fact that we got to see them married under the tent. It just seemed like such an ancient ceremony too, the ritual of it with her walking around him and the constant prayer that was going on. I really felt like the love for these two, and how important it was that everybody gather around them and pray all together. And then going into the building to watch them run down the hallway. And he's smiling. And I'm like, this is my old buddy man, he's smiling at me. I didn't realize that this was the turning point. They turned off into a room. And that's where they go to consummate the marriage. A small room, I think, with a bed in it. And everybody just eats out in the hall, out in the dining hall, which has a partition down the middle of it. And the men are on one side and the women are on the other side. So we had to leave the hall at that point when they had gone to the room. And we were invited back in when they were being carried out on the chairs. And they placed down in their separate rooms there. And they have to dance with everybody in the room. He danced with hundreds of guys. I mean, it's incredible, the energy that you have to put out on your wedding night if you're Hasidic is just incredible. Now his father had suspected something of me. Because a few of the Hasidic guys at the wedding had winked at me and come up and elbowed me. They knew me from the legend of Curly Oxide. Several of them had gone down to the Right Bank because his song was on the jukebox. They heard about that. And so this guy was like a legend in his neighborhood. And they were coming up to me. And I think the father saw some of this going on. And he would give me what I call the skunk eye every once in a while. He gave me like this hairy eyeball. And I zoomed in on him every time he'd do that. So I had this up close footage of the hairy eyeball from his father. It was incredible. At the very end of the whole thing, I walked up to him. Because everybody was shaking his hand at that point. And Cass shook his hand. And I walk up and I shook his hand like a total stranger. And we had zero energy transferred between us in the old way. You know, we really blocked it off. Congratulations man, she seems like a beautiful bride. And that was it. And we had a big laugh boy, afterwards though when he showed up here. I mean we laughed for like half an hour over this whole thing. Years after that half hour laugh, Billy Campion is touring at Vic Thrill playing shows around New York and throughout Europe. If you ever catch his act, you'll witness a guy as antic as anyone you'll ever see on stage. Pager on vibrate is how one observer put it. The unembarrassable style owes a little something to Curly Oxide. In the months after the wedding, every once in awhile, Billy and Chaim would get together just to catch up. But almost immediately, Chaim and his family moved an hour upstate. Now he doesn't see Billy much. In part he relocated to avoid the temptations of his old ways. Then again, he doesn't sound like a man on the verge of a back slide. I didn't even want to think of missing it, because I'm missing it. Meaning I'm not there, so why even go there to feel missing it. You blank out. You try. You blank yourself out. I mean, I know that I can't have. But you know what I would like over there. And I like my life now. And I would lose everything going back. There's too much to lose. And I know that I can't have it. So I wouldn't even touch that. Does your wife know that you had this other life as Curly Oxide. Yes, she actually does. I told him. I actually regret telling it. Because let me tell you, if don't know if you guys are married. But anybody that is married, do not tell you wife your past, especially your troubled past, I mean the stuff that you did, your mischief past. I asked Chaim, would he tell his son if the boy announced one day if he wanted to sing in a rock band. Chaim almost frowned. I'd tell him to sing something traditional, he said, and songs that are Yiddish. As for Curly Oxide, there's hardly a trace of his career anywhere. He never released a CD. And last year the Right Bank closed. And that unplugged the only jukebox in the world where you could hear his music. David Segal is a staff writer for the Washington Post. He also has a website, www.jewsrock.org. Act Two, Miami Vices. This next story was recorded as a live stage show in Los Angeles called Mortified, in which everyday people stand up on stage and read from their own teenage diaries. One person took the stage one night with Sascha Rothchild. A quick warning for sensitive listeners, that she mentions all kinds of fooling around with teenage boys in what follows. Hi everybody. My name is Sascha. And to give you a little background, I grew up in a very upper class, Jewish household in Miami Beach. And I went to elementary school. For elementary school, I went to private school. And I hated it because the kids were really mean to me. So I really wanted to go to public school for junior high, and my parents let me. And this is what happened when I went to public school. And I'm 13 here. A lot happened today. I made out five times with Jose Pola. He said, I kiss like a rich girl. He had the longest tongue. I really like his best friend, Carlos. I think Carlos likes me. Jose and I are just good friends. But we fool around because we think each other is hot. I'm reading The Diary of Anne Frank. It really means a lot to me. First of all, I'm Jewish and that means a lot to me. Also, I recently got you and started writing in you. The Diary of Anne Frank has really inspired me. Anyway, Carlos and I finally made out. Jessica is being a bitch. After I was with Carlos, I spent some time with Tyrone, Treyant and Tyrell. I love them. I like black boys much more than white boys. They're more fun. It gets worse. So much has happened. I went to a big party at Gira's house. The party was awesome. I got completely drunk and started talking to these older guys who had beer. They gave me a lot. The older guys liked me and they wanted my phone number. I gave it to them. I'm worried though. I'm turning into a bad girl. My grades are dropping, I'm drinking a lot, I'm lying, et cetera. I don't want to tell Diego and Shane I'm only 13, but I also don't want to get raped or anything. I don't know what to do. I think I'm going to lose my virginity very soon. The scary thing is is that I'm having so much fun. So many guys like me. I'm so [BLEEP] popular. My mind and body are 17, but I'm only 13. P.S. I have grown so much inside in the past few months. Hey, what's up or down? I put the arrows up or down. Well, things are totally up with me. Helder and I are going out. I like him so much. He's so cool, nice, funny, caring, sensitive, and [BLEEP] fine. He has such a nice body. In the movie, Helder and I made out a lot and we went to second over the shirt. It wasn't a big deal. Later dude. I wrote later dude literally. OK, a lot happened. First of all, Helder and I broke up yesterday. I dumped him, in parentheses. The day after we went out, and went to his house and we were in bed naked together. Don't ask me how that happened. I wouldn't sleep with him and I think he got mad. Since then, it seemed all Helder wanted was to have sex with me. I broke up with him six days after we went out. Aye, literally aye-- because I'm hanging out with Cubans-- so I'm trying to understand how to speak Spanish. Well a lot of [BLEEP] [BLEEP] has happened. I have been getting drunk and stoned everyday. Also, Diego and I broke up. I didn't mind that he was a drug dealer, but it just wasn't working out anyway. Anna and I aren't friends anymore. Cricket and I are very good friends. And last but not least I'm going out with Antonio. We have been together for nine days. I really like him. I'm planning on sleeping with him. Oh, and I tried cocaine. It's the coolest [BLEEP] thing on earth. I think I'm addicted. Oh well. And the downfall continues. Antonio and I got into our first big fight last night. What a temper! We made up though. I like the way he makes me feel. I'm the woman and should be kept in my place. Of course he is a Cuban. Well, I got to go change my tampon. At least I'm not pregnant yet. What's up, yo-- literally in the diary, what's up yo? I have done flake five times today. For those of you who don't know, flake is a pseudonym for cocaine if you're not cool. I have done flake five times today. I loved all of them. I'm not doing any more, for now at least. I like it too much. The high is worth the low. I'm also trying to stop smoking pot. I'm getting really burnt. Instead I'm smoking cigarettes and shoplifting. I love it. I get such a head rush. Today I stole three pairs of underwear, one bra, and two shirts. It was too easy. We're nearing the end. Oh my god. It has to stop. It all has to stop. I'm going to change my life around. I snorted two huge bumps and then I came down hard, real hard. The high isn't worth the low anymore. I have to stop hanging out with these people. I'm going to [BLEEP] up my life. I'm scared, really scared. OK, this is a month later. Hi, I'm still alive and not pregnant yet. I broke up with Antonio and I'm going to NA. I've been off cocaine and pot since October 2. I'm doing really good. I'm still having fun without totally going crazy. I think I'm going to sleep with Jason. I really want to because he's so hot and he thinks I'm hot. so many people do. I'm so popular and scandalous. I'm leaving out so many details that I hope I don't forget. But my hand would hurt if I wrote them all down. It's time for a new diary, but this one will always be most memorable. Later dude. Sascha Rothchild is still not pregnant. She graduated from high school drug free and with honors. She's now married, a writer living in Los Angeles. She was recorded at a show called Mortified. Thanks to David Nadelberg who runs the show. More info at www.getmortified.com. Our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Will [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia who can be heard at bars all over Chicago walking up to young people and saying-- I have a recording studio up the street. I would love to have you by some time if you really want to get these recordings down, you know what I mean, in a quality way? Hey, worked on me. Back next week with more quality recordings of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK, America, here's something you don't run into every day, a six-month pregnant lady sitting on a tractor. Do you want me to start it? Sure. Susie lived on the farm for years before she ever got onto the tractor. Her husband, John, is the farmer in the family. Susie's here in rural Tennessee because of him. I was never like a person who idealized farm life. I didn't grow up on farm, I grew up in the suburbs. We didn't have a garden, like I didn't have any romance about farming. I knew people who grew up on farms and they were just poor. That was my idea of farming, more or less. She first got on the tractor because she had to, after John had a scare in the spring with a neurologic disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome. The timing was pretty bad. They'd already done the part of farming where you spend all the money to get the seeds into the ground. And then literally, the day before the first harvest, the day before they were going to take the stuff to market for the first time, when they would first be making money, John went into the hospital. Eventually I was paralyzed, quadriplegic. I couldn't swallow, couldn't walk, talk, couldn't shut my eyes, couldn't sleep. And we had no other help on the farm regularly, so we just decided to write off this year's farming. At that point, Susie was five-months pregnant, going to the hospital every day, where John needed more and more help. He's fine now, but at the time they were scared. He was losing all neurologic control of all of his muscles and they had no idea how bad it was going to get. Susie was also caring for their four year old daughter, and they didn't have much family nearby to rely on. They'd just moved to the area two years before, didn't know people so well. Didn't belong to a church. They knew the farmers in the farmers market, but didn't really socialize with them. They'd never been at each others' homes. for example. And so they were surprised when the farmers at the farmer's market but up a sign in John's booth at the market, explaining his illness, collecting money for him. They opened up a fund, which I was-- they said, do you mind if we do that? And at first I just thought, yeah. I said to John or I said to John's sister, does that mean people think we're poor? I felt like a fund? You know, it just felt like well, we kind of need a fund. It's like, all right, right. So I said, OK, fine. So they set up this bank account as the fund and they collected all this money. Susie and John's next door neighbor came by every day for six weeks and harvested their flowers and sold them from her booth at the market, giving the money to Susie and John. A customer made two paintings of flowers that Susie and John had grown, and sold the paintings with the money going to Susie and John. The women in Susie's book club all wrote checks. Then one day, at the height of a farmer's busiest season, when spending any time away from the farm costs them money, 10 farmers came and spent the day working in John and Susie's fields. Which really touched John. They're taking the day off from their own farm. So they're sacrificing their farm to come out here. Meanwhile, at the preschool where Susie and John take their four year old, Hannah, a school which is not a small town farm school, but a school in a regular suburb of Nashville that they drive a half hour to get to, Susie was informed that the next few months of Hannah's tuition had been paid for. And one of the mothers from the preschool called Susie in the first week of all this trouble and said-- If you need help with child care, you're going to need help with this. And she said, are you pregnant? Like you can't eat that hospital food. I said, yeah, but I couldn't coordinate. Like my mind wasn't-- I was trying to try to make sure John was getting the right care and make sure-- I was still trying to keep farm things kind of going. So my brain for coordination was just shot. And she said, we're just going to make a plan here about some of this and we'll just run it by you. And I said, that's great. Next thing Susie knew, they were handing her a schedule of parents who were going to bring food to the hospital every night. And families who would take Hannah after school every day for the next two weeks. That, to me, was sort of a really-- I mean, I was surprised how much we needed it. I thought we could just sort of patch it together and I could just come home and we just couldn't do it. We just couldn't do it. It changes things having people reach out to like that. Before John got sick, Susie sometimes still had a little daydream of what her life would have been like if she had moved to a big city, like her college friends did. She pictured going out to neighborhood restaurants, hanging out with people. But she says this experience made her feel like she had her life in Tennessee, like she could never move. There's always been a feeling of like, how did I land here exactly? And I feel now like it feels like just where we need to be. I just feel like everybody I've told about it, who live in all the places, or have all the lives that I sometimes think might have been mine in other ways-- People in New York and Chicago and Minnesota? People in big cities or in funky, cool places that I sort of think maybe would have been nice or whatever. They all seemed so shocked that people would surround us and help us this way. And I feel shocked at that. I feel like it doesn't feel easy to come by. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, "Someone to Watch Over Me." Stories of people stepping in to help other people, whether they're ready for it or not. Act One of our program today, "Doctoring the Doctor," in which a wife cares for her husband who is the worst kind of patient of all. Namely, a physician. Act Two, "The Over-Protective Kind," in which a husband worries about his wife's safety on a very dangerous adventure that she's undertaking to a beach resort. Act Three, "Are You a Man, or Are You a Mouse." Aimee Bender contemplates what to do if your man changes from one to the other, literally. Stay with us. Act One, "Doctoring the Doctor." Douglas Forde spent his life taking care of others, as a physician in Los Angeles. But in 2003, he had some strokes and was diagnosed with a kind of dementia, something called multi-infarct dementia. It's related to Alzheimer's. Douglas' wife, Jo Giese, is a radio journalist, usually for the radio program Marketplace. And she made dozens of hours of tapes over the course of eight months when she was caring for him and had people in and out of the house taking care of him. The kind of situation that Douglas got into at this point in his life is the kind of thing that happens all the time now, but didn't just 25 or 30 years ago. What's happened is that we've gotten so good at keeping people alive for years that they survive to create a whole community, an economy, a family of people who care for them. Douglas and Jo's house turned into a kind of mini hospital, of people caring for Douglas. Here's Jo's story. In January 2003, I found my husband asleep in a pool of blood, the back of his head sliced open from a fall on the bathroom floor. He was hospitalized and his doctor thought he might die. Six months later he had a massive stroke that left him unable to talk, walk, write. He was incontinent. Again, his doctor thought he might die. It's after this second false alarm with death, and after three and a half years of Douglas being ill, three and a half years of caring for him, not sure what else to do with myself, that I grabbed my tape recorder. I start recording on Father's Day. Is there anything else we need to put on the tape? Padrina's 35 and she's from Belize. She has the sturdy body of a weightlifter, which is important because if Douglas falls again I need someone who can lift him. Douglas is so wobbly that for his safety he's confined to the first floor of our two-story house. In fact, he even sleeps downstairs in a hospital bed in the living room. It's just two weeks since his massive stroke. Now he's using a wheelchair, sometimes a walker. We're going to close this a little bit. Padrina, why don't you help Douglas come in. Padrina's not a nurse. She has no professional or medical training. During the week she works at a print shop printing up business cards. She's a caregiver. Its work usually done by new immigrants. I've had over a dozen of them living with us 24 hours a day for the past six months. The caregivers bathe Douglas, trim his nails, shave him, cook for him, dress him. In those long periods when there's nothing to do for Douglas, they also help around the house. They do some light housekeeping. To help Douglas remember Padrina's name, I've written it on all the white boards I've placed around the house since he's been sick. I also made her a name tag. And we'll put him over there on that side and we'll just do it buffet style. In all the pre-party chaos, none of us notice that Douglas is no longer in the living room in his wheelchair. We look for him everywhere. Out on the patio, on the deck. I find him at the top of the stairs clinging to the banister for dear life. What happened? How did you happen to go upstairs? I just thought I'd go upstairs. He doesn't remember that he hasn't been upstairs in weeks. You don't really have the strength to go upstairs anymore. Well, I've been doing it for 84 years. Yeah, but we're in a different condition in your life right now. Were you just going to rest here a moment? Yeah. I get him a chair. While he's catching his breath I find Padrina. Padrina, come here a second. If I ever ask you to do something like to back him downstairs because people are coming, your main job is to just keep your eyes on Douglas. What happened? Exactly. My job is a nurse, not nurse slash maid. OK, but Shoni does housework and she keeps an eye on him. But we've had three examples of this now. This can't go on. It's scary. I guess he's not supposed to stay by himself. Well, he's never by himself. Yes, of course, never. Even when I use the restroom, I keep a crack on the door. I use it real quick and I keep peeking on him. It takes one second. That's all it took. OK. So in the future we'll just keep an eye on him a little bit more. Exactly. OK, well, I'm going to go downstairs and make the lemonade for the party. You're going to stay up here and watch over his shoulder. It scares me whenever a caregiver isn't paying attention. I already experienced the shock of finding Douglas once in a pool of blood, I couldn't bear to find him at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck. With everything else going on, I'm now managing all these people in my own home. We have two shifts of live-in caregivers. One's Monday to Thursday and the other's Thursday to Sunday. There are six different caregivers rotating in and out, and that doesn't include the visiting nurses and a physical therapist. Good morning, did you get my message? Yeah, this I did. This is Shoni. She's 53 years old and from the Philippines. She works the Monday to Thursday shift. Shoni's been with us a month. She's been doing this work forever. She's seen a lot of her clients die. Whenever this happens, she flies back home to the Philippines for a couple of weeks to recover. Good morning. Good morning, Douglas. How are you? Fine. I'm sorry I am late a little bit. It's the traffic. I understand the traffic's bad. It's bumper to bumper. Then there's Evelyn, a visiting nurse from St. John's Hospital. She's kind of seen it all. We enjoy each other. We call each other by our nicknames. She calls me Josie, I call her Evie. On days when Evie isn't making house calls, another nurse, Amanda, stops by. Amanda's style is way too perky for me. OK, I'm going to listen to your heart, and your lungs, and your tummy, and check your blood pressure. And then we'll take you blood and run it to the lab. I cringe when she tells my husband that she's going to look at his tummy. The thing that kills me though, is that if Douglas were his old self, he would too. As a physician, he practiced medicine with a certain elegance. Never in a million years would he have spoken baby talk to a patient. Give me a smile. Good. And then there's Shirley. She's a weekend substitute. She's from Little Rock, Arkansas. She's 61, stylish, and she laughs easily. There's also Don, the physical therapist. He comes in three times a week. And then we have our unofficial maintenance crew. Each time Douglas's condition changes, Brad comes by to install more handrails and grab bars in the house. Bill comes to clean the carpet. He hasn't been here since Douglas fell in January. There's still some blood from that accident to cleanup. Sorry to be so nosy. I'm just curious, what do the doctors have to say about him? My dad passed away and he lived in the living room for a year, so I just know that's another step in the progression of downwardness. Sorry to say. Having so many people coming in and out of the house, sometimes I feel like I'm getting to know way too many people way too well. At this point, there's not much the caregivers and I don't know about each other. Take Shoni. At night, she wears a red nightie, and every Thursday she rolls her short black hair in pink rollers. Shirley spends her off hours at Hollywood Park, the race track, betting on the horses. And Padrina never misses a Lakers game on TV. In turn, they probably know I'm drinking too much. I need this crowd of people to help me run this mini hospital. Except after six months, I'm fed up with never having any privacy. So I just made a sign from my bedroom door. No entrance. Stay out. Except nobody's paying any attention to my sign. They still waltz right in on me. I'll be sitting on the toilet and there they are. I've always thought of myself as a go with the flow person, someone with a little grace under pressure. But after months of caregivers living in my home, drinking my coffee out of my cups, packing my refrigerator with their buns and noodles, I have a short fuse. But I can't blow up at them because then they'll walk off the job. So I suck it up. Meanwhile, all the simple comforts of marriage are gone. Douglas and I no longer share a bed, and it's Shoni, not me, who tucks my husband in for the night. Okie dokie. While you are sitting, I gave you your medication, OK? Got it? Yeah, I got it. Between the medications and the dementia, Douglas's whole personality has changed. He's pulling in to himself. He can't stand it when I touch him. But I still reach out, still try to connect with this man who was once the big love of my life. OK, I'm going to go upstairs and take a bath. Shoni will be here. Shoni will be here. Would you like me to stay here with you a little bit? What I want him to say is yes. I want to sit by him as long as I can. No, Jo, don't. Don't bother. I know you're going to have a good bath. That's not the point, Doogle. Would you like me to sit here with you a little bit? Would that be a comfort to you? OK. You can do it, Jo. Because sometimes it's confusing. I don't know if you are more comfortable just by yourself resting or if it's more of a comfort if I'm here. Well, as a matter of fact, once I receive a notice that I'm going to go to sleep, I'm going to go to sleep. Do you follow that? Yeah. I like to go to sleep. Do you follow that? Yeah. Good night Doogle. Good night. Marooned upstairs in my bedroom I lie awake and listen to Douglas breathing on the monitor. Sleep is impossible, so most nights I wander back downstairs and look for Shoni. The rooms are dark. I usually find her in the kitchen watching TV. Then I pour myself another glass of wine or two, or three. Shoni usually has tea. We talk about her son, her new grandchild, how much we both like to dance. One night in July she tells me she's worried that when Douglas has another stroke the two of us won't be able to lift him. Recently he slid off the toilet and we had to call the fire department to pick him up from the bathroom floor. So far I've had no luck finding a male caregiver, or at least a woman who's Douglas's size. And I just let Padrina go. It takes weeks to find someone to replace her and during that time I care for him alone three days a week. I hate some parts of the job and I can tell that Douglas hates me doing them too. When I help him with his personal hygiene he gets this pained look on his face. One day I'm watching Shoni give Douglas a sponge bath. He's naked on the bed except for one strategically placed towel. And she's scrubbing him with a white terry cloth wash cloth when he turns to me and says-- I would just assume that you didn't watch all of this. You don't want me to watch? No, I don't. OK, I'll go away. How would you like it, he asks, if I watched you? It's taken a few weeks, but I've just found a new weekend caregiver. Vicky's from Bulgaria. She's 27. And like most caregivers, she's perfectly qualified for some other line of work. I had my master degree in economics. My specialties marketing and trading. Vicky came to the US less than a year ago with her boyfriend, who's trying to get permanent legal residency. She wears green Spandex bicycle pants. She has a beautiful smile. We can use some light an laughter in this house. So Douglas, this is Vicky. Hello. Hi Vicky. Good morning, how are you? I'm well. How are you? Fine, thank you. Vicky has an easy rapport with Doogle and he's charmed by her. One morning I walk into the kitchen to find her teaching him the Bulgarian word for French toast. So, how are you doing this morning, Doogle? You went upstairs, you had a shower, you've read some of the newspaper. Come on, Douglas. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. What do you want? I'm just asking you how you're feeling this morning? Why are the two of you laughing? OK, what are your plans for the day? You guys just going to sit around and laugh? I'm pleased someone unleashes the laughter in Doogle. But for me, I'm the one who's holding everything together. It feels like I haven't laughed in a year. I wake up angry, I go to bed angry. As you can imagine, money is hemorrhaging out of our bank account. I'm spending over $1,000 a week on caregivers. I've heard about people who end up selling their houses to finance this kind of care. Since Douglas doesn't drive anymore, a few weeks ago we talked about selling his car. At the time, he thought it was a good idea. Today, as I'm leaving to show his car to a possible buyer, I remind him about our decision. That turns out to be a big, fat mistake. One of the errands I'm doing this morning is I'm taking your car to the Pacific Palisades. Don, the physical therapist, has a client there who might want to buy it. Well, I would really prefer because I'm ready now actually, I would really prefer not selling it and keeping it. Why would you want to keep it? To drive it. Who drive it? Me drive it. You know you don't have a driver's license? You surrendered your driver's license after you had that stroke in January. I really hate it when you refer to that little episode that I had as a stroke. A stroke is not a stroke. A stroke is not what you're talking about. A stroke is where you can't get out of bed because your whole left side is useless. That's true, of course. But what he's forgetting is that happened to him. He really did have a stroke. A massive one. You want to talk to your friends about it, you can refer to it as what it was. It was a TIA, a ischemic attack. That's a spasm. A stroke is a clot. You need to go to medical school in order to learn what a stroke is. I really mean that. Douglas and I fell in love on our third date. For 17 years it was the easiest relationship either of us ever knew. To turn away from your beloved, to waste a single day in anger, that's the luxury of the young. We knew life was too short. When he was well, Douglas was an extraordinary listener. Now there's no listening. During these four months, she has really not felt well, but has difficulty in describing it. Just the other day, I found his old dictaphone, the one he used when he was practicing medicine. And in between notes for patients' charts, he accidentally recorded a phone call he made to me. It begins with a sentence he'd never say today. Hello, I was just phoning you to see how you are. OK, that's what I thought. So I just going to say hello and I will probably be home about 2:30, 3 o'clock. Yeah, what time do you meet him? Well, I'll come over to the house first. Yeah. All right, bye. It's the most ordinary kind of phone call in the world. Two people checking in. And today, even though he's the one with that thousand mile blank stare, and he's the one losing his memory, it's like I'm losing mine too. It's hard to get up the habit of talking to Douglas about every little thing. I keep forgetting that an easy husband-wife chat is no longer possible. How are you feeling about the caregivers who are here in the house. Vicky and Shoni? I think get them out. I don't like having people around the house. But there is a need for them. In what way is there a need for daily nursing? I don't need people here all the time. I notice that when people are here all the time, you're not here. It's as though you're replacing, you're being replaced. Well, I agree with you. It's a change. Like yesterday, I was really tired of having people around. See, what's difficult for you to understand is that we are so different. You don't need a host of friends coming in? I don't need anybody except you. Hearing this gives me a chill. His whole world is now me. Douglas's life has gotten so small, it's confined to the living room, dining room, kitchen, powder room, the deck. But my life also has a short tether. If I go more than 12 miles from the house I get physically nauseous. I never thought that I'd have anything in common with Nancy Reagan, but when I read that when Ronnie was still alive Nancy didn't go any further than five minutes from their home, in a weird way I felt close to her. It's the end of August. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up. Nine months ago Douglas's doctor urged me to consider a nursing home. But years before that Douglas filled out a medical directive, a standard form with check boxes we got at the stationery store. He marked each box carefully: no life support, must be able to care for himself, communicate meaningfully with others. And then at the bottom of the page in his beautiful, old-fashioned handwriting he added, don't want to go to a rest home. Period. Just want to be at home. Period. One day at his doctor's office while Douglas sits out in the waiting room with Vicky, I talk about this with Arman, his doctor. So, how long does this go on for. I mean, how do people hang in? I mean, I'm really serious. Very tough. It could go on for 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. We would be totally out of money by then. Well, these things can go-- have a life of their own. As long as he eats and has a good appetite and he's cared for, he could do fine. Could he get a full-blown Alzheimer's where he doesn't recognize me, doesn't recognize the dog? Could he get a full-blown dementia that he can do this? The answer is, it's possible. It's highly probable I think in this case. With medication, you're slowing the pace of the deterioration. In other words, the better we care for him, the longer he'll survive. And the more likely he'll live to the point where he doesn't even recognize me. Not long after that appointment, Vicky, the one taught Douglas the Bulgarian word for French toast, quits. The hours are too hard for her, she says. And she has a four month old baby. I call an agency I used once and explained that I need an older person, strong enough to lift my husband, and experienced enough so that when things get worse, they can point the way and tell me what to do. I end up with Jenny, the youngest, smallest, most inexperienced caregiver of all the 17 people I've hired. She's 23, barely 5 feet tall, has been in the US only 4 months. She's never seen anyone die. She turns out to be perfect for the job. Douglas continues to decline. By Christmas Eve he's able to sit at the table, but that takes all his energy. He doesn't talk. He just stares. In January, no matter how hot I make the house, Douglas can't get warm. Finally, he slips into a coma and dies February 1 at home of an infection. I just left the room for a second when it happened. Jenny, his final caregiver, is with him when he takes his last breath. I speak with her a month after he died. Before he took his last breath, his breathing is harder and closer. But then, I said, he's not going to die at this moment. So I just walk to the window. And then in a few minutes I just heard one last breath. It's like [GASPING SOUND]. I said, oh, he's gone. Then I called you. I can't forget that. You cannot? Yeah, I cannot. Well, what's interesting to me about this process is since you were with him when he took his last breath, and you were with us, I don't ever want to lose contact with you. You are part of the family. What can I say? So we've become family, Jenny. Yeah. I feel that I am the member of your family too. It's weird, but I miss all the commotion. I miss everything and everyone. I miss the life and death urgency. After Douglas died and everyone cleared out of the house, it was so silent. It wasn't just that he was gone, everything was gone. The people, the adjustable bed, the medicines, my mini hospital shut down. I suddenly had nothing to do. I was in shock. So I called Jenny and asked her to come stay with me for a few days. Joe Giese in Los Angeles. Coming up, a marriage where they serve and protect. She serves, he protects. Or, maybe it's the other way around. 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, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, "Someone to Watch Over Me," we have stories of three couples. In each story one person taking care of the other. We've arrived at act two of our program. Act Two, The Over-Protective Kind. Veronica Chater tells this story. The setting, the Bay Area suburbs. The characters, her own mother and father. Recently, my parents' marriage went through a few weeks of chaos when my mom announced that she was taking a vacation. Turns out, Noreen, her best friend of 40 years, was inviting her to Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, to spend a week in her timeshare. My parents had been married for 45 years and they've never been apart for more than a day or two. What's more, in those 45 years, they've never taken a vacation. Partly because they've been raising 11 children and helping to raise 20 grandchildren. And partly because my dad's feelings about vacations go something like this. I detest shopping. I detest eating out. I detest motels. I detest beaches. I detest anything having to do with what most people go on vacations for. For me, it's the opposite of having fun. It's a purgatory. Mom didn't even think of inviting him along. But as she began preparing for her trip, Dad began worrying. My dad is something of a safety net. He was a police officer and then a corporate security consultant. And as a result, he's the kind of guy who sees danger around every corner and is ready to defend himself and his family against any possible foe. As I was growing up, whenever our birthdays came around, my brothers and sisters and I always knew the present from dad was going to be a weapon. A hunting knife say, or a rifle. After I was the victim of a violent crime about 10 years ago, he only got worse. He took me out to buy a gun, a Colt 38 detective special, and taught me how to use it. Then he wrote a book called The Protection Formula: Thinking like a Cop, to teach ordinary people to be more like him. These days, when he bicycles to work each day on a busy road in the California suburbs, he carries with him a fully stocked survival kit. Ace bandages, iodine, insulating blanket, and just to be on the safe side, a 10-inch long bayonet. He'd carry a gun if he could, but as a former cop, he'd never dream of breaking California's concealed weapons law. Given all this, when my mom broke the news that she was heading on vacation to a foreign country, it meant only one thing to my dad-- peril. You get two quite naive women down there and my wife still has sex appeal as far as I'm concerned ant that's a case for worry. It isn't only that she still has sex appeal, it's the fact that there are bad people that will do things to compromise a middle-aged woman. They might think she's wealthy. Who knows what a depraved person will think. You don't know, there's plenty of them out there. Do you think he's right to feel afraid? No, because of where we're going to be. When you're in a place like Puerta Vallarta, which is a resort town, and I've talked to several people that I've come in contact with that have been there, and it's been fine. And we're not that naive, my goodness sakes. Do you really think Mom's being naive to say-- Yes, I think she is. We've discussed this before. There's a state of mind that some people do not have. They don't have a vigilance about them. They don't suspect and that bothers me. Dad had plenty of ideas about what might happen to mom in Puerta Vallarta. Someone could slip a Mickey into her drink. They could copy her hotel room key and follow her back to her room. Dad stewed about this for two weeks, and then one day he announced to my mom that he had no choice, he was coming with her. It would be the only way to ensure her safety. Mom was stunned and stammered that of course, he'd be welcome to come. And then she quickly called Noreen. This wasn't the vacation either of them had in mind and they had to do some last minute juggling. They had to figure out sleeping arrangements. They had to buy another plane ticket. And while Mom went about shopping for swimsuits and suntan lotion, Dad started preparing for the trip in his own way. By faxing a letter to the Mexican consulate asking which weapons of self defense he could legally bring into the country. I asked Dad to read a sample from the latter. Presumably, guns are not allowed there for travelers, but what about pepper spray and knives? I'm retired from law enforcement and therefore I know intimately, our state laws on bladed weapons, which are very specific as to length of blade, concealed and et cetera. And because I want to stay within the law in Mexico, I'd like to know specifics. What is the language of the laws as to blade length, concealment, folders versus fixed blades, gravity knives, and so on. Also, the laws on pepper spray or the like. And a final question, if we decide to rent a car and drive in the hinterland, is it possible to hire protection? For instance, off duty policeman. Dad never did get a response to his letter. But he did hear from his law enforcement buddies that bringing a weapon into Mexico could land him in jail indefinitely. He began to worry that announcing his desire to enter the country armed might not have been the best way to introduce himself to the Mexican authorities. Meanwhile, my mom began worrying about how my dad was going to fare on the trip. He's a creature of habit with a nightly ritual that he follows religiously. He comes in the kitchen, he has one shot of gin and he has a beer. And he's got his little hor d'oeurve there. He has certain things: radishes, carrots, onions, cheese. He's now into Gruyere. He likes the Gruyere. Then he sits down and has his meal. And then he has to go right to bed. That's it. And so there's no visiting. You don't do any-- I mean, he's got this thing. He does it. Every night, same thing. And he's so routinized it drives you crazy. Does he watch a movie every night? Yeah, well not a movie. He never watches a movie. He's got six to eight pieces. He watches pieces of this, that, and the other. He's either looking for something and it a car that he saw, or there's a diner. Or there's a particular scene that reminds him of something. Or I don't know, he's just got his little-- yeah, all that stuff. For a week my dad vacillated on his decision to go. Finally, he told mom he'd decided to stay home, blaming his change of heart on back pain. Mom was secretly relieved. The night before she left, as Dad offered last minute instructions on how to jam the hotel door shut with a chair, she wrote out her flight details and gave Dad a list of household chores. The next morning, she was gone. Four days later, I dropped in to see how Dad's getting along. When I show up, the front door is locked. Something that never happens when Mom's around. I have to knock loudly twice. When he finally opens the door, Dad is unshaven. His white hair uncombed. All the windows are closed and the curtains shut. Last night's video, Cast Away, sits on the TV set. I tell Dad he looks like he's the one who's stranded on a desert island. He pretends to find the joke funny, but he can't muster a smile. OK, so we go 011. I suggest we call mom to check up on her. Well, we're just out. We cannot believe the humidity here, the heat. We've just had to stay in the hotel almost the whole time. It's dirty out there. Just dirty. You had to stay in the hotel? Yeah, we've just had to stay in here because we can't stand the heat. Oh my gosh. Well, that makes me feel better. It makes you feel better? Yeah. I'm almost to the point of being in a full depression here with you being away. Mom knows just the words that will get Dad's attention: heat, dirt, thieves, danger all around. Well, we walked by some people and Noreen and I, we were just hanging on to our purses. We thought oh my gosh, Lyle was right. He should have come. For Pete's sake we're like, what are we in here? This is ridiculous. I don't know, but anyways. Haven't you done any shopping or gone-- How can you shop? You can't even breathe out there. Dad leans back in his chair. He's beaming. He looks genuinely pleased that he was right about everything. That mom is stuck in her hotel room, having no fun at all. Finally, when she knows Dad is all worked up, she drops the bomb. OK, now you want the real scoop now? You ready? Yes. OK, it's fabulous. Absolutely fabulous. Now I'm getting depressed again. I'm sorry, but I'm going to tell the truth here. Oh my gosh. In fact, we weren't here because we were laying by the pool. The trip was just as they'd imagined it would be. No, better. The people were the friendliest she'd ever met. She and Noreen were buying tacos from street vendors, bartering with the local merchants, and attending mass in a Mexican church. You could hear in her voice that she was having the time of her life. And this was even before we saw the pictures of the young waiter pouring tequila and grenadine down her throat at dinner one night. As Mom goes on, Dad's face slowly sinks into a frown. He looks disappointed and confused. Not a single bad thing happened? It was all good? He waits for Mom's effervescence to run out of fizz. And when it doesn't, he jumps in at the first opportunity. Let me interrupt. I couldn't find the freezer key. It's hanging above the washer. I showed you. OK, I'll look. And I couldn't find your checkbook. Then, when Mom asks Dad how he's doing, he gives her all the grisly details of the lousy time he's been having in her absence. Those packaged foods things you bought me are awful. You're kidding? Our best meal since you've been gone has been Jack in the Box. Did you put those in the oven? Yeah, I cooked them. Oven or the microwave? In the microwave. No, oven is always better for those things. Well, it's too late. Those are expensive. Those should be really good, Lyle. Well, they weren't. When Dad hangs up the phone, he sinks further into self pity. All these years he'd been living under the misconception that he was the one in charge. The man with the badge, worried and over-protetive, and laying down rules. But in fact, she is the one who takes care of him. Without Mom at home to look after him, Dad was defenseless. I wanted her to go and have a good time I'm just nervous. I'm so used to having her presence here. It's incredible. It's physical. You can't see it coming. All of a sudden she's gone. She's not here. There's a different aura in the house. What does the house feel like? Cold. She really is, she has a radiance about her. And she brightens things and it's gone. My mom survived the trip and my dad did too. And he even found his way to the right location at the airport to pick up Mom. True, he did arrive more than an hour late. Mom let him know she wasn't too happy about that. And once she got home she reprimanded him for being a hopeless housekeeper and a terrible gardener. But Mom could have scolded Dad all she like. He was enjoying every minute of it. You could see it in his face as she lined up the sliced radishes, counted out the correct number of olives, and made his salad just the way he likes it. Veronica Chater in Northern California. Act Three, "Are You a Man or Are You a Mouse?" Well, we close our show with this story of a woman taking care of her man. Who, like the other men on today's program, is not always doing so well. Aimee Bender tells the story. A warning to listeners that she mentioned sex in here. My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don't know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It's been a month and now he's a sea turtle. I keep him on the counter in a glass baking pan filled with salt water. Ben, I say to his small, protruding head, can you understand me? And he stares with eyes like little droplets of tar. And I drip tears into the pan, a sea of me. He is shedding a million years a day. I'm no scientist, but this is roughly what I've figured out. I went to the old biology teacher at the community college and asked him for an approximate timeline of our evolution. He was irritated at first. He wanted money. I told him I'd be happy to pay and then he cheered up quite a bit. I can hardly read his timeline. He should have typed it. And it turns out to be wrong. According to him, the whole process should take about a year, but from the way things are going, I think we have less than a month left. At first, people called on the phone and asked me, where was Ben? Why wasn't he at work? Why did he miss his lunch date with those clients? His out of print special order book on civilization had arrived at the bookstore, would he please come pick it up? I told them he was sick, a strange sickness, and to please stop calling. The stranger thing was, they did. They stopped calling. After a week, the phone was silent and Ben, the baboon, sat in a corner by the window wrapped up in drapery chattering to himself. The last day I saw him human he was sad about the world. This was not unusual, he was always sad about the world. It was a large reason why I loved him. We'd sit together and be sad and think about being sad and sometimes discussed sadness. On his last human day he said, Annie, don't you see? We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart. He looked at me pointedly, blue eyes unwavering. Like us, Annie, he said. We think far too much. On his last human day, he put his head in his hands and sighed. And I stood up and kissed the entire back of his neck. Covered that flesh, made wishes there because I knew no woman had ever been so thorough, had ever kissed his every inch of skin. I coated him. What did I wish for? I wished for good. That's all. Just good. I took him in my arms and made love to have, my sad man. See we're not thinking, I whispered into his ear while he kissed my neck. We're not thinking at all. And he pressed his head into my shoulder and help me tighter. Afterward, we went outside again. There was no moon and the night was dark. Then he told me he wanted to sleep outside for some reason. And in the morning, when I woke up in bed, I looked out to the patio and there was an ape sprawled on the cement. Great, furry arms covering his head to block out the glare of the sun. Even before I saw the eyes, I knew it was him. And once we were face to face, he gave me his same sad look. I sat with him outside and smoothed the fur on the back of his hand. When he reached for me, I said, no, loudly and he seemed to understand and pulled back. I have limits here. We sat on the lawn together and ripped up the grass. I didn't miss human Ben right away, I wanted to meet the ape too. But I didn't realize he wasn't coming back. Now, I come home from work and look for his regular size shape walking and worrying, and realize over and over that he's gone. I pace the halls. I chew whole packs of gum in mere minutes. I review my memories and make sure they're still intact. Because if he's not here, then it is my job to remember. I think of the way he wrapped his arms around my back and held me so tight it made me nervous. And the way his breath felt in my ear-- right. When I go to the kitchen I peer in the glass and see he's some kind of salamander now. He's small. Ben, I whisper, do you remember me? Do you remember? His eyes roll up in his head and I dribble honey into the water. He used to love honey. He looks at it and then swims to the other end of the pan. This is the limit of my limits. Here it is. You don't ever know for sure where it is and then you bump up against it and bam, you're there. Because I cannot bear to look down into the water and not be able to find him at all. To search the tiny clear waves with a microscope lens and to locate my lover, the one-celled wonder, brainless, benign, heading clear and small like an eye floater into nothingness. I put him in the passenger seat of the car and drive him to the beach. Walking down the sand I nod at people on towels, laying their bodies out to the sun and wishing. At the water's edge I stoop down and place the whole pan on the tip of a baby wave. Ben, the salamander, swims out. I wave to the water with both arms, big enough for him to see if he looks back. I turn around and walked back to the car. Sometimes I think he'll wash up on shore, a naked man with a startled look who's been to history and back. I keep my eyes on the newspaper. I make sure my phone number is listed. I walk around the block at night in case he doesn't quite remember which house it is. I feed the birds outside and sometimes, before I put my one self to bed, I place my hands around my skull to see if it's growing and wonder what of any use, would fill it if it did. Aimee Bender. Her story "The Rememberer" appears in the book The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Well, that song performed for our show by the band American Draft. You can download an MP3 of what we believe is the world's only metal cover of this Gershwin classic at our web site, www.thisamericanlife.org. You can also listen to our programs for free there. Our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes and Sarah Koenig. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Will [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. You know you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife. 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 Malatia, who listens to our program each week this way. He's naked on the bed except for one strategically placed towel. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. 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From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio. From PRI, Public Radio. Public Radio. Public Radio International. I was talking to a first-grader about libraries, and I suddenly found myself talking about bullies. That's the thing about the idea of the bullies, the idea is so powerful that it can derail any conversation and pull it towards its own orbit. Here's how it happened. We were on a school bus. I was asking the first-grader what kinds of books he takes out from the library, and that was all it took. Suddenly he launches into this big thing. This kid in our class, he's a bully, and he takes out bully books. He takes out bully ones. Like what are the bully books? They teach you how to be meaner, to push people around and stuff. There are books to teach you how to be mean? Yeah. And nice. There's this one book that's called, bully, bully's are made for pushing around, and bullies make all the rules, and they be picking on nice kids. As far as I was able to determine later, talking with parents and teachers and consulting with books in print, there is no book. There is no real book that corresponds to the book this first-grader thinks he saw the bully read. And you know, it's a shame. It was such a comforting thought. Why are people bullies? Why are they so mean? Why do they push you sometimes, and take your change, and say nasty things? Maybe they're just getting it from a book. I'm surprised. Are you sure that that's what the book was about? I can't believe somebody would write a book saying, here's how to be mean to other people. Well, maybe the person who wrote it was probably a bully himself. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Back for another week documenting stories of these United States using all the tools of radio storytelling-- documentaries, monologues, overheard conversations, found tapes, anything we can think of. And today we bring you three stories about the cruelty of children. Act one, writer David Sedaris explains why he made fun of sissy boys when he was one himself. Act two, children and a man trapped in a well. And act three, well, just stay with us and listen. Act one. David Sedaris is a regular contributor to our program. His latest book is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. And this next story was recorded a few years ago at a fundraiser for the program Stories on Stage here in Chicago. In this story, David Sedaris describes a web of meanness which he participates in, as a victim sometimes, and as a perpetrator sometimes. Quick warning-- some moments in the story might not be suitable for younger listeners. These are things I'm working on for a new book, a collection of nonfiction stories. When asked if they're true, I prefer to answer that they're true enough. The only thing you'll need to know in terms of this first story is that during the seventh and eighth grade, I normally spent my summers working at Dorothea Dix, a state mental hospital, and that by law, every homosexual must at some point write a variation of this exact story-- "I Like Guys." Shortly before graduating the eighth grade, it was announced that, come fall, our county school system would adopt a policy of integration by way of forced busing. My Spanish teacher broke the news in a way she hoped might lead us to a greater understanding of her beauty and generosity. "I remember the time I was at the state fair, standing in line for a snow cone," she said, fingering the kiss curls that trained her squat, compact face. "And a little colored girl ran up and tugged at my skirt, asking if she could touch my hair, 'Just once,' she said, 'just one time for luck.' Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but my hair means a lot to me." The members of my class nodded to signify that their hair meant a lot to them, as well. They inched forward in their seats, wondering where this story might be going. Perhaps the little girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for fresh white scalp. I sat marveling at their naivete. Like all her other antidotes, this woman's story was headed straight up her ass. "I checked to make sure she didn't have any candy on her hands, and then I bent down and let this colored girl touch my hair." The teacher's eyes assumed that dewy, faraway look she reserved for such Hallmark moments. "Then this little fudge colored child put her hand on my cheek and said, 'Oh,' she said, 'I wish I could be white and pretty like you.'" She paused, positioning herself on the edge of the desk as though she were posing for a portrait the government might use on a stamp commemorating gallantry. "The thing to remember," she said, "is that more than anything in the world these people wish they were white." I just wasn't buying it. This was the same teacher who, when announcing her pregnancy, said, "I just pray my first baby is a boy. I'll have a boy, and then, maybe later, I'll have a girl, because if you do it the other way around, there's a good chance the boy will turn out to be funny." "Funny as in having no arms and legs?" I asked. "That," the teacher said, "is far from funny. That is tragic. And you, sir, should have your lips sewn shut for saying such an ugly thing. When I say funny I mean funny as in," she relaxed her wrist, allowing her hand to dangle and flop, "I mean funny as in that kind of funny." She minced across the room, but it failed to illustrate her point, as this was her natural walk. A series of gambling little steps, her back held straight, giving the illusion she was balancing something of value atop her empty head. My math teacher did a much better version. A former coach, he accompanied his routine with a high pitched lisp, snatching a purse off the back of a student's chair, he pranced about the room, batting his eyes and blowing kisses at the boys seated on the front row. [? "'Tho 'fery nice to meet you," he'd say. Not wanting to draw any attention to myself, I hooted and squawked along with the rest of the class, all the while thinking, that's me he's talking about. What really bothered me was that this was such an easy way to get a laugh. As entertainers, these teachers were nothing, zero, they could barely impersonate themselves. "Look at you," the coach would shout, skipping across the basketball court. "You're a group of ladies, a bunch of silly queers." I had never done anything with another guy, and literally prayed it would never happen. As much as I fantasized about it, I understood that there could be nothing worse than that. You'd see them on television from time to time, the homosexuals, maybe on one of the afternoon talk programs or filling in as a contestant on one of the game shows. They were the celebrities never asked about their home life, the men running a scarf under their toupee or framing their face with their open palms in an attempt to eliminate the circles beneath their eyes. "The poor man's face lift," my mother called it. Regardless of their natty attire, they were always sweaty and desperate, willing to play the fool in exchange for the studio applause they seemed to mistake for love and acceptance. I saw something of myself in their mock weary delivery and the way they crossed their legs and laughed at their own jokes. I pictured their homes, the finicky placement of their throw rugs and sectional sofas, the magazines carefully fanned just so upon the coffee table, with no wives or children to disturb their order. I imagined the pornography hidden in their closets and envisioned them powerless and sobbing as the police led them away in shackles, past the teenage boy who stood bathed in the light of the television news camera, shouting, "That's him. He's the one who touched my hair." It was my plan to win a contest, cash in my prizes, and use the money to visit a psychiatrist who might cure me of having homosexual thoughts. I would tell my family I'd given the money to charity, and then, under the doctor's supervision, I would really buckle down and change. I swore I would. My parents knew a couple whose son had killed a minister while driving drunk. They had friends whose oldest daughter had sprinkled a bundt cake with Comet, and once vacationed with a man whose children had set fire to the family's elderly border collie. Yet they spoke of no one whose son was a homosexual. The odds struck me as bizarre, but the message was the same. This was clearly the worst thing that could happen to a person. I washed my hands until they were pink and wrinkled, and then, deciding that clean hands were a sure giveaway, I dug my fingers into my mother's planter in order to pack dirt beneath my nails. The day to day anxiety was bad enough without my instructors taking their feeble little potshots. If my math teacher were able to subtract the alcohol from his diet, he'd still be on the football field where he belonged, and my Spanish teacher's credentials were based on nothing more than a long weekend in Tijuana as far as I was concerned. Except for a few transfer students, I'd known most of the homosexuals since third grade. We'd spent years gathered together in cinder block offices as one speech therapist after another tried curing us of our lisps. Had there been a walking specialist, we would have met there, too. These were the same boys who avoided the shortcut through the woods and were the first to raise their hands when the teacher asked for a volunteer to read aloud from The Yearling or Lord of the Flies. We had long ago identified one another and understood that, because of everything we had in common, we could never be friends. To socialize would have drawn too much attention to ourselves. We were members of a secret society based upon self-loathing. When a teacher or a classmate made fun of a real homosexual, I made certain my laugh was louder than anyone else's. When a society member's clothing was thrown into the locker room toilet, I was always the first to cheer. When it was my clothing, I watched as the faces of my fellows broke into recognizable expressions of relief. They had been spared, and now it was someone else's turn. Several of my teachers, when discussing the upcoming school integration, would scratch at the damp stains beneath their arms, pulling back their lips to display every bit of tooth and gum. They made monkey noises, a manic succession of oohs and aahs I imagined they practiced nightly in their bedrooms. If an ape were seated in the room, I guess he might have identified their's as a cry of panic. Anything that caused them suffering brought me joy, but I doubted they would talk this way come fall. From everything I've seen on television, the negroes would never settle for such foolishness. As a people, they seemed to stick together, waving their fists against the backdrop of a fiery sky. They knew how to fight, and I hoped that, once they arrived, the battle might come down to black and white, leaving the rest of us alone. At the end of the school year, my sister Lisa and I were excused from our volunteer jobs and sent to Greece to attend a month long summer camp advertised as the crown jewel of the Ionian Sea. The camp was reserved exclusively for Greek Americans, and featured instruction in such topics as folk dancing and religious training. I detested the idea of summer camp, but wanted to boast that I'd been to Europe. "It changes people," our neighbor had said, marking her garden with a series of tissue sized international flags. "Europe is the best thing that can happen to a person, especially if you like wine." I saw Europe as an opportunity to reinvent myself. I might still look and speak the same way, but having walked those ancient cobblestone streets, I would be identified as continental. "He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. "Quick, let's run before he judges us." I told myself I would find a girlfriend in Greece. She would be a French tourist wandering the beach with a loaf of bread beneath her arm. Lisette would prove that I wasn't a homosexual, but a man with refined tastes. I pictured us holding hands against the silhouette of the Acropolis, her begging me to take a recording as a memento of our love. "Silly you," I would say, brushing the tears from her eyes. "Just give me the beret, that'll be enough to hold you in my heart until the end of time." In case no one believed me, I would have my sister as a witness. Lisa and I weren't getting along very well, but hopefully the warm Mediterranean breezes might melt the icicle she seemed to have mistaken for a rectal thermometer. My father accompanied us to New York where we met our fellow campers for the charter flight. There were hundreds of them, each one confident and celebratory. They tossed their complimentary Aegean Airlines bags across the room, shouting and jostling one another. Were it an all girls camp, I would have been able to work up some enthusiasm, but spending a month in the company of boys, that was asking too much. I tried to put it out of my mind, but faced with their boisterous presence, I found myself growing progressively more hysterical. My nervous tics shifted into their highest gear, and a crowd gathered, watching what they believed to be an epileptic seizure. If my sister was anxious about the trip, she certainly didn't show it. Prying my fingers off her wrist, she crossed the room and introduced herself to a fellow camper. This was a tough looking Queens native named Stephanie Heartattackis or Testacokales. I recall only that her last name had granted her a lifelong supply of resentment. Stephanie wore mirrored aviator sunglasses and carried an oversize comb in the back pocket of her hip hugger jeans. Of all the girls in the room, she seemed the least likely candidate for my sister's friendship. They sat beside one another on the plane, and by the time we disembarked in Athens, Lisa was speaking in a bad Queens accent. During the long flight, while I sat cowering beside a boy named Semen, my sister had undergone a complete physical and cultural transformation. Her shoulder length hair was now parted on the side, covering the left side of her face as if to conceal a nasty scar. She cursed and spat, scowling out the bus window as if she'd come to Greece with the sole intention of kicking its ass. "What a [BLEEP] hole," she yelled. "Jesus, if I'd known it was going to be this hot, I would have stayed home with my head in the oven, right goils? I approached her once we reached the camp, a cluster of whitewashed buildings hugging the desolate coast far from any neighboring village. "Listen [BLEEP] hole," she said, "as far as this place is concerned, I don't know you, and you sure as [BLEEP] don't know me. You got that?" "Hey, Carolina," one of her friends called. "All right, already," she brayed, "I'm coming, I'm coming." That was the last time we spoke until she borrowed money a week before returning home. Lisa had adjusted with remarkable ease. Although we were cut from the same cloth, something deep in my stomach suggested I wouldn't do nearly so well. Camp lasted a month, during which time, I never once had a bowel movement. I was used to having a semi-private bathroom, and could not bring myself to occupy one of the men's room stalls, fearful that someone might recognize my shoes. Sitting down three times a day for a heavy Greek meal became an exercise akin to packing a musket. I told myself I'd sneak off during one of our field trips, but those toilets were nothing more than a hole in the ground, a hole I could have easily filled with no problem whatsoever. I considered using the Ionian Sea, but for some unexplained reason, we were not allowed to swim in those waters. The camp had an Olympic size pool which was fed from the sea, and soon grew murky with stray bits of jelly fish, which had been pulverized by the pump. The tiny tentacles raised welts, so shortly after arriving, it was announced that we could photograph both the pool and the ocean, but we could swim in neither. The Greeks had invented democracy, built the acropolis, and then called it a day. The camp was basically an extension of my junior high school, except here, everyone had either an excess of moles or a single eyebrow. The attractive, sports minded boys ran the show, currying favors from the staff and ruining the weekly outdoor movies with their inane heckling. From time to time, the rented tour buses would carry us to view one of the country's many splendors, and we would raid the gift shops, stealing anything that wasn't bolted down to the shelf. These were cheap plated puzzle rings and pint-size vases, little pom pom shoes and coffee mugs reading, "Sparta is for a lover." My shoplifting experience was the only thing that gave me an edge over the popular boys. "Hold it like this," I whispered, "then swivel around and slip the statue of Diana down the back of your shorts, covering it with your t-shirt. Just remember to always back out the door, and never forget to wave goodbye." There was one boy at camp I felt at ease with, a Detroit native named Pete who stepped on the bunk below me. Pete looked away while talking to the other boys, shifting his eyes as if he were studying the weather conditions. Like me, he used his free time to curl in a fetal position, staring at the bedside calendar upon which he'd exed out all the days he'd so far endured. We were finishing our 7:15 to 7:45 wash and rinse segment one morning, when the counselor arrived for inspection, shouting, "What are you, a bunch of goddamn faggots who can't make your goddamn beds?" I found myself giggling at his stupid choice of words, if any knew how to make their bed, it was a faggot. It was the others he needed to worry about. I caught Pete laughing, too, and soon, we took to mocking this counselor, referring to one another first as faggots, and then as stinking faggots. We were lazy faggots and sunburnt faggots before we eventually became faggoty faggots. We couldn't protest the word as it would have meant acknowledging the truth of it. The most we could do was embrace it as a joke, and in doing so, embody its darkest meaning, mincing and prancing about the room for each other's entertainment while the others weren't looking. Faggot as a word was always delivered in a harsh, unforgiving tone, befitting anyone weak or stupid enough to act upon their impulses. This was a game, less humiliating than soccer, but certainly more dangerous. Late at night, I'd feel my bunk buck and sway, knowing that Pete was either masturbating or beating eggs for an omelet. Is that me he's thinking about? Joining in, I would awake the next morning to find our entire iron framed unit had wandered a good foot away from the wall. Let the mountains stay where they were, our love had the power to move bunks. Having no willpower, we depended on circumstances to keep us apart. "This can't happen" was accompanied by the sound of bed springs whining, "Oh, but why can't it?" There came an afternoon when, running late for flag worship, we found ourselves alone in the cabin. What started off as name calling soon escalated to a series of mock angry slaps. We wrestled one another onto one of the lower bunks, knowing that these were not regulation holds, yet unable to stop ourselves. "You kids think you invented sex," my mother was fond of saying. But hadn't we? With no written instruction manual or pre-scheduled rehearsal, didn't each of us come away feeling we had discovered something unspeakably modern? What produced in others a sense of swaggering exhilaration left Pete and I with a mortifying sense of guilt. We fled the room as if, in our fondlings, we had uncapped some virus we might still escape if we ran hard enough. Had one of the counselors not caught me scaling the fence, I was certain I would've made it back to Raleigh by morning, skittering across the surface of the water like one of those lizards often featured on the television wildlife specials. When discovered making out with one of the Greek bus drivers, a 16 year-old camper was forced to stand beside the flag pole, dressed in long pants and thick sweaters. We watched her broil in the hot sun until, fully cooked, she stumbled for a moment or two before passing out. If this was a punishment for a boy and a girl, I could not begin to imagine the punishment they might level upon two boys. Nothing, however, could match the cruelty and humiliation we soon practiced against one another. Pete started a rumor that I had stolen an athletic supporter from another camper and worshipped it as a keepsake. I retaliated, claiming that he had expressed a desire to become a dancer. "That's nothing," he said to the assembled crowd, "take a look at what I found on David's bed." He reached into the pocket of his shorts and withdrew a sheet of notebook paper upon which were written the words, "I like guys." Presented as an indictment, the document was both pathetic and comic. Would I supposedly have written a note to remind myself of that fact, least I forget? Had I intended to wear it taped to my bare back, advertising my preference next time our rented buses carried us off to yet another sun-drenched sexual playground? I like guys. He held the paper above his head, turning a slow circle so that everyone might get a chance to see it. I suppose he originally intended to plant it on my bunk for one of the counselors to find. Presenting it himself had foiled the note's intended effect. The other boys groaned and looked away, wondering why he'd picked it up and carried the thing around. He might as well have cradled a glistening turd, shouting, "Look what he did." Touching such a foul document made him suspect and guilty by association. In attempting to discredit one another, we round up alienating ourselves even further. During meals, I studied him from across the room. Clearly he had tricked me, cast a spell or slipped something into my food. I watched as he befriended a girl named Theodora and held her hand during a screening of A Lovely Way to Die, one of the cave paintings the camp offered as a weekly movie. She wasn't a bad person, Theodora. Someday, the doctors might find a way to transplant a calf's brain into a human skull, and she'd be just as lively and intelligent as he was. I tried to find a girlfriend of my own, but my one possible candidate was sent home after her leg brace got caught in the grill of a delivery truck. Pete looked convincing enough in the company of his girlfriend. They scrambled up the steps of various ruins, snapping one another's pictures and sharing their private jokes, while I watched them, fuming. My jealousy stemmed from the belief that he had been cured. One fistful of my flesh, and he had lost all symptoms of the disease. "We're thinking of getting married," I heard him boast to one of the other campers. "She lives in Florida, and I'm in Michigan, but if we wait a year, I'm pretty sure 16 is a legal age in Georgia." Yeah right, I thought. Legal age in Greece appeared to be about 12, why not just stay here, raise some goats, and start your own delivery service, you stupid, lying faggot. Camp ended and I flew home with my legs crossed, dropping my bag of stolen souvenirs to race to the bathroom, where I spent the next several days sitting on the toilet and studying my face in a hand mirror. I like guys. The words had settled themselves into my features. I returned to my job at the mental hospital, carrying harsh Greek cigarettes I offered as incentives to some of the more difficult patients. "Faggot," one woman shouted, stooping to protect the collection of pine cones. "Get your faggoty hands away from my radio transmitters." "Don't mind her," the orderly said, "she's crazy." Maybe not, I thought, holding a pine cone up to my ear. She'd gotten the faggot part right, so maybe she was on to something. The moment we'd boarded our return flight from Kennedy to Raleigh, Lisa had rearranged her hair, dropped her accent, and turned to me, saying, "Well, I thought that was very nice. How about you?" Over the course of five minutes, she had eliminated all traces of her reckless European self. Why couldn't I do the same? Shortly before school began, I discovered that I would not be bused. There had been violence in other counties and states, troubles as far away as Boston, but in Raleigh the transition was peaceful. Not only the students, but many of the teachers had been shifted from one school to another. My new science teacher was a negro very adept at swishing his way across the room, mocking everyone from Albert Einstein to the dweebish host of a popular children's television program. Black and white, the teachers offered their ridicule as an olive branch. "Here," they said, "this is something we all have in common. Proof that we're all brothers under the skin." Thank you. David Sedaris, reading years ago at a benefit for Stories on Stage. That story was later published in David's book Naked. Coming up, kids decide not to save a man trapped in a well. Plus, an experiment that actually made kids less cruel. 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 we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to take a whack at the theme. Today's theme is cruelty of children-- not cruelty to children, mind you, cruelty of children. And our next story is by writer Ira Sher. And in it, the children aren't cruel in a mean spirited or typical way, but the effect of their actions constitutes a kind of cruelty. I was nine when I discovered the man in the well in an abandoned farm lot near my home. I was with a group of friends playing hide and go seek, or something, when I found the well, and then I heard the voice of the man in the well calling out for help. I think it's important that we decided not to help him. Everyone, like myself, was probably on the verge of fetching a rope, or asking where we could find a ladder, but then we looked around at each other, and it was decided. I don't remember if we told ourselves a reason why we couldn't help him, but we had decided then. Because of this, I never went very close to the lip of the well, or I only came up on my hands and knees, so that he couldn't see me. And just as we wouldn't allow him to see us, I know that none of us ever saw the man in the well. The well was too dark for that, too deep, even when the sun was high up angling down the stone sides like golden hair. I remember that we were still full of games and laughter when we called down to him. He had heard us shouting while we were playing, and he had been hollering for us to come. He was so relieved at that moment. "God, get me out. I've been here for days." He must've known we were children, because he immediately struggled us to go get a ladder, get help. At first afraid to disobey the voice from the man in the well, we turned around and actually began to walk toward the nearest house, which was Arthur's. But along the way, we slowed down, and then we stopped. And after waiting what seemed like a good while, we quietly came back to the well. We stood or lay around the lip, listening for maybe half an hour. And then Arthur, after some hesitation, called down, "What's your name?" This, after all, seemed like the most natural question. The man answered back immediately. "Do you have the ladder?" We all looked at Arthur, and he called back down, "No, we couldn't find one." Now that we had established some sort of a dialogue, everyone had questions he or she wanted to ask the man in the well. The man wouldn't stop speaking. "Go tell your parents there's someone in this well. If they have a rope, or a ladder," he trailed off. His voice was raw, and sometimes he would cough. "Just tell your parents." We were quiet, but this time, no one stood up or moved. Someone, I think little Jason, called down, "Hello. Is it dark?" And then after a moment, "Can you see the sky?" He didn't answer, but instead told us to go again. When we were quiet for a bit, he called to see if we were gone. After a pause, Wendy crawled right to the edge so that her hair lifted slightly in the updraft. "Is there any water down there?" "Have they gone for help?" He asked. She looked around at us, and then she called down, "Yes. They're all gone now. Isn't there any water down there?" I don't think anyone smiled at how easy it was to deceive him. This was too important. "Isn't there?" She said again. "No," he said. "It's very dry." He cleared his throat. "Do you think it will rain?" She stood up and took in the whole sky with her blue eyes, making sure. "No, I don't think so." We heard him cough in the well, and we waited for a while, thinking about him waiting in the well. Resting on the grass and cement by the well, I tried to picture him. I tried to imagine the gesture of his hand reaching to cover his mouth each time he coughed. Or perhaps he was too tired to make that gesture each time. After an hour, he began calling again, but for some reason, we didn't want to answer. We got up and began running, filling up with panic as we moved, until we were racing across the ruts of the old field. I kept turning, stumbling as I looked behind. Perhaps he had heard us getting up and running away from the well. Only Wendy stayed by the well for a while, watching us run as his calling grew louder and wilder, until finally she ran, too, and then we were far away. The next morning, we came back, most of us carrying bread or fruit, or something to eat, in our pockets. Arthur brought a canvas bag from his house and a plastic jug of water. When we got to the well, we stood around quietly for a moment, listening for him. "Maybe he's asleep," Wendy said. We sat down around the mouth of the well on an old concrete slab, warming in the sun, and coursing with ants and tiny insects. Aaron called down then, when everyone was comfortable, and the man answered right away, as if he had been listening to us the whole time. "Did your parents get help?" Arthur kneeled at the edge of the well and called, "Watch out." And then he let the bag fall after holding it out for a moment, maybe for the man to see. It hit the ground more quickly than I expected. That, combined with the feeling that he could hear everything we said, made him suddenly closer, as if he might be able to see us. I wanted to be very quiet so that if he heard or saw anyone, he would not notice me. The man in the well started coughing, and Arthur volunteered, "There's some water in the bag. We all brought something." We could hear him moving around down there. After a few minutes he asked us, "When are they coming? What did your parents say?" We all looked at each other, aware that he couldn't address anyone in particular. He must've understood this, because he called out in his thin, groping voice, "What are your names?" No one answered until Aaron, who was the oldest, said, "My father said he's coming with the police, and he knows what to do." We admired Aaron very much for coming up with this on the spot. "Are they on their way?" The man in the well asked. We could hear that he was eating. "My father said, don't worry, because he's coming with the police." Little Jason came up next to Aaron and asked, "What's your name," because we still don't know what to call him. When we were talking among ourselves, he had simply become the man. He didn't answer, so Jason asked him how old he was, and then Grace came up too and asked him something, I don't remember. Finally, we all stopped talking, and we lay down on the cement. It was a hot day, so after a while, Grace got up, and then little Jason, and another young boy, Robert, I think, and went to town to sit in the cool movie theater. That was what we did most afternoons back then. After an hour, everyone had left except Wendy and myself, and I was beginning to think that I would go, too. He called up to us all of a sudden. "Are they coming now?" "Yes," Wendy said, looking at me, and I nodded my head. She sounded certain. "Aaron said his dad is almost here." As soon as she said it she was sorry, because she'd broken one of the rules. I could see it on her face, eyes filling with space as she moved back from the well. Now he had one of our names. She said, "They're going to come," to cover up the mistake. There it was, and there was nothing to do about it. The man in the well didn't say anything for a few minutes, then he surprised us again by asking, "Is it going to rain?" Wendy stood up and turned around, like she had done the other day. The sky was clear. "No," she said. Then he asked again, "They're coming, you said, Aaron's dad?" And he shouted, "Right," so that we jumped and stood up and began running away, just as we had the day before. We could hear him shouting for a while, and we were afraid someone might hear. I thought that toward the end maybe he had said he was sorry, but I never asked Wendy what she thought he'd said. Everyone was there again on the following morning. It was all I could think about during supper the night before, and then the anticipation in the morning over breakfast. My mother was very upset with something at the time. I could hear her weeping at night in her room downstairs, and the stubborn murmur of my father. There was a feeling to those days, months, actually, that I can't describe without resorting to the man in the well, as if through a great whispering, like a gathering of clouds, or the long sound, the turbulent wreck of the ocean. At the well, we put together the things to eat we had smuggled out, but we hadn't even gotten them all in the bag when the voice of the man in the well soared out sharply, "They're on their way now." We stood very still so that he couldn't hear us, but I knew what was coming, and I couldn't do anything to soften or blur the words of the voice. "Aaron," he pronounced, and I had imagined him practicing that voice, all night long, and holding it in his mouth so that he wouldn't let it slip away in his sleep. Aaron lost all the color in his face, and he looked at us with suspicion, as if we had somehow taken on a part of the man in the well. I didn't even glance at Wendy. We were both too embarrassed. Neither of us said anything. We were all quiet then. Arthur finished assembling the bag, and we could see his hand shaking as he dropped it into the well. We heard the man in the well moving around. After 10 minutes or so, Grace called down to him, "What's your name?" But someone pulled her back from the well, and we became silent again. Today the question humiliated us with its simplicity. There was no sound for a while from the well, except for the cloth noises and the scraping the man in the well made as he moved around. Then he called out, in a pleasant voice, "Aaron, what do you think my name is?" Aaron, who had been very still this whole time, looked around at all of us again. We knew he was afraid. His fingers were pulling with a separate life at the collar of his shirt, and maybe because she felt badly for him, Wendy answered instead. "Edgar." It sounded inane, but the man in the well answered. "No," the man said. Little Jason called out, "David?" "No," the man in the well said. Then Aaron, who had been absolutely quiet, said, "Arthur," in a small, clear voice, and we all started. I could see Arthur was furious, but Aaron was older and bigger than he was, and nothing could be said or done without giving himself, his name, away. We knew the man in the well was listening for the changes in our breath, anything. Aaron didn't look at Arthur, or anyone, and then he began giving all of our names, one at a time. We all watched him, trembling, our faces the faces I'd seen pasted on the spectators in the freak tank when the circus had come to town. We were watching such a deformity take place before our eyes, and I remember the spasm of anger when he said my name, and felt the man in the well soak it up. Because the man in the well understood. The man in the well didn't say anything now. When Aaron was done, we all waited for the man in the well to speak up. I stood on one leg, then the other, and eventually I sat down. We had to wait for an hour, and today, no one wanted to leave to lie in the shade, or hide in the velvet movie seats. At last, the man in the well said, "All right, then, Arthur, what do you think I look like?" We heard him cough a couple of times, and then the sound like the smacking of lips. Arthur, who was sitting on the ground with his chin propped on his fists, didn't say anything. How could he? I knew I couldn't answer myself if the man in the well called me by name. He called a few of us, and I watched the shudder move from face to face. Then he was quiet for a while. It was afternoon now, and the light was changing, withdrawing from the well. It was as if the well was filling up with earth. The man in the well moved around a bit, and then he called Jason. He asked, "How old do you think I am, Jason?" He didn't seem to care that no one would answer, or he seemed to expect that no one would. He said, "All right, what's my name?" He used everyone's name. He asked everyone. When he said my name, I felt the water clouding my eyes, and I wanted to throw stones, dirt, down the well to crush out his voice, but we couldn't do anything, none of us did, because then he would know. In the evening, we could tell he was getting tired. He wasn't saying much, and seemed to have lost interest in us. Before we left that day, as we were rising quietly and looking at the dark shadows of the trees we had to move through to reach our homes, he said, "Why didn't you tell anyone?" He coughed. "Didn't you want to tell anyone?" Perhaps he heard the hesitation in our breaths, but he wasn't going to help us now. It was almost night then, and we were spared the detail of having to see and read each other's faces. That night it rained, and I listened to the rain on the roof and my mother sobbing downstairs until I fell asleep. After that, we didn't play by the well anymore. Even when we were much older, we didn't go back. I will never go back. Ira Sher's story, "The Man in the Well," was originally published in The Chicago Review. It was his first published story. Just in case there's any ambiguity about it, it's a work of fiction. Ira Sher's the author of the novel, Gentlemen of Space. Act three, Human Nature, The View from Kindergarten. One old approach to raising children takes as its premise the idea of that children are by nature little monsters, whose destructive and selfish impulses have to be controlled, with physical force, if necessary. And so far in our program, we've provided, I think, a fair amount of evidence to support this particular school of thought. We've heard so far about boys taunting other boys in a cruel sort of survival of the fittest, we've heard about children leaving a man to die in a well. And so, for our final act, let's change things up a little bit. I want to tell you about an experiment done in a kindergarten classroom by a teacher named Vivian Paley, and it was an experiment to make children less cruel to each other. Paley is the author of many books about education, including one about this classroom experiment, and she's a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, though she's embarrassed whenever anybody actually says that as part of her credentials. And until recently, she was a kindergarten teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School. And she got the idea for her experiment when one day, it occurred to her how often she heard children in her classroom tell each other no. No, there's no room here for you to play with us. No, I promised I would play the next 16 games with someone else. No, we're already playing, you can't join in. No, you cannot play with us. And it was the same children, always, who were made into the outcasts. By kindergarten, Vivian Paley says, a ruling class starts to form among children. Certain kids notify others of their acceptability, and certain kids are told they're unacceptable, over, and over, and over again. And she points out that hitting and name calling are not allowed in school, but for some reason, this still is. It's every day. It suddenly came to me that this hidden curriculum has taken over. It's almost as if we're teaching children for an elitist life of bosses. Of course, we weren't. We were trying our best to dissuade them. Often, you would put your foot down. Teachers do it all the time. "I'm going to have to insist that you let Johnny play." And before you knew it, the play area would empty. The kids would stop playing? Yeah. The cruelty of the children's behavior seemed clear enough. If adults went around telling each other, no, you cannot sit with us, no, we do not want you here, no, you have to go away, it would be clear that this is not the way to act. And so Vivian Paley proposed to her students that they have a new rule in the class. She wrote it up in front of the room. You can't say, you can't play. That is, if someone wants to join your game, you have to let them. And their initial reaction? Disbelief. Both the ones who did the rejecting and the ones who were already used to being rejected could not see how such a plan could work. They understood the language. They understood what I was saying. But their amazement and distrust and fear that they would not be able to handle what it was that I was talking about, that play would be spoiled, was very apparent. Vivian Paley wasn't exactly sure what she should do, and so seeking some sort of input, she turned to the older children at the school where she taught. She visited all the grades from first grade through fifth grade and explained her proposed new rule, you can't say you can't play, and asked the children if they thought it was fair, and if they thought that it could work. And interestingly, what she ran into was a kind of pint size version of not in my backyard, not with me you don't. Third and fourth and fifth graders said the proposed rule might work with those kindergarten kids, because the kindergarten kids are nicer, and they're more willing to accept the rules from the teacher, but they said, kids their age, at their advanced age, were already way too mean with each other for this ever to catch hold. And they had a kind of nostalgia, even in third, and fourth, and fifth grade, a kind of nostalgia, and would talk wistfully about the days when they themselves were nicer, back in kindergarten. From grade to grade going up, they were more and more convinced of two things, that it couldn't work, it was against human nature, but they all seemed to feel that it could have gone differently at a younger age. When children said that it didn't seem natural, a lot of the argument just came down to the whole point of play was that they want to play with their friends, that it's an extension of friendship. Right. And let me ask you to read from the book. You recorded and then transcribed the conversations you had with the children about this. Let me ask you to read to the bottom of page 19. Right, this is one of the first formal discussions we have on the issue of you can't say you can't play. And this Angelo, who is about to speak, is certainly one of those who is-- not only feels himself, but is-- often rejected. Angelo, "Let anybody play if someone asks." Lisa, "But then what's the whole point of playing?" Nelson, "You just want Cynthia." Lisa, "I could play alone. Why can't Clara play alone?" Clara was one of the other children who was often rejected. Often rejected, and goes and sits in her cubby. Right. Angelo, "I think that's pretty sad. People that is alone, they has water in their eyes." Lisa, "I'm more said if someone comes that I don't want to play with." Teacher, "Who is sadder? The one who isn't allowed to play, or the one who has to play with someone he or she doesn't want to play with?" Clara, "It's more sadder if you can't play." Lisa, "The other one's the same sadder." Angelo, "It has to be Clara, because she puts herself away in her cubby, and Lisa can still play every time." Lisa, "I can't play every time if I'm sad." One of the children you talk about a lot in the book is this girl who you call Lisa, and when you put the rule into effect the first day, Lisa, you say, she pouts, "It's not fair at all. I thought we were only just talking about it." Right "I just want my own friends. What if someone isn't nice and hits me?" And then the discussion, you say, "Well, you know we have a rule about hitting." And then Lisa's not impressed with this, and she says, "There's some people I don't like." And there's this really amazing moment where Angelo says, you write here, Angelo says without emotion, "You don't like me." And everyone looks at him as if acknowledging the sad truth of his statement. Yes. What happened once the rule kicked in? How much did you see Lisa resist? I mean, what finally happened? Within a week it was as if this had always been the way life would be. And she was-- it was a tremendous event for Lisa. And if I may add parenthetically, it's not in the book, but all the years later, whenever Lisa, the child I call Lisa, met me in the hallway, she would always stop and ask me how is the rule doing, and give me an example of something she had done that showed she was still trying to follow the rule. The last time I met her was in the grocery store with her mother, and she said, "Mrs. Paley, it's still pretty hard for me, but I know I can do it, and I always try." And her mother nodded, and said, "She really does, you know." Vivian Paley. Back when her class was debating the new rule, she wondered, can you really legislate this type of morality? Can you order people to be kind to each other, not to exclude others? "Is there not," she wrote, "a natural desire to include certain people and exclude others?" And, she says, that once I put the new rule into effect, there was a palpable sense of relief in her class, as if they'd been rescued from meanness. The children were grateful for a structure that let them feel good about themselves and each other. Her book, You Can't Say You Can't Play, is published by Harvard University Press. Yeah, let's go. Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself, with Peter Clowney, Alix Spiegel, and Dolores Wilbur. This is our production manager Todd Bachmann's last week on the program. He's actually been our production manager since we've had a production manager, years and years. So much about our radio show, and the fact that our computers run, the fact that we actually have network computers, the fact that or contributors get promptly paid, to the existence of our online store, are thanks to him. It's going to be very hard to work around here without him. That we wish him the best. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free, or buy CDs of them, or, Todd asked me to say this, we just started selling the DVD of the cartoon slide show about Louis Sullivan and his architecture that I did with Chris Ware. That's www.thisamericanlife.org. You know, you can download today's program in our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who I met this way. What started off as name calling soon escalated to a series of mock angry slaps. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio, International.
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Colin was 14, a straight-A student, in a program for gifted kids. But he hated school. And this spring, a few weeks before the end of eighth grade, before he would leave middle school forever, he looked at his grade point average, did a little calculation, and realized something kind of amazing. I had a high enough GPA that I could flunk every class in eighth grade all the way through, and I would still graduate. Even if I had turned in nothing, I would have had a D average for that semester. And the D average would turn into an overall B average overall. And so, I had no reason to go. So I didn't go. He didn't just quit school all at once though. For a while he went to class. But quietly, and deliberately, stopped doing his work, on principle. There were lots of days where I just didn't do any work at all. And I would just sit through class and wait for the bell to ring, and give the appearance that I was working, or copy off people, or things like that, and so. Wasn't it more boring, doing nothing? No. Did you have a book you were reading, where you could just kind of, sit in the back-- No. I don't really read, so. Yeah. Or a magazine, or something? That's something that they could point at, though. I mean, I wasn't giving them anything they could point at. So if I did something like that, then they could say, well he was reading while we were supposed to be working. Right. That would be deliberately defying their instructions. Or it's just sitting there and not working. Right. There's nothing really they can do. And when it comes to high school, will you work in high school? Of course. Because high school, you're working towards the rest of your life. You're working toward what college you'll go to, and what college you go to decides what career you choose. But middle school? My counselor reassured me that it doesn't count for anything. That this will be all disregarded after this year is over. He cut school completely one time. And then a second time. And both times, the school tried to call his parents, but Colin, naturally, intercepted those messages and erased them from the family answering machine. And the third day that Colin cut school, it led to a kind of uncomfortable moment for his dad. His dad you see, is a behavior specialist for the public schools, in charge of training administrators how to keep kids doing what they're supposed to be doing. At a hundred schools, in three counties in Oregon, including the school that Colin attends. In your job, do you deal with kids who don't show up at school? Yep. And I was in the school for a meeting regarding something else, and the vice principal said, oh, are you here because of the call? And I said, call? And she said, well Colin is not in school all day. And I'm like, news to me. And so I called my wife and she said, I got a call earlier-- Can we just pause on that moment for a second? OK, so you're here to coach them about disciplining and controlling children. And in the middle of this, they say to you, oh by the way, you got our call about your son hasn't shown up today. What's that like for you? It's a little, kind of, it's sort of almost like, belching in a crowd, you know. It's just a little awkward. So I left work and went home. So I went there, and there he was. Much to his surprise, he saw me walk in the door. Sort of like, what are you doing here. He came into my room and, "Where the hell have you been?" And back and forth about, what were you doing, what were you thinking, what was your logic for this? And that's when I really told him. I had enough credits to graduate, and I didn't need to pass any more classes. There's no point. At some points in this fight, did you find yourself kind of convinced by him? From the beginning. I know what schools are like. I am there. I know the reality of that. It would be one thing for me to have this illusion about that. But, I mean, there's a part of me that wanted to laugh. But there's another part of me that wanted to strangle him. So you're simultaneously proud of him, and completely flummoxed. Yes. Baffled. [LAUGHTER] And beside myself. And needing to get back to work. And wishing this weren't so. It's kind of a stumper, what to do. On the one hand, Colin had a point. He was thinking independently, which his dad wants. Maybe the right thing to do would be to let Colin stop doing his schoolwork, and then force him to live through the consequences of that very adult decision. Maybe that would teach him something useful. On the other hand, Colin had a history of trying to wriggle out of his responsibilities. And so letting him wriggle out of something so big and important, it just didn't sit right. His dad tried to convince him to return to school. That event triggered a three week period of knock down, drag out, screaming, crying, yelling. And at one point, in the middle of an argument, I said Colin, I need to-- sort of in a moment of intensity-- I sort of went time out. You know, I need to clarify something here. And that is that, I don't know that I'm right. How'd that go over? He said well that's reassuring. Sort of, well that's reassuring. So he was like, you're telling me, I got to go to school because da da da da, but you don't even know that you're right! I said, no, I don't know that I'm right. I said it's my best guess, given the information available to me. Colin's dad says this is par for the course. You can't raise kids without getting into situations where you don't know what to do. Because as kids develop, they fight against you, try to get their independence. And sometimes you have to let them win those fights. And sometimes you have to stop them. And at every stage in their growth, there's going to be situations where it's going to be unclear what to do, what is best. Which brings us to the subject of today's radio program. From WBEZ Chicago, this is This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today we have two stories about adults struggling to figure out what is in the best interest of some child. And in situations where, what is best is not so clear. Act One of our program, I'd Prefer Not. In that act, as you heard, a 14 year old boy nearly gets the last word with his own father. Act Two, Exodus of One. In that story, a three year old girl comes into this country from another country with illegal papers. And authorities don't know what to do with her, and make their best guess. Years later, one of the officials goes on a search to find out if they did the right thing. Stay with us. Act One. I'd Prefer Not. So during this three week fight between Colin and his dad, Colin did agree to go back to school until it was resolved. And one day in math class, the teacher, as you'd expect, noticed that Colin was doing absolutely nothing. She asked me if I did my homework last night, and I said no. And she asked me why, and I said, because I don't want to. And she said, OK, well are you planning on doing it? And I said, if I feel like it. So she sent me to the office. And did you say this in kind of an angry way? Or were you just as neutral-- I was no, really polite about it. I said, well, there's no point. So she sent me to the office. It wasn't like I was trying to be mean to her about it. I mean she even told my mom later that, well, he was really polite about it. And so she sends him down to the office. She can't have him, I mean, it's open defiance in front of all the rest of the students. And if she says OK, the rest of the students look around, say, hmm. It worked for him. I was in the office, and I had been waiting in the focus room, which is basically a room with a table and a chair in it. And I was probably in there-- The focus room? Yeah. Meaning like, focus on what you had done? I guess. The focus room. There was one window, that had no handles on them. There's no way to get out besides the door. Well there's no way to get out of any room besides the door. Well, the window, but-- Oh, the window, I see what you're saying. [LAUGHTER] They actually took the handle out of the window. And it was hot in there. And I'd probably been in there for an hour and a half, to close to two hours. And then my dad came. I walked in the room. And I said, what can I do to help? And so we left the building and walked around. And I had the, you can't throw in the towel speech. Throwing in the towel, yeah, he used that a lot. Yeah. It was his favorite analogy. I probably hear that about 10 times a week. You can't throw in the towel. You can't throw in the towel. I said, I'm not going to let you throw in the towel. You can't throw in the towel. Can't throw in the towel. I mean I would hear it over and over. I could hear it coming. I could be like, oh here comes the towel. I could mouth it, I could mouth the words. Now were you aware during this period that you were posing kind of a puzzle for your dad? I was. And I was enjoying it. Say a little more about that. He deals with kids who have problems like that every day. And so, he's an expert. It's like, it's trying to beat Michael Jordan on a one-on-one, you know. Was there like, a most satisfying moment of it? That you remember you just thought, like, yes, OK. Well actually, yeah. When? When he told me that he didn't know if it was right. That was the moment when I thought, I really beat Michael Jordan. What I figured out was, that what we really needed to do is get through the end of the year. And I had this discussion with Colin. And we agreed. So what I worked out was him being able to come to Chicago from Oregon. And be with his sister for a couple of days for a weekend. And-- Oh, you gave him a reward, if he would actually go to school. Right. Oh. A bribe. Well-- yeah. I asked your dad how it was resolved. And he said he basically just tried to bribe. [LAUGHTER] Did he say how he would bribe me? That you got to come out to Chicago. He thought-- oh, so he was trying to bribe me with the Chicago trip? Well, he didn't-- yes. Is that what he said? That's pretty much, yeah. Well, I guess that it-- I look at it now, and I guess yeah, he did bribe me. And is that a bad thing? I think it's kind of bad when you're bribing your kids. I mean-- See I disagree with you. I think that if you're getting people to do the right thing for the right reasons, it's always best. But if that fails, getting them to do the right thing for the wrong reasons-- that's life. Sometimes that's the way it's got to go. So you think that sometimes you just got to do the wrong thing, to get him to go and do the right thing overall? I don't think it's the wrong thing to offer you the trip as a present. A present? It's now a present? Well what would you do? What should he have done? For me, I would have said, then don't go to school. See but, he wanted you to go to school. Like, he-- And I think I would have, actually. If he had let me stay home from school maybe a week? And I would just, I mean-- I couldn't have done it. I don't think I could have stayed home from school for the rest of the year. Why? It's kind of like, if you ever have been homesick, you know. You think it's going to be so great. But then after the first couple days, it's like, oh, I just want to get back to school. Because you felt like probably you would have been bored, you would have wanted to see your friends, it would just feel weird. Right. It would. I know the days that I stayed home it felt weird. I mean, I couldn't answer the phone. I couldn't be seen. I felt like I was hiding. I mean I was hiding. It felt-- it just didn't feel right. Wow. Did you realize this at the time, or did you only realize it in retrospect? I realized it at the time. I thought that if my dad had let me stay home, I would've stayed home for probably only a week at the very most. And I would have gone back to school. It's kind of like, if you gave me that much control, then I might be less rebellious. Colin Dunn and his father Corey, in Oregon. Act Two, Exodus of One. There are over 5,000 children each year who get caught at the borders or at the airport, trying to come into this country without a parent or a legal guardian. No legal papers. The law is clear-cut to what to do about them, but the situation often is not so clear-cut. They're taken to residential facilities. One is in Chicago, on a neighborhood street on the north side. It's innocuous looking. A two story, white brick building, bounded by an iron wrought fence, called the International Children's Center. It's run by a nonprofit agency under contract with the US government, and houses up to 70 children at a time, most of them teenagers, from China, Africa, Central America, and elsewhere. The average stay is two to three months. During that time, the children don't know what's going to happen to them. If they're going to be allowed to stay in the United States, or they're going to be sent back. Alex Kotlowitz has this story, about one of the memorable and difficult cases that they faced in the last few years. On the afternoon of December 14, 1999, at Chicago's O'Hare airport, immigration officials pulled aside a three year old girl named Georgia Norman. She had arrived at O'Hare with a woman from Milwaukee, and customs officials discovered that Georgia's visa had been forged. Little was known about the girl other than her name, and that she was from Jamaica. Given her age, she couldn't tell the officials very much. And the woman from Milwaukee was vague about her relationship with the girl. So the INS, concerned that the woman might be smuggling the girl to sell her as part of a child trafficking operation, took her into protective custody and brought her to the International Children's Center. She was not an obedient child when we first made contact with her. This is Hugo Ruiz, the center's director. For the first few weeks, Georgia threw tantrums when she didn't get her way, biting and spitting at those who tried to comfort her. She had nightmares. In the morning she'd awake disoriented, asking for her family. She refused to eat her meals. The staff at the center had such trouble with Georgia, that Hugo had to step in. I took Georgia to bed. And I was talking to her, and laying her down in bed, and she lifted up her leg and kicked down as I was holding her. And she dislocated my thumb. I actually tried to grab my thumb and put it back into place, and I did, but Georgia got scared. Because she saw that she had hurt me. And she started crying. And I hugged her. And we sang some songs, and I read her a couple of stories. And she fell asleep. And I went and got an ice bag. So that was my real introduction to Georgia early on in the program. Hugo, who is 54, is even keeled and patient. An immigrant himself, from Peru, on some level he identified with the confusion and uncertainty the children at the center felt. Also he had raised two daughters of his own. He continued to read to Georgia at night, and let her tag along with him to meetings downtown. Soon, the crying and the fits stopped. Georgia began to feel at home. She had the run of the place. She was a beautiful child, with a smile Hugo said, that could put anyone under her power. And because she was so much younger than most of the children at the center, she was doted on. Especially by some of the older girls, many of whom had left younger siblings behind. I miss my family, and I miss my little brothers. And I wanted to be close to her. Because it was a comfort for me, as well as for her. And we were very close. We'd take a lot of pictures together. Sagal [? Abdi, ?] who was 17 at the time, was from Somalia. Like some of the other kids here, she was running from horrific memories. In her case, the brutality of her country's civil wars, which had claimed the life of her father. Many other kids, especially the Chinese, are sent here by their parents, often with the aid of smugglers, in the hope that they'll find work and be able to send money home. Though the kids don't know the particulars of each other's stories, they feel connected by their common experiences. Sagal became Georgia's roommate, and they became like sisters. One day, Sagal learned that her effort to gain political asylum had run into some problems. So I was very upset. And I was sitting in my room, and she came in. And she started dancing. And she stole one of my make-up and put it on. And she put all over her face, and she was, just so cute. And I just look at her, and I started laughing. And I thought about it, and I say, this little kid, she's away from her family, she's having a good time. And just, you know, playing around. Me, I'm older than her. I shouldn't sit and cry. So we just went to the hallway and joined the other kids. Georgia seemed to know that since she was so much younger than everyone else, she could usually get her way. Either through petty stubbornness, or through charm. I was visiting the center around that time, and I remember how the staff would break program rules for her. They snuck her extra candy. They brought her Barbie dolls, which she coveted. They hired a clown for her birthday. The older girls like Sagal used their allowances to buy her presents. And they would take turns braiding her hair. They taught her phrases in Spanish and Chinese. When the children posed for photographs, Georgia, like a little Zelig, would dance her way into these pictures. At the center she learned to ride a bike. She rode her first elevator. She learned to swim at the nearby YMCA. Meanwhile, Hugo tried to figure out her future. Which first meant figuring out her past. In the afternoons, Hugo invited Georgia to come visit him at his first floor office. And I remember sitting in my desk, and she was not quite awake yet after her nap. And she'd come in, and kind of poke her head in the door. And she just would show me her smile, and then go back outside. And I said, come on in Georgia. I would show her pictures of Jamaica. And she'd say, oh, that looks like where I used to live. Even after three months at the center, no one knew much about Georgia. Where she was from in Jamaica, who her parents were, how she ended up in this country with this woman from Milwaukee. She was a three year old girl without a history. No one knew what to do with her. Three months turned into four, and eventually into six. Through all of this, the only absolute that Hugo knew, was that if Georgia stayed at the center, she'd be OK. But he knew she couldn't remain there indefinitely. There were many takers in the program that wanted to take care of Georgia for the rest of her life. Including yourself? I, unfortunately, I was probably the first one in line. I think I had been a father to her fairly easily. Why has the US government kept this three year old in detention for six months? Eye on America investigates. In the wake of Elian Gonzales, Georgia's story made national news. And the outrage was that a three year old girl had been in custody for so long. TV crews parked outside the center. Local congressmen, along with Jesse Jackson, demanded a meeting with Georgia to make sure she was OK. Which of course she was. They wanted something done for this three year old girl. But there really weren't any clear options. Then a reporter from Milwaukee located Georgia's mother near Runaway Bay, a resort town on Jamaica's north coast. It appeared that Georgia's mother had willingly given Georgia to the Milwaukee woman, in the hope that she might have a better life in America. Georgia's mother also made it clear to authorities that she wanted Georgia back home. So a decision was made to reunite Georgia with her mother. And while that seemed like the obvious choice, it worried those who had taken care of her. What does it mean to send a child back to a parent who was willing to give her away? This question weighed heavily on Hugo. When it came time to go back to Jamaica, I was the one that went back with her. And that was a tough trip. It was a very difficult trip. Every child deserves to be with their parent. In the case of Georgia, given the background of what happened, my fear would be that Georgia would be put through another episode, much like first one. Georgia left the center in June of 2000, just two weeks after she'd turned four. Hugo woke her early for a 6:00 AM flight. She wore her favorite outfit, a blouse with umbrellas, blue jeans, and tennis shoes with blinking lights. Hugo tried to prepare Georgia for the trip, letting her know that he was taking her to her mother. But it soon became apparent that Georgia thought this was simply a visit. And that she'd return to Chicago with Hugo. When they arrived at the airport in Kingston, they were greeted by a representative from the Jamaican government. I introduced her to the gentleman that came in from the Jamaican Child and Welfare Services, and said, this is the guy that's going to take you back to your mom. And then she asked me the real tough question, that I can still remember her little face, and she had all her favorite toys. And she went back with lots of bags and luggage. And she was holding her favorite doll, and she said, "You're coming with me?" And I had to tell her that I wasn't. Tough. Tough to see a child that trusts you and cares about you. You sort of feel like you're in them now. This past May, Hugo began to look for Georgia. She would be nearly eight years old. I'm looking for Georgia Norman. Do you know a young girl by the name of Georgia Norman? Well, I'm calling from the United States. I'm trying to find a friend of mine that I met a long time ago. And I'm just trying to find out where she's at. In those intervening four years, Hugo hadn't stopped worrying about Georgia. He wondered what kind of life she had in Jamaica, if in fact she was still there. Maybe her mother had given her away again. In the main hallway of the center, he had hung a photo of Georgia on roller skates, taken just before she left the center, on her birthday. And he held on to the two American Airline ticket stubs that he used to fly Georgia back home. They remained in his wallet for four years. Well I want to find Georgia. I want to know what happened. I want to find out what is that has gone on in her life. One of the things that I told Georgia when we parted in Kingston was that I would see her soon. And it's been a while, and I want to be able to keep my word. Over the past few years, Hugo had talked to me about going down to Jamaica to find Georgia. He had never done anything like this with any other children from the center. This past spring, I suggested we finally make the trip. Truth was, we weren't even certain we'd be able to find her. We pulled an old phone number from her lawyer's documents. We tried calling Jamaicans with the same last name. But nothing. Then shortly before we were going to depart, I found Sheila Ramos, the Milwaukee woman who had brought Georgia into this country with a forged visa. Remember, officials initially believed that she might be trafficking in children, planning to sell Georgia. That turned out not to be the case. But given those early suspicions, I was surprised that she so readily agreed to talk to me. I would have thought she'd want to put the whole episode behind her. I drove to her home in Milwaukee, not sure what to expect. I stop at custom, and they want to see her birth certificate. And they say, who is she? That's when I say, that's the little girl that's coming to live with me. And then that's when they say, hold up. I didn't think I did nothing wrong. When Sheila Ramos tells the story of her decision to take Georgia back to the US with her, it seems surprisingly innocent. And at the same time, strangely spur of the moment. Sheila's 50 and married, works with inner city youth, and has two grown children of her own. Once a year Sheila would bring a group of Milwaukee teenagers to Jamaica, and on one visit, she met Georgia and her mother, Margaret Francis. Margaret would bring Georgia by the hotel so she could swim in its pool. Margaret and Sheila became friendly and stayed in touch. When Sheila returned the next year, the idea of her taking Georgia back to the US came up. And she came over, she said, it would be real nice if she can have a nice family to go home to. And I say well, I mean she can easily come and visit if she like. And then, she said, Sheila, that'd be real good, you know. She said you can be the godmother, or I could be her legal guardian, or something like that. And when I came back over to Jamaica, like I said two years later, she said well we're going to go to court. It all seems almost, casual's not the right word, but kind of matter of fact. I mean that you don't say to her, well why would you want to give her up. It's, you-- And it could be because it's like, because I see the poverty there. So, to me, when she said because she would have a better life with you. I didn't ask questions. I said, well, yeah she will have a better life with me. Because you can see the child. You know, she was not dirty, but don't have nice clothes. I just looked at her and said OK. And that was that. It didn't even occur to Sheila that she'd need anything more than legal guardianship to bring Georgia into the US. Her husband Carlos though, had reservations. And when he met Margaret, he wasn't reassured. There wasn't no curiosity coming out of her. And I said, ask me something. You know, no curiosity. No, how do you guys live, how are you going to do this. No questions was come out of her there. That puzzled me and worried me a little bit. I said, come on, man. Act like a, act like you're sad, you know. You're giving up your child, you know. But I didn't sense that, not once. Never once did she change her mind. In the end Carlos gave in, because Sheila wanted it so much. So it would be a real thrill for me, because I have two boys. And I always wanted a daughter. I would've probably spoiled her to death. She'd probably be in probably everything-- karate, ballet, model. She'd probably be in everything. After spending an afternoon with Sheila, and meeting the people around her, I was convinced that her intentions were good. She runs a small youth center, and not long ago took in a 17 year old neighborhood girl who'd been abandoned by her family. The girl calls Sheila mom. But here's the last thing I expected to hear. Four years after trying to bring Georgia into this country, she's now trying again. She's attempting to formally adopt her. And though her first effort was denied, she is now appealing the decision. She had stayed in close touch with Margaret. There had been regular visits, and they speak every week. And so Sheila was also able to solve the mystery of how to find Georgia. She gave me Margaret's phone number, and Hugo called to arrange a visit. As we headed down to Jamaica, we worried about what kind of situation we'd find Georgia in. Whether she was still being cared for, what could be going on that her mother was still trying so hard to give her away. In a sense, things had come full circle. Four years ago, Georgia must have felt abandoned. First by her mother, then by Sheila, and finally by Hugo. And now four years later, Georgia was back with her mother, and faced being sent away yet again. It's exactly what Hugo had feared. Coming up, Alex and Hugo in Jamaica. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Alex Kotlowitz's story continues, tracking down a little girl after four years. We arrived in Runaway Bay, Jamaica, on Memorial Day weekend. Margaret and Georgia had agreed to meet us at the hotel that first evening. And so we waited for them near the front door, watching a game of netball on the lobby's television. They soon arrived. They were holding hands. Georgia was four years older, nearly eight now, but she looked unmistakably like the young girl I'd met in Chicago. She wore her hair in braids, two to the side like pigtails, and a double braid down her back. Hugo approached Georgia. How are you? How are you? She didn't recognize him, and hid behind her mother, clutching one of her legs. You remember me? Do you? I know I lost a little bit of hair. Both Georgia and her mother had dressed up for the occasion. Margaret, a sturdily built woman with a shortly cropped afro, wore a white linen shorts suit. Georgia wore a neatly ironed white button down blouse, and a short blue denim skirt. We went and sat by the pool and Georgia, understandably wary of the microphone, kept her distance. Hugo sat in a chair, and Georgia stood a few feet away. So, how are you honey? You look so cute. You've grown quite a bit. You were only this size when I brought you. Do you remember when I brought you here? Do you? Yes. It's kind of like I thought. She would probably be shy and not remember, and that it would take a while to warm up. And, but, I think after a little bit of talking with her, she started to make the connection. We had brought along photographs of two of the teenagers who had been particularly close to Georgia in Chicago. Who's this? Um, [INAUDIBLE]. Bi-wi ?], this is [? Bi-wi. One was of [? Bi-wi ?] Lin, a girl from China. And the other was a photograph taken at the center of Sagal and Georgia. Uh-oh, who's that? Me. And Sagal. Remember Sagal? Yeah. In the photos, Sagal is kneeling, her cheek pressed up against Georgia's. Both are smiling, their arms slung around each other. And see this one, she hasn't seen this one. That's Sagal. She's from Somalia. She used to really take care of her a lot. Margaret smiled timidly. While she's reserved, almost shy, it was clear she appreciated hearing of Georgia's time in Chicago. Though she never asked Hugo any questions about her life there. I remembered Sheila's husband, Carlos, telling me how incurious she was. Margaret told Hugo about a visit she and Georgia took to Bob Marley's grave site. Georgia walked over from the pool at that point. I know what you're talking about. About Bob Marley. I know a lot about him. I know his [? story ?], his temper, his house. And I know when he was born and I know when he died. When did he die? 1981. Oh, when was he born? 1945. Ah ha. Georgia was warming up to Hugo. They traded facts about Bob Marley for a while. And then her attention drifted toward the pool. She waded in, and Hugo encouraged her to go deeper. She looked back at her mom, like any good kid would, for permission. You've done a real good job with her. She just seems like a real sweet girl, and all that she has done, is she's grown up. At the outdoor restaurant Margaret chose for dinner, a neighborhood hangout, music blared through refrigerator-sized speakers stacked one on top of the other. It was difficult to have a conversation. It was uncomfortable sitting around this picnic table, barely able to exchange a word. But it was easy to see that Margaret adored Georgia, and that Georgia adored her mom. They shared a plate of chicken. And at one point, Georgia snuggled up against her mother, and together they sang along with the music. Margaret and Hugo tried over the music to talk about the adoption. But Georgia soon ran out of food. You want more jerk chicken? You do? Come on, let's go get some. Come on Georgia, help me. They strolled to the counter. I asked Georgia, I said, come on, give me your hand. I haven't held your hand for such a long time. And she says, but they're so greasy. And I said it doesn't matter, here, come on, give me your hand. So she gave me her hand and we went up and walked up the steps and put the order in. And I asked her, I said, so Georgia, what do you want to do? She said, well, I want to go to Chicago. That sort of surprised me. It surprised me that she would say that. I said why, she says, because I like it there. And I just wonder what it is that she liked about Chicago. Or I wonder if, as some of the other children sometimes are, if she was coached to say that. Georgia's answer unnerved Hugo. It wasn't what he had expected. Especially after only a couple of hours together. Hugo and I assumed that Georgia was mimicking what her mother clearly wanted for her. As close as she and Georgia seemed, she was still planning to send her to live with Sheila in America. Back at the hotel, Hugo and I talked about the evening. I'm happy that she is the way she is. She's clearly attached to her mom. She seems like a very normal kid. It must be somewhat of a relief. Because I know you were anxious, and I know I was anxious, and I didn't have anywhere near as much at stake as you did about what we were going to find. It really is a relief. I know her recollections are not as vivid as I had hoped. But you know, that's also good. It's also good that she's able to go ahead, and move from that to bond with her mom the way she did. I still think it would be very difficult for her to leave her mom. The next morning, Georgia, her mother, and her mother's friend Maury, picked us up at the hotel to visit their home. We wound our way along the serpentine roads of Jamaica's interior. It took half an hour to drive the eight miles, past groves of fruit trees, around hairpin turns. Through the center of Brown's Town, a bustling place where men were drinking beer and playing dominoes on the sidewalk. Margaret's house is rather remote, on the far outskirts of the town. We turned on to a rutted dirt road, and then on to another dirt road, which was a slushy brown from yesterday's rains. We finally pulled up alongside a narrow concrete structure, which had been built into a steep hill. Margaret's home had belonged to her uncle, who had recently died. In places, the concrete is chipped away. Most of the window panes are missing or broken. There's no plumbing. Margaret showed us around. You see right now, in the next part there, the flooring needs to fix. I see you put a patch there, huh? Yeah. Along one side of the house, Margaret had hung a shower curtain. On a table sat a yellow plastic tub. So you fill up something, and then-- Yeah. OK, I see. So you've got to get this full and then you basically, you just kind of, OK. That works. That's why I really want a better life for Georgia, you understand? I see. Good. We quickly realized that her mission for the day was to convince us how poor she was. In order for the adoption with Sheila to go through, one of the things that Margaret has to prove is that she's not able to adequately care for Georgia. She knew Hugo had an important job working with immigrant children. And so she hoped he'd have some influence. With that in mind, Margaret showed us the front room where she and Georgia shared a bed. She pointed out two sheets of plywood, which covered a hole in the floor. She told us that her grown nephew, grown niece, and her niece's two year old son, stayed in two small rooms off to the side. She took us into the kitchen, which is barely large enough for their two appliances, a gas stove and a rather small refrigerator. Which is empty, except for a pitcher of water and a brown bag of fruit. There are no sinks or cabinets. When I asked about her bathroom, she nodded to their pit toilet, which sits on a ridge a short walk from the house. Margaret marched us from room to room with the indifference of a tired museum guide. It was clear that if she hadn't thought it might help Georgia's chances to go to the US, she wouldn't have had us there at all. For our part, it felt voyeuristic. It was, to be honest, terribly awkward. Hugo tried to put everyone at ease. At the back of the house, we walked over to a stone cistern, which collects their drinking water off the house's tin roof. Swimming pool? [LAUGHTER] Yeah. How full does it get? Does it get all the way to the top sometimes, or not? Yeah. When the rain fall, all it fill up. And then it flow over. There's a lot of fish inside there now. So the fish will die once the fish are in there. There are fish in your water here? How do they get them in? My nephew bring them and put them in there. Her nephew had dumped some river perch into the drinking water, which was murky, and which she usually boils before drinking. Hugo and Georgia wandered off to the side of the house. Georgia. You remember how I used to play, over there in Chicago, with [? Bi-wi ?] and Sagal? Sit down. Like this. The hands, patty cake. Hugo sat down with Georgia to re-aquaint her with the game of patty cake. Then one like this. Back again. Then with this one, no, the other side. And then again, then down. Then up. Mm-mm-mm. As they played, Georgia very quietly brought up Chicago, as she did on the first night. She asked Hugo, if she were to come to America, and the same thing happened as last time, she gets stopped by immigration, would she end up with him? If I go back, and I don't have my visa, how would I [? reach ?] where you are? Maybe, if they catch you, if they catch you. If they don't catch you, then you go with your, what's her name? Sheila. Sheila. Where do you want to go, with Sheila, or with us? With you. Hugo asked her why she wanted to return to Chicago. Because, she said, I want to see Sagal and [? Bi-wi. ?] Meanwhile, Margaret and I were talking on the front porch. We leaned on the railing overlooking the tropical bush and the dirt road. I asked Margaret why she was so intent on giving Georgia to Sheila. I really don't want to see her on the island. Because of violence, and all those things. You have a lot like those cool little boys, and don't go to school, and just, you know. She told me that the local boys, many of whom don't go to school, harass Georgia, often grabbing her by the hand. Margaret also said that she worked as a domestic. But only part-time, because she wanted to be at home each day when George arrived from school. So you're worried that she's-- somebody might take advantage of her? Right. Has that happened at all, have people tried to do that? Like one evening she come from school, and she's telling me that, mommy you know what the guy on the bus tell me? I said what. He's giving me three more here. I said what? Said he giving me three more here. Because like, she's eight now, innocent. So he giving her three more years. Three more years? Right. Three more years. The guy on the bus meant that's when Georgia will be old enough to be a mother. Margaret, who's now 39, had her first child at 21. And eventually had six children by four different men. Georgia is her youngest. None of the men stuck around, including Georgia's father, who has disappeared from her life. When Margaret's oldest turned 16, she informed Margaret that she was pregnant. When Margaret heard that, she cried. So, I just don't want to see that happen to Georgia, I just want her to grow up. And have things, have what she can have, innocence. Like go to school and take her education. Pass her subject and get a nice job before she go on to wherever she go, have kids. Cannot walk in my footstep. She can't walk in my footsteps, Margaret says. Not I hope she doesn't, she can't. Margaret was adamant about that. Do you ever think, how am I going to be here without my daughter? [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. I always survived. I just want the best for her. But it's got to be hard for you. I can tell how close you are with Georgia. Yeah but, the reason why is because I don't have anybody to help me. So I want to do something for myself, because I don't want to lean on anyone for saying, give me this and give me that, now give me this. I want to have something for myself, actually something for myself too. I'm getting old. I'm 39 years old. I want to have something for myself, you know friend? But it's got to be so hard as a mother to let go. Margaret didn't answer. She swatted at the mosquitoes. She stared at the bush on the other side of the road. I wondered if, given her reality, she had by necessity stopped asking herself these questions. All I could think to say to break the long silence was-- It's quite humid, huh? As we spent time in Jamaica, it became clear that Georgia's situation was not at all extraordinary. Virtually everyone we met had a similar story to tell. During the drive from Kingston to Runaway Bay, we had told our driver, [? Ollie Forester, ?] about Georgia. And he said that just a few days earlier, a complete stranger had left a five year old boy carrying a backpack full of clothes at the gate to his father's house. They just left one at the gate. They just left him at the gate, and just leave him like that. His mother just come, and leave him like that. So your father's taking care of a child now? Yes, right now. Yeah. And it's not the first time. Ollie's ?] father, a farmer in his 70s, plans to raise this child. Maybe even legally adopt him, if he can find the mother. Then when we visited the Sunflower Hotel, where Margaret and Sheila first met, we encounter the hotel's owner, Vana Taylor. She told us this story of how she came to take in a child seven years ago. The child is now eleven. Vana was at the beach early one morning and saw a mother with her daughter. It was a school day. And I said, why is the child not at school? Because I'm always worried about that. And then the mother said, I have no clothes, I have no food, I have nothing to send the child to school. So I said to her, you know, why don't you give me the child, or something like that. And then she said, fine, you know. She said to the child, do you want to go live with Ms. Taylor, and the child said, yes. That was it. That matter of fact. That matter of fact. And by the time I got home, she was here. It's very easy, it's much easier than having one, isn't it? [LAUGHTER] There's a saying in Jamaica that once the children [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE} kitten. Meaning that just like a cat, people give away their children. This is Claudette Pious who works with children in Spanish Town, near Kingston. She says it's actually rare for Jamaican children to be sent to America. Usually it's the parents who go, leaving behind their children with family, friends, or sometimes on their own. It's become so common that there's a name for the kids left behind, barrel children. Because they receive barrels of goods from their parents, mostly name-brand shoes and clothes. Claudette herself was abandoned. Her mother emigrated to Canada in search of work, and left Claudette behind with an aunt. Claudette told me she never forgave her mother. I got many letters. I still have some. And I can remember her sending me a tape recorder. And saying, I should talk on the tape recorder and send the tapes to her. I'd just sit by myself, and talk to this tape recorder. Sometimes I'd quarrel with her. Sometimes I'd tell her all the things happening. Sometimes it was almost like a diary. If it was a good day, I would tell her. Some bad days, I would tell her. But interestingly, I didn't send the tapes. In her work with children today, Claudette won't take any in. She won't build a shelter. She feels it's too important that they stay with their own families. Her own mother eventually returned to Jamaica when Claudette was an adult. I remember saying to her, that whatever I become in life have nothing to do with you. That's what you said to your mother? And she was very upset. And she said, I was very ungrateful because she supported me. She send the money. And I said, it's not about the money. It's about that connection, not being there for me when I wanted to cry, when I wanted to laugh, when I wanted to-- just to hold you, and I wanted you to be close. Hugo believes what Claudette does, that if at all possible kids should stay with their parents. And like Claudette, he had had his own experience. Growing up in Peru, his family at one point fell on hard times. His mother had the chance to give him up. An uncle offered to raise him. But she held on to Hugo. It was more important to her, poor or not, that her son be with his mom. But in the nine years Hugo has been at the children's center, he's begun to understand why parents might let go of their children. He learned it first through the children from India, whose parents had been conned by smugglers into thinking they were sending their children to America to attend great schools and to live with well to-do families. When in fact, the smugglers planned to put them to work at menial jobs. Hugo would occasionally talk by phone with these parents. And the first thing they'd ask about were the schools their children presumably attended. I used to be fairly judgemental as far as that went. There's a lot of people that do not understand. But I understand today why they separate from their children. And I don't think they love them any less than we love our children. I just think that they're so desperate that they don't have any other options. And I understand that piece a lot better today. The interesting thing that perplexes me, I mean I think I can understand the first time around. Georgia's really young, she's three years old, and Margaret's living a really difficult life. A woman comes along who she clearly on some level admires, maybe doesn't know well, and offers to take Georgia. And Margaret goes along with it. And then everything goes awry, and she gets her kid back. And I would think that would be the most glorious moment in some ways. You know, her-- And she doesn't come across that way. Yeah, and that she doesn't want-- she's still willing. Here we are four years later, and she's still willing and ready to give Georgia up. I think of what goes through Georgia's head right now. And I'm sure she has questions as well. That she's not able to express to her mom, or maybe to anyone. Not yet anyway. Later on, I'm sure that she'll want some answers. What kind of questions? You know, why am I being sent here again? I'm here with my mom. And at this age, it's going to be a fairly difficult separation, legal or not. It's going to be a difficult situation. But I don't know that Georgia will ever forget at this age. Because Georgia is now in what I consider to be a stable environment. And this is where she should remain. [SINGING] Don't worry about a thing. 'Cause every little thing is going to be all right. Tell you don't worry about a thing. That night at the hotel bar, Georgia sang along to the piano player. [SINGING] Rising sun in the morning, smile with the rising sun. Three little birds-- Margaret looked on, beaming. It was the one time she seemed completely unburdened. And it was the same with Georgia, as well. Ironically, one of the reason she's doing so well, is Sheila. Who sends $50 to $100 every couple of weeks. She's also paying for Georgia's private school education. [SINGING] Singing sweet songs of melodies pure and true. This is our message to you. We left the next day after stopping by to bring Georgia presents and a cake to celebrate her eighth birthday. As she waits for adults in two countries to figure out her fate, I suppose a hopeful thing is that she's been in the same place before, and came out of it OK. Or so it seemed. What has to be toughest on Georgia though, are all the unknowns. Hugo once told me that the longer he works with children like Georgia, it becomes more complicated, not less. So many of these children, they don't seem to fully belong anywhere. Alex Kotlowitz. His most recent book is Never a City So Real. Four years ago when Georgia came to the United States, about 5,000 minors were stopped at US borders and airports. This year, 6,300 are expected. The number of residential centers for them, like the one Hugo runs, has jumped from eight to twenty, in just four years. Our program's produced today by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachman and Will [? Reichel ?]. It is Will's last show. He's performed bravely and capably in the face of great adversity, and we are sorry to see him go. Our website www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for free. Or you know you can download audio of our show at audible.com/thisamericanlife. Where they have public radio programs, best selling books, even the New York Times, all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. In the crowded gym locker room, I can report to you, he just repeats this mantra over and over-- "Can't throw in the towel. Can't throw in the towel." I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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A couple weeks ago, I heard this show on the radio where they were trying to explain why most people in most elections prefer Republicans these days. And there was a writer named Thomas Frank on the show, going around with this book that he just published about politics in Kansas. He is interested in why Kansans would keep voting for Republicans at every level, even though Republican economic policies and social policies weren't doing much to help them. And, he says, they actually made their lives tougher in a lot of ways. Hurt farmers. Hurt the Kansas economy. The poorest county in the country went for President Bush with an 80% majority in the last election. Frank's argument-- you may have heard him talk about this on that book tour-- is that Republicans were getting people to vote against their own economic self-interest by appealing to their values on cultural issues, on abortion, on God. Though as Frank and the other guest on this radio show, On Point, said-- the other guest was Atlantic Monthly senior editor, Jack Beatty-- the Democrats haven't been very good for most Kansans' economic interests either. You know, it's hard to say that the people voting for the Republican party are all that wrong. I mean, neither party represents their interests. So they vote for the party that better represents their values. And that is the GOP. Exactly. It delivers. Gag rule on abortion internationally, stem cell research, abstinence-only programs in the schools, an effort to appoint anti-choice judges. It delivers, or tries to deliver, on the values agenda. Whereas the Democrats-- I mean, look at Clinton. He gave the Midwest NAFTA, the China health deal. They didn't get health care. So it's hard to turn around to the people who've lost their livelihoods and say, vote for us. We're the party that will-- well, what will we do? Well, we'll expose you to international competition. Whereas the Republicans are going to do the same thing. But at least they're going to make noises on the culture war. Soon they got to callers. The first was this Republican voter who said that of course he wasn't just voting his pocketbook. That would be crude. Your commentator's points about their voting against their economic best interests, well there's more of concern to me than who's going to give me a tax break, or who's going to build a factory in my town. I've got a lot of other interests that are important to me. This caller said that he disagreed with the Republicans on a bunch of things. But he said that one nice thing about the Republican Party is that it welcomes people who disagree with them on this particular issue, or that particular issue. Whereas, he said, Democrats, if you're pro-life, it doesn't feel like there's any place for you in the party. The next caller said the same thing, that there was no room in the Democratic Party for a diversity of views. If you even contemplate, if you even advocate even restrictions on abortion-- which even the majority of people of the United States would favor-- there's no room for you in the Democratic Party. You won't be allowed to speak at the Convention to advocate the idea that the state should decide when and under what circumstances abortion should be allowed. Of course, famously, in 1992, Pennsylvania's Democratic governor, Robert Casey, wasn't allowed to speak at his own party's convention, because he was pro-life. Republicans control the House, they control the Senate, they control the White House. They have 28 of 50 governorships. They control the House and the Senate in 21 State Houses. Seven out of nine Supreme Court Justices are Republican appointees. And they dominate the majority of federal appellate courts, as well. They are on the march. Republicans are positioning themselves as America's majority party. And what that means is-- though Democrats may find this surprising, given the fact that blacks, and Jews, and Hispanics still vote mostly for Democrats-- lots of people find the Republican Party to be more inclusive, more welcoming, more accepting of diverging views. This is what Newt Gingrich was talking about, just last week, when he declared that yes, there is a party of narrow-minded bigotry in this country. It's called the Democrats. He meant that the Democrats are the ones who demand that you fall into lockstep on abortion, and affirmative action, and all sorts of other political correctness besides. Today on our radio show, Republicans on the March. Their party is great at getting elected. And they do it very smartly, by papering over the differences come election time. On today's program, though, we leave aside the official talking points that Republicans are saying everywhere until November, and ask Republicans to speak instead about what they actually believe, and what they want for their party, and for the country. And it's way more complicated than you might think. Not just Christians on the one side of the Party fighting with moderates on the other. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our radio show, Republicans, The Party of Inclusion. Act One of our program, Pink Elephant. In that act, a Republican on what might seem like an ill-fated mission to win the hearts and minds of his fellow Republicans at their convention. Act Two, Right and Righter. A visit to one of the many states where the Republican Party has been picking up strength. To see how and why, we spend some time with the Alabama Republican Party. Act Three, Indecent Proposal. In that act, free market Republicans in this story, about a rich guy who knows that every person has his price. And so he goes to his Republican co-workers with an offer of money-- lots and lots of money-- if they will dare to spend just one evening with him, doing an act that most Republicans would find utterly repulsive, namely watching the Michael Moore film. Act Four, It's My Party. One of the most civil conversations that you will ever hear between one side of the Party, that feels like it should be included, and the other, that feels that maybe it should not. Stay with us. Act One, Pink Elephant. Patrick Howell came to the Republican Convention this year on a mission that makes you wonder if he's in denial about the state of today's Republican Party, or if he knows a lot more about it than you do. I saw it as a great opportunity to bring the inclusive Log Cabin message to the delegates that I happened to meet. The Log Cabin message is the message of gay Republicans. Log Cabin, you may already know, is the name of the gay Republicans' official national organization. And their inclusive message definitely had an uphill battle at this year's convention. Not only did the party adopt a platform calling for a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage, and decrying that homosexuality is not compatible with military service, gay Republicans couldn't even talk a single delegate into presenting their side of things for discussion at the platform committee. They were totally shut out. Nationally, just 11% of Republican voters support same-sex marriage. Hence Patrick's plan. I get to go to all the breakfasts, and all of the events, and get onto the convention floor. And so, what does that mean? What do you think you're going to be doing? Well, really just showing them that there are gay Republicans out there, that there needs to be a big tent approach, in order to win over the broader public, the suburban voters that are much more moderate. In his experience talking to Republicans, which is considerable, this is the most effective sell, that tolerance wins elections. 1.1 million gays and lesbians voted for President Bush in the year 2000, just a fourth of the gay vote overall, but enough to make a difference for the president. In Florida, that works out to nearly 50,000 votes, the Log Cabin Republicans say. Patrick is in his 30s, an attorney in Orlando. Until a few years ago he was married. He has a little boy from that marriage. Then he came out. He has always been a Republican, and agrees with the president on pretty much everything, he says, except gay issues. The treatment that he gets in his own party has varied quite a bit. For instance, county Republican leaders specifically reached out and invited Patrick to run for the state assembly two years ago, in a district in Orlando that's mostly Democrats and gay-friendly. The State Party gave him the maximum, $50,000, and hooked him up with another $50,000 in third party ads. But then the Republican who used to hold that seat actually endorsed Patrick's Democratic opponent in the race, rather than support a gay candidate. Patrick has gotten some nasty emails, saying, why don't you leave the party? You're not wanted. But the nastiness, he says, happens less often than you'd think. One-on-one, he finds most Republicans are glad to sit down and talk to him. You know, people that just know you on the fringe, but then you end up sitting at a voter registration booth with them for four hours on a Saturday. And suddenly that person leaves really knowing everything about me. And Patrick, what do you find in that kind of situation, that tends to change people's mind? I think that it's just the realization that I'm not that different from themselves. And so, basically, you talk about your kid. You talk about going to church. Right. Right. During this extraordinary and even challenging moment, we have discovered who our friends are. And with us today, our friend and yours, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In New York, the first Republican Convention event that Patrick attended was run by his own organization, the Log Cabin Republicans. In the wake of their defeats at the Platform Committee, they staged what they called the Big Tent Event, with as many high-profile mainstream politicians as they could sign up. The very liberal-minded Republican Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, kicked things off to a room with a few hundred people in it, which for gay Republicans, is a huge turnout. As the host of this reception, I want to tell you that a few years ago, I used this event as an occasion to come out, as a Republican, you should know. The mayor talked about inclusiveness being the future of the Party, and about how constitutional amendments shouldn't be used to divide people. New York governor Pataki, who is such a rising star in the party, that he was the one who introduced President Bush at the convention later in the week, who is a possible 2008 presidential contender himself, felt enough solidarity with the gay Republicans to show up at this event, but not enough solidarity to actually mention in his remarks inclusiveness, the place of gays in the party, the place of moderates in the party, gay marriage, homosexuals, or really any other Log Cabin issues at all. It was the sort of speech he could have given to any group of Republicans. We are going to have a great week here in New York. And we are going to have a celebration of the greatest city in the world. And at the end of that week, I hope you leave with a little more-- Wait, I didn't mean it that way. The surprise stars of the day were Arlen Specter and William Weld. Senator Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said that he didn't know, and he didn't care, if supporting gay rights would help Republicans win elections. These are fundamental rights, he said. Then came William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts, another possible presidential candidate for 2008. If you've heard President Bush rail against activist judges legalizing marriage, Governor Weld would remind you that some of those judges are Republican appointees, including the head of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, who he appointed, and who legalized gay marriage in that state. Weld talked about his gay and lesbian friends, about gay and lesbian members of his own administration in Massachusetts. As a matter of fact, it was my pleasure to return to Massachusetts in June of this year to marry my former chief of staff, Kevin Smith, and a former cabinet member, Mitchell Adams. And from there, the Republican Weld laid out a position on gay marriage that is far more liberal than the supposedly super liberal John Kerry's position. Kerry opposes gay marriage. Let me just say one word about the federal constitutional amendment on gay marriage. You know, I've been invited to oppose this amendment on states' rights grounds, on the ground that this should be left to the states. And I've jumped over that issue. I prefer to oppose this amendment on substantive grounds, on the merit. It's the conservative point of view. It's making the same demands on gays and lesbians that are made on everyone else when they want to commit to each other. To me, it's kind of obvious. And the fact that some people have gay and lesbian preferences is not something that's going to be changed based on what somebody in the legislature says. And I don't know whether the percentage of the population is 10%, or 5%, or 15%, or 1%. It doesn't matter. You're not going to repeal biology in the United States Senate or the House, no matter what you do. Patrick was one of the people clapping enthusiastically when Weld said that, and when Arlen Specter talked about gay rights being a matter of principle. I love that. It was just nice to be able to hear it articulated by someone that has a national presence. Yeah, when he said that, again, I was just like, wow, I don't know if I've ever heard anyone say that, Democrat or Republican. I don't think I have either. And it's wonderful to hear. I've never heard that. You've never heard that. No. It's totally amazing. I mean that's not even the message that we send. We send the message that hey, this is the thing that's going to increase our party numbers. And it's the thing that's going to make our party the majority party. We try to appeal to the brain, as opposed to the heart. But I don't know. Maybe we need to start appealing to both. Hey, how are you? Hello. At the convention one night, at Madison Square Garden, I hovered around Patrick as he walked up to seven different groups of Republicans, wearing his Log Cabin inclusion pin. A lady from Texas in a red cowboy hat and red boots and a handsome couple from Virginia both pretty much iced Patrick when the subject of gay marriage came up, which Patrick took as opposition to gay marriage. A young African American guy was for gay marriage, as were two rich people from Miami. One of them turned out to be gay. And the other, his friend, turned out to be a big Republican donor, on the chairman's advisory board. Three other people that Patrick approached fell into kind of a gray area, against gay marriage, but in ways that gave him some kind of sliver of hope. There was this family from Utah, who seemed open to the idea of civil unions. And there was this Korean War vet. I have no problem with people who are gay, or lesbians, or whatever. But I don't think they should get married. I think they should live together, have a lot of the protections of marriage, but I think that a marriage should be between a man a woman. So I may not be with you altogether. Civil unions were fine with him, though. Patrick says that ever since Republicans started talking about outlawing gay marriage, at the federal level, tons of Republicans have been supporting civil unions, to a degree that he'd never imagined five years ago. He was very hopeful about the vet. He's one of those people that if he makes those inclusive-minded statements that he did, he's about 90% there. He's there on civil unions. He's there on not being bigoted towards gays and lesbians. So it's encouraging. He looked to be in his 60s. And if we have 60-year-old white, male veterans that are moving in towards our direction, that's a very good sign. Hi. I'm Patrick Howell. Cindy White, North Carolina. From Orlando, Florida. Oh, Greensboro, North Carolina. Oh, OK. Nice to meet you. Cindy White tells Patrick that Republicans in North Carolina are mostly against gay marriage. It's the Bible Belt, she says. What would it take, do you think, to move you personally on the Federal Marriage Amendment? Oh, my brother-in-law lives in Key West and is gay. Oh, OK. It doesn't mean I approve of marriage. But he's gay, and I approve of him. Right. He hasn't married anyone. Doesn't want to, that I know of. But does have a partner. But it's just something I'm not ready to say exactly where I feel on it. You might still be working on it, yourself. Yeah, might still be working on it. Right. At the end of talking to all these Republicans, the score was two against Patrick and gay rights, two for Patrick and gay rights, and three, like this last woman, that seemed like they might come around some day. Patrick felt pretty good. His sense, in general, is that people are more flexible than you know. I don't think that self-described social conservatives are as monolithic as a lot of people think. I think you do have social conservatives that keep an open mind, and may be very conservative in their religious views and whatnot, but at the same time have gay friends, and understand that they need to move a little bit on some of those issues. I think that's true more than it's not true. If you think about it, how many situations are there, where arch-conservative Christians and homosexuals sit down together and really hash things out. That's the point, Patrick says. We're inside the fortress. We're in these people's lives. We're talking to them. If anybody's going to get to these very conservative people on gay issues, it's going to be gay Republicans, not the protesters and activists who are outside the fortress. Act Two, Right and Righter. To understand the rise of the Republican Party over the last 20 years, one place you can look is Alabama, where they've made huge strides. If there is a religious and a nonreligious wing of the party, this is definitely the religious wing. Of the 48 delegates Alabama sent to the Republican Convention in New York, not one was pro-choice. Nationally, one out of three Republican Voters is pro-choice. 70% of the state identifies itself as born-again Christian, versus 40% nationally. Alex Blumberg visited with the Alabama Republican Party. Marty Connors is the state chairman of the Republican Party in Alabama. He says that for Alabama, he's a moderate. He supports the war in Iraq 100%. He's opposed to any and all taxes. He wants Roe v. Wade to be overturned. And he would welcome prayer back into the public schools. But this is the state residents proudly call the buckle of the Bible Belt. So Marty Connors sometimes finds himself the most liberal person in the room. A few years back, I was at a convention doing some whip work. And one of the delegates, who will go unnamed, felt that former President Bush-- who was then going to be vice president-- just wasn't conservative enough to be on the ticket. So he was going to support Gene Kirkpatrick for vice president, as opposed to George Bush. Which, Gene's great, but there's a time and place for everything. And that would have meant, literally, what? Well, Alabama being in the first state in the Union that has to-- the first state in the roll call, it would have looked a little awkward not having a unanimous-- So we decided to put him in a room, one-on-one with Jesse Helms for a little while, just to talk some sense, that kind of thing. So Jesse spent about 30 minutes with him. And the young man comes out of the room. And I said well, is everything fine? He said, oh, yeah. Everything's really fine. And I said, well, good. We'll have your support? He said, no, I'm still going to vote against you. And I said, well, why? And he said, well, Jesse Helms just doesn't completely understand the conservative movement. So that's how it went. There are two informal wings in the Alabama Republican Party. This is Jim Zeigler, founder of a group called The League of Christian Voters, which represents the right wing of Alabama's right wing. There is an establishment, party official, chamber of commerce, business council, internationalist wing. And then there is the conservative Christian, adamantly pro-life, pro-family wing. Right now, the right wing, of which I am a part, is not in control of the party machinery. And I have appointed myself as the coordinator of the movement to take back the Republican Party for Republican principles. Of course, in Alabama, both wings of the party are pro-life and begin their meetings with a prayer. So it can be a little hard to tell the two sides apart. The difference is mainly one of priorities. Business Republicans pray a lot, but Jim Zeigler's wing wants God to be at the very center of everything the government does. In other words, it's the wing of Judge Roy Moore. Remember him? He was the Alabama chief justice who installed a 5,000 pound monument of the 10 Commandments in the state courthouse, and then was told to remove it by his own Republican-dominated bench. He later lost a job over it. Lots of Republicans didn't support Moore, or found him a little embarrassing. But the fact that the party didn't go to bat for him galvanized Jim Zeigler. He started The League of Christian Voters to try and get more Republicans like Judge Moore elected. The Republican Party does not need to have a broad tent. We need to focus on the issues of Republican principles. Here's how the Christian wing is doing so far. Out of three races for state judge this summer in the Republican Primary, they won one. And they make up about a third of the delegates at the Republican National Convention, 17 out of 48. One of those 17 was Zeigler himself, who became a delegate in a very symbolic race. He beat a man named Perry Hooper, Sr., who was one of the founders of the modern GOP in Alabama, the first Republican ever elected to the State Supreme Court, and one of the most respected centrists in the entire party. After his loss, Hooper called Zeigler an embarrassment to Christianity. At this time, Bradley Byrne, state senator, will lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you. Please cover your hearts. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. On a Thursday night in the break room of Warrior Tractor, a farm equipment retailer in Monroeville, Alabama, I got a chance to see the moderate wing of the Republican Party. This is the largest meeting ever of the Monroe County Chapter of the Republican Party. People are turning Republican in Alabama faster than the Party infrastructure can keep up with them. For over a century, the state, like all its southern neighbors, had voted exclusively Democratic. You could fit all the Republicans in the state into one room, I'm told over and over again. As late as 1992, Democrats controlled both of Alabama's seats in the US Senate, and five of the seven in the House of Representatives. Today, just a decade later, it's reversed. Five of the seven representatives and both senators are Republican, not to mention the governor and most of the State Supreme Court. There are about 100 people here, nibbling at pot luck offerings from Tupperware containers and casserole dishes. Mostly they're small business people. And mostly they want the standard Republican wish list. Smaller government, lower taxes, stronger military. But at some level, the issues are only part of the Republican draw. Kay Ivey, the state's first Republican treasurer, and featured speaker, puts it this way. You see, we in this room come from a same set of values. We cherish family, and patriotism, and hard work, and home ownership, and family and friends, and, goodness knows, the right to cook and eat. Y'all have done great. But you know, we care about people. And the president has the values that we have in this room tonight. And that's a clear distinction from his opponent. Later, a woman at the meeting tells me she can imagine George Bush walking right into this room, filled with these people, and fitting right in. But try as she might, she can't imagine John Kerry here. And actually, neither can I. Although Monroe County is almost 40% black, the crowd here is all white. And everyone admits the Party doesn't do too well with black people in Alabama. 19 out of every 20 black votes goes to a Democrat. And the state chairman was actually booed during a speech at Tuskegee University, when he mentioned Condoleezza Rice. Mainly this is historical. Lots of white voters in the South switched to the Republicans because of Democratic Party support for civil rights in the 60s. Today though, when a person with openly racist views decides to run on the Republican ticket, one Republican operative told me, the Party funnels back-channel money to the Democratic opponents, to make sure he doesn't get elected. And when visiting reporters come to town, the Party leadership introduces them to Shirrell Roberts, one of the black pioneers in the Alabama Republican Party. Shirrell's parents lived through the civil rights struggles in Alabama. And he lives in Montgomery, which is where, you remember, Martin Luther King's church was located, freedom riders were beaten at the bus station, and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. I can understand the generation that was there, that lived it. I can understand the blacks that had the hose turned on them, the dogs put on them, absolutely. I don't expect those folks to get over it. And well, they shouldn't. And I understand exactly the hesitancy of a lot of blacks to say, hey, why would I want to join up with this group when you have the Willie Horton thing, Jesse Helms, what Trent Lott said about Strom Thurmond? Those type of things, specifically those, when I hear them, I'm like, look, that's not representative of our party. Shirrell's car has a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker. Driving around the neighborhood, he's been called a sellout and an Uncle Tom. He gets in political arguments with his Democrat mom all the time. Shirrell realized he was a Republican while watching the 1984 Democratic Convention with his family, when he heard Walter Mondale promise to raise taxes. Even as a kid, in a house of Mondale supporters, he hated that idea, proof that some people are just born Republican. Shirrell says that old-guard segregationists still occasionally show up in the party. But whenever I run into people like that, I just tell them, look, this country has changed. There is no way that you're going to be able to win an election anywhere with just a white vote. You aren't going to do it. You aren't going do it. And if that's your vision of our party, we will be the minority party for the rest of this century. Shirrell is pro-life, wants smaller government. He's for the war in Iraq. But most of our conversation was spent on the subject of inequality-- racial and economic inequality-- which isn't one of your usual Republican talking points. If there's a problem in the black community, it affects the white community as well. If there's a problem in the white community, it affects the black community. And people have to realize we're all in this thing together. Let's not have one community very prosperous, but over here have another segment of the community that's not doing well. I don't have a responsibility to educate a child here in Montgomery. I live 150 miles away. My wife and I have two children. I don't have children with anybody else. I'm responsible for educating them. You have to hand it to a political party that can claim both of these guys as loyal members. Steven King is a self-described right wing Christian and the chairman of the Blount County Republican Party. On most issues, it's not that he and Shirrell believe different things, it's just that Steven King believes them more. He's more of a free marketeer, thinks government should almost not exist, and on religious issues, he's less of a compromiser. I would rather be right on an issue and lose, than be wrong and win. We misuse the word big tent, I think. I'm sure there are people in the Republican Party are homosexuals. You've got the Log Cabin Republicans. They want to become Republicans, fine. My viewpoint is we're still going to have a position on our plank that we're not going to be for homosexual marriage. People in the Christian wing, like Steven King, because they're motivated by their idealism and care less about political majorities, can find themselves in a paradoxical position. They're the Party's most conservative members. But sometimes they sound like its most liberal critics. Steven King, for example, doesn't trust the Patriot Act. He's opposed to tort reform, and don't even get him started about that secret meeting Dick Cheney held a while back with energy industry representatives. The vice president has refused to release even a list of the people who attended. And Steven King says that's the same type of thing that Republicans got mad at President Clinton about when he appointed his wife, Hillary, to head a panel on health care. Who are these people? It's my tax money. Too many people on my side of the aisle, or my side of the position, and the other side of the spectrum, I don't think are intellectually honest. I mean, you can't say that when the Democrats are there and they get some health care panel together, that everything ought to be all open. And Mr. Cheney comes along, and well, that's a different thing. Well, no, it's not different. Like many idealistic people, Steven King has a complicated relationship to politics. He's drawn to it, but he also feels let down by it. He still remembers, as a kid, begging his parents to stay up and watch the '72 Convention on TV, to see Nixon get nominated. All those people with all those deeply held convictions coming together to argue and persuade. It seemed romantic, like the first Constitutional Convention, when the country was being founded. I guess I thought, in some ways, that was what was going on at a convention. I realize now that those things don't happen, or don't happen, I guess, the way that I thought about it then. Was that a disappointment, to find out that they don't happen that way? Yeah. I was a delegate four years ago in Philadelphia. And I was, I guess, naive. And I learned that my participation was very, very limited, almost to the point of simply being a warm body in a chair. I've been a Republican my whole life. You want to have a say-so. This is what I believe, and this is why I believe it. And they don't-- I don't want to say they don't want to hear it. but that's just not what you're there for. This, it sometimes seems, is what you are here for, to drink free booze and dance awkwardly to cover bands. It's the week of the GOP Convention in New York. A couple of the delegates at this party have a line on some Skynyrd tickets for later. It's a private concert for the GOP conventioneers. And even though this is the largest assembly of Republicans for the next four years, and even though there's every kind of Republican present here-- including a drunk one at the bar, who confided in me late in the evening that he's voting for Kerry-- even here, Steven King can't get what he wants. The thing I want is for there to be debate, to be open discussion. I want someone to allow me to try to convince them otherwise. And I'm open to be convinced otherwise. Let's engage in debate. Otherwise, we're just this mish mash goosh of feel good, which doesn't mean anything. That story by Alex Blumberg. Coming up, Steven King gets his wish, a real debate, the kind that rarely happens in American politics. We have him sit down with Patrick Howell, the Log Cabin Republican from the first act of our show, mano-a-mano. Who will convince whom? That's in the second half of our show, 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, stories about America's majority party. And yes, they are just barely the majority. But it's the Republicans whose numbers are rising. In the second half of our show, we have two stories of people in this charged political environment this fall trying to come to a meeting of the minds. We'll pick up with Alabama's Steven King again in a little bit. Where we turn now is to a visit to a different wing of the party, people who are Republicans, but not for religious reasons, but for economic ones. 70% of Republicans approve of the way that President Bush is handling the economy. That's versus just 22% of Democrats who approve. We have arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Indecent Proposal. Shane DuBow tells the story of Republicans who work in a place where everyone is thinking about the economy and its ups and downs all the time. Every election season, a company-wide email goes out at my work. The email reminds everyone that our office is supposed to be a politics-free zone. The subtext is all about keeping things civil and productive. At my friend Mike's work, that's not how they do it. Come here. I want to talk to you a second. Come here. This is the cattle pit of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It's the morning after Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani have given speeches at the Republican National Convention in New York. Come out here for a second, if you get a second. One second. You are not that busy. Come out here. He said, economic girly man That's the big refrain today. What? They call me liberal boy. And they get the refrain from Schwarzenegger-- that economic girly man. I've heard it all morning. I mean, between Giuliani's speech bashing Kerry and the economic girly man, it has been a bad two days to be down here. Put it that way. What Mike means is that it has been a bad two days to be one of the only outspoken Democrats in a testosterone-charged pit full of some of the most right-leaning and red meat-eating traders on the floor. Every day, all day, he gets heckled. During the election season it gets worse. With that in mind, Mike has come up with this idea, this way to win a few converts, or at least score a few political points. His plan? Take some of these guys to see the Michael Moore movie Fahrenheit 9/11. And to get them to go, he's offering cash. I'm paying $400 a crack to go. It's $400. I got some takers. You can wager it in Vegas. It's $400, and I'll even throw in a drink afterwards. We're going to see Fahrenheit 9/11. Are you going to come with us? No. What? After a month of trying and failing to make this movie thing happen, he has finally found some takers, Bill and Tom. Well, we have a long relationship. We have a 10-year relationship, all of us on the floor. And it tends to be me against-- tends to be me against the pit. And Tom tends to be the leader on the other side. And he has quite a lot of help. And he's not even close to being on his soapbox yet. This is Bill. Two days ago we had a nice little chat. And three rows down-- we were sitting in those stadium seats way at the top-- everybody's turning around and looking up, because Mike is screaming about, "These people are lying. Did you read this in the paper? They're absolutely lying! These Republicans--" The political arguments these guys get into will probably sound familiar. There's the one about terrorism. Under your man's administration for eight years, we ignored all the signs. The one about the economy. You think Clinton can take credit for the tech boom? Are you out of your-- Oh, come one, seriously. No, no, no. The other one about the economy. The junior, Bush Junior drove it into the ditch. I mean come on. The father drove the economy into the ditch. And then Bush Junior drove it into the ditch. Oh, man. And then there's whatever you call this. I consider myself a political moderate. Really. Oh, my God. That's the problem. You think you're a moderate. I'm a moderate. You're a moderate? I'm a moderate. I'm right in the center. I'm a Clintonian. In fact, I love Bill Clinton. He tacked the country right to the middle. What? He tacked the country right-- He attacked every chick in his office. No, no, no. He tacked-- Tom is 49, tall and good looking, a former college basketball player. In Tom's world, the flat tax is the fairest tax, Fox is the fairest network, and nationalized health care will lead to socialism. Growing up, Tom says, his family didn't have a lot of money. You talk about the political girly man. Hey, you know what? I put myself through college. Nobody gave me a dime. You didn't do that. He's looking straight at Mike here. I've been working since I was in fifth grade. And no one has ever given me anything. I don't feel sorry for people that sit around and wait for entitlements. You shouldn't call it an entitlement. It's welfare. It's not entitlement. You're not entitled to squat. As for Bill, he's also an independent broker who had to work growing up. And he also doesn't think much of taxes or welfare, which brings us back to Mike, and his hopes for Michael Moore's latest movie. Fahrenheit 9/11 came out. All of the people, the conservatives, the people that I talked to in the pit, no one had seen the movie. No one had seen the movie. They would critique the hell out of the movie, but they wouldn't go see it. So I started-- Is that true? No one wanted to see the movie? The reason for that is because you knew that, for example, Michael Moore's previous stuff. He mixes some facts with some non-facts, and this is your story. All right, hold on here. This is the kind of thing that I have to endure. Hold on. I'll say something else. OK, no, you've been talking the whole time now. This is what happens in the pit. People are quoting everything else they read about the movie, but they won't see it, OK? And that is the premise that I've operated under. So the way this started is a guy that is in my next office comes in one day, is quoting the same stuff, saying, oh, it's so terrible, what Michael Moore is doing to the country with this movie. And I say, Fred, have you seen the movie? And he says, no, I haven't seen the movie. I said, OK, what's it going to take to get you to go to the movie? And he says, my time is worth more than going to see a movie. I said, well, what's your time worth? He says, well, I'm paid $200 an hour as a consultant. And I said, OK. The movie is two hours. How about $400? There seems like there's a political debate going on in the country, and no one's listening to each other. So one side talks to their brethren, the other side talks to their brethren, and we're not having any cross-fertilization. There's no dialogue happening. And one of the most fundamental things in a democracy is to have a dialogue. Even before the main feature, it's clear Bill and Tom are ready to find liberal plots behind whatever they see. Example. When a preview for the new shark movie Open Water comes on, and a young couple is shown treading water, Tom and Bill make jokes about Chappaquiddick. I asked Mike for a few predictions. Which one of these guys do you think is most vulnerable to slipping over to the real side? Which one of these two, sitting in front of me? I think Tom is pretty vulnerable on this one. And I think it's going to be one of those things, if this does make him break-- Mike, I want you closer to me so I can hear you bad-mouthing me. I'm not bad-mouthing you. He asked me which one of you guys are going to come over to the other side after you see this thing. I'll put it this way. G. Gordon Liddy is too middle of the road for me. See? I think he's ready. I think he's primed for a conversion. I think he's primed for a conversion. You know, you get your most extreme right before you decide to change. The movie starts. Right away, Mike's bid to win these guys over seems in trouble. Here is an early scene showing black members of Congress protesting the 2000 election results in a joint session. Al Gore is presiding as president of the senate. Is the objection in writing, and signed by a member of the House and a senator? The objection is in writing. And I don't care that it is not signed by a member-- That's the beauty of liberals. They don't care about the rules. When Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, explains how President Bush was obsessed with invading Iraq, even before September 11, Bill whispers that Clarke had an axe to grind, because he got passed over for a promotion. And Tom says, "Right, so he's bitter. They're interviewing a bitter ex-employee." Even the movie's celebrity walk-ons get the treatment. Look, there's Ben Affleck. He's often in my dreams. I'll bet he is. You get the idea. Sarcastic comments from Tom, dismissive chitchat from Bill. A lot of hopeful, see? See what I means? from Mike. And every now and then, a moment of silence, when it's hard to tell how exactly the movie is going over. By the end, though, Mike seems encouraged. As we leave the theater, he asks Tom about a few scenes, like the one where Bush, at a black tie fundraiser, first dubs the crowd a collection of haves and have mores, and then says, "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base." You know, you're the kind of person that wasn't born in the elites of the country, right? And so, when Bush gets up and he says I'm here with-- wait, wait, hold on. He says I'm here with the mores and have mores, does that appeal do you, intrinsically? It doesn't appeal to me, but it was a joke and it was funny. He's making a joke, and it was a funny joke. It wasn't like he was disparaging anyone. He just said-- because that's who was there. I asked Tom and Bill if anything in the movie, anything at all, struck a chord. Tom mentions the part where Bush is said to have opposed better pay and benefits for soldiers. He says if that's true, it's disturbing. Bill agrees. Both men say they'll go home and do some research, see if Michael Moore's quote unquote "facts" check out. Well, you know what? The problem with Moore is so much of his premise is riddled with half truths and lies. So I'd like to find out what really was the deal with that. I mean, I just can't believe that's true. They don't even believe one of the points in the movie that's actually backed up by the Independent and Bipartisan 9/11 Commission, that there's no meaningful link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I don't believe that for a minute. I don't care who tells me. I don't believe that for a minute. Then Bill weighs in on the one part of the movie I thought might be persuasive, the part where the pro-military mother from Flint, Michigan loses her son in Iraq. I thought he really belabored that. I thought he was really staid on that. And in particular, when she was in Washington, and then she's breaking down crying, well, I'm sitting there thinking, well, geez, here's this poor woman falling down crying, and you're just stand there filming. Typical press deal. Right. It's at this point that Tom turns, reaches into his back pocket, and pulls out a wad of folded papers he's printed off the internet. Oh, that's something about all the untruths in the movie, though? Not all of them, just a handful of them. Oh, you had it going in. You didn't show me that. Well, what am I--? Did you read all these before you came into the movie today? Yeah. So you were prepared. What am I supposed to do? Come in here like a sheep to be sheared by you? By you and your left-wing liberal friends, trying to corner me just like Michael Moore? Trying to ambush me? In the entire 10-year history of these arguments, and these discussions, has anyone ever been persuaded? Absolutely not. That is a problem. And that's the thing. I was thinking, because people say, why are you going to this thing today? And I said, well, I have got to straighten some liberals out about a few things. And I said it in a joking manner, because the fact of the matter is, no matter what you do, I think people are wired differently. I mean, I've tried to straighten out Mike several times. But he's wired different. No matter what I show him, to show him that I'm right and he's wrong, he could agree with me on all this stuff, and then he'll still say, no, I'm still supporting Democrats. Mike doesn't exactly see it that way. He's still surprisingly hopeful, even though he's worked on these guys for seven straight hours, including the movie. And to me it seems like they haven't budged. Tom will never really cede any ground in an argument, but I did see a door open, go ajar there. A little doubt entered his mind when he saw that the military benefits had been cut for the veterans. And I think that really bothered him. And it's a war of attrition with these guys. And by God, I'm going to work on them tomorrow morning, in the pit, with this thing. When I call Mike for an update, he says that for a few days after the movie, he got more grief than ever out on the trading floor. Tom brought in a copy of Zell Miller's Republican Convention speech, and took to reading it out loud whenever there was a lull. But then all the politics started to wear people out. The back and forth got old and the teasing died down. And then just when things were returning to normal, Mike says, two other Republican traders approached him on the floor. They had gone to see Fahrenheit 9/11 on their own, they said. They each wanted their $400. Shane DuBow, in Chicago. Act Four, It's My Party. So Steven King, Christian Republican from Alabama, came to the Republican Convention in New York, wanting to debate the issues. And Patrick Howell, gay Republican from Florida, came to the Convention wanting to debate the issues. So it only seems right that somebody, somebody, would get those two crazy kids together. Hi. Steve King. Patrick Howell. Nice to meet you, Patrick. Nice to meet you, too. They hit it off right away. Patrick, it turns out-- and two brothers and a sister-- went to school up in Alabama, at Samford University, the Baptist school where, coincidentally, Steven got his law degree. Patrick was Sigma Nu. So was Steven's brother. Patrick's sister still lives a few miles from Birmingham. Steven knew the town and the high school her kids are going to. I live just north of Birmingham, about 30 miles, in Blount County, Oneonta. OK. Do you know the Phillips family? Yeah. You know Derick? Yeah, Derick was a fraternity brother of mine. Oh, you're kidding. Yeah. After a few minutes of Southern comfortableness, they got down to business. Patrick said that while of course he and Steven would agree that our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, our idea of those principles changes over time. Slavery was abolished. Women got the right to vote. And it's the same with rights for gays and lesbians, he said. And, you know, it's difficult for us, when social conservatives come at us from two angles. They come at us from the angle of saying, you're immoral, you sleep around, you can't settle down and have one relationship. And then on the other side, the same people are saying, we're not going to let you enter into relationships. We don't want you to. And that's frustrating for us, when you hear that coming from both sides of someone's mouth. Because that's what we want. We want to be boring. That's what we're fighting for, is to be boring, and to just settle down with someone and spend the rest of our lives with them. What are your thoughts on maybe coming to some sort of middle ground, that would allow for civil unions and protections like that? With respect to coming to some kind of common ground, or middle ground, we probably can on some level. And there's going to be other levels we won't be able to. I'm never going to agree that homosexuality, or that lifestyle, is a moral lifestyle. Reading God's word, I'm never going to come to that position. One thing I sense from the homosexual lobby-- I'll call it that-- is that I get a sense it's not just whether you want to be able to have civil unions, or marriage, or whatever. It's that you want me-- or people who believe like me-- not just to accept your homosexuality, but that homosexuality is OK. No. I don't think that that is our goal at all. I know, personally, that's not my goal. When you talk about-- you're talking about two different things. One is acceptance, and one is tolerance. That's really what we're looking for. Asking for tolerance isn't really asking for a lot. It's just asking that you be able to say, you know, I don't endorse this. I don't agree with it. But I tolerate it. Certainly, acceptance would be great. But tolerance is really all that we're looking for. OK. I think I'm tolerant. I'm not going to agree with your lifestyle. And we're in some sense in a battle, it seems to be. That's probably what it is going to be for a while. And one of us is going to prevail, and one of us is not. And in the meantime, I don't want bad things happen to you. I don't want people to be mean, or physically harm you, or anything like that. I don't want the government harassing you. I hope this is not harassing. We disagree. I don't think it's harassing at all. We have an understanding of I know where you stand, and where you're feeling, and you know mine. They talked about gay marriage. Patrick ticked off a list of problems that gay couples face right now because they can't marry. Visitation in hospitals when a partner is sick, inheriting property when a partner dies. Even if there's a will, family members can contest it in court, he says. Steven said he'd never heard about that one. Steven said his main problem with letting gays marry-- or have civil unions in some states-- is that it's hard to imagine that it would just be confined to a few states. Surely, he said, some liberal judge would make all the states recognize the marriages. And from his point of view, it's just the next thing in a slippery slope. Christians lost the right to pray in schools, there's Roe versus Wade, then no-fault divorce. This is just one more thing that he's teaching his kids is wrong, that society says is OK. The fact that Patrick's religious, goes to church, his six-year-old son goes to a religious school, all means something to Steven. I want him to be a good father. I want to be a good father. Our quote "society" as a whole, I think, probably in a lot of ways, would be better off, if people was interested in their children, probably, as Patrick is-- is it a son, is that what you said? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's fine that you're involved in a church there and things, whatever. I do wonder what the church-- and how the church, gets around the clear teaching in scripture against homosexuality. Here's what I have trouble with. You would never-- well, I'm not going to put words in your mouth. But if someone came to your church and was divorced, you would never tell that person, you are committing adultery. That's what Jesus said in the Bible. He said that if you divorce and remarry, you're committing adultery with that person. I agree. Your church, I'll bet, doesn't tell people that are divorced that. From the pulpit, look over at the divorced people that are sitting there, that have remarried, and say, every time you sleep with your new husband, you're committing adultery. And so, what you've done, and what you're able to do, probably, and what your church does, is you cherry-pick things from the Bible that are going to be something that you hold out as a principle. And the other stuff you conveniently leave in there, and close it, and put it out of your mind. And for whatever reason, homosexuality is one of those things that has been cherry-picked out, and has been, for whatever reason, given this different status. I think you make an excellent point. And I think the way you put it, about the cherry-picking, is correct. But even with the hypocrisy, that I admit is there, that doesn't get around with what scripture says. Well, we talked about tolerance. And I think that tolerance can go both ways, because I can tolerate what I see as the hypocrisy in a lot of churches, if you can tolerate that there are people that have a different view of what God's message is, or what the scripture means, or what the application is to our individual lives. Understand that we've got to tolerate those views and try to focus on things we do agree on. Because there's a lot. I agree. I think there is a lot. But know and understand this, and getting back just within the Republican Party, we're going to continue to have this struggle, disagreement, on the platform. If those platform revisions change, would you leave the party? Well, no, I don't think I'd be OK. And that's when I would come to the point of, will I continue to be a Republican? What am I going to do? There's going to be a struggle. There's going to be a conflict. One of us will be OK, or happy, and one of us won't. It is my thought-- belief, or whatever-- I think over time, even though I may disagree with it, I think Patrick ultimately is going to get his wish. I hope that doesn't happen, but I-- being a realist-- I think that will happen whether [INAUDIBLE] or not. That's what I believe. Perhaps in the future-- it may be in 20 or 25 years-- it's just no big deal. It's not a forefront issue. I don't know. That's what I'm working for. Steven said that if the Republican Party ever became pro-choice, he'd definitely have to leave. On gay issues, he'll wait and see how he feels. Like he says, what's probably going to happen is, either Patrick's going to be unhappy with the party's position-- and struggling from within to change it-- or Steven will. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollack. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Amy O'Leary. You know, you can download audio of our show at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, best-selling books, even The New York Times, all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who swears whenever we try to put him on the show-- You and your left-wing liberal friends, trying to corner me, just like Michael Moore? Trying to ambush me? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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A couple weeks ago I got into an argument with a 13 year old about algebra. "Why should I bother learning algebra?" He asked me. "Have you ever used algebra as an adult?" You know, every possible thing you could say as an adult in this situation, you've heard adults say. And you know how stupid they sound. When you're a kid, you're expected to be a renaissance man. You're supposed to be interested in math and science. You're supposed to read literature, you write poetry, maybe you play an instrument. You're athletic, you play sports, you learn a foreign language. And you're supposed to be enthusiastic. You're actually graded on effort. You get a grade for the effort, not just for the work. And somehow, in America especially I think, this idea that you're supposed to put your heart into everything. Any test that you're given, you're supposed to show a can do spirit. You're supposed to show enthusiasm no matter what the task. It's been transferred to all sorts of things in adult life where it really, probably doesn't belong. Kenneth for example got a job as a greeter at a create your own stir-fry chain restaurant. As a host, I just stayed at the door, and I greeted people as they came in, and the manager is supposed to seat them. Say someone walks in the door. I'm like, Hi, how are you doing? And they'd say hello. And then I'd say, And they'd say two. Then I would turn to the person standing next to me and say, two people for dinner. So I think I could do it very, very well. Hi, how many? Three? All right, she'll be right back over to seat you. And that was it. I mean pretty much a five year old could handle that. Say hi to people and repeat the number that they say to you. So the owner always had a problem because he said I wasn't enthusiastic enough in my job. I needed to smile wider. And his exact words were I had no sense of urgency. And I didn't realize what was so urgent about getting people to sit down and have stir-fry that they make themselves. Every time that he would run the floor, which he was not very good at, you could really see how people would get scared when they walked in the door. As soon as the people would come, he would jump in front of me, literally jump in front of me and go, hi, how are you doing? And then every now and then customers, as they were going to the table would even look back at me and shoot me a glance like, what's up with dude? Is everything OK? And then he would always turn around and be like, see that's how you're supposed to do it. And I used to just shrug my shoulders at him, like, yeah, don't worry about it. Coming from me it woulnd't have been genuine. I don't really want to be giving anybody food. But I make money doing it. And I want to have a phone, and light and water. So that's why I do it. But it's not something that I really love or care about. Going through the motions has a bad name in our culture, phoning it in, walking through it, putting on. But there are so many situations where that is the only path of dignity. Today on our radio program, three stories of people deciding whether to take that path. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our show today, Farm Eye for the Farm Guy. In that act, a Pennsylvania farmer needs somebody to throw his heart and soul into his vegetable patch. And we step in to help. Act Two, Diary of a Long Shot, a candidate in this fall's elections keeps an amazingly frank audio diary in which he says a few things that you wonder if politicians ever actually feel. And puts everything he has on the line for an unlikely cause. Act Three, Contrails of My Tears. In that act, we believe we have discovered a human phenomenon never before documented involving airplanes and Reese Witherspoon. Stay with us. Act One, Farm Eye for a Farm Guy. Things aren't going so well on Hilary's farm. He bought 75 acres in Western Pennsylvania five years ago, put all his money into it, moved from the city, had a dream. To grow his own food, make little money, never wear a tie again. In five years, he has not only not turned a profit, he's not even close. His back hurts all the time. He did something to his thumb. He gets headaches from all the muscle strains. His best customer is his chiropractor. And he's thinking of quitting. I vacillate between wanting to give it up and wanting to continue. And even sometimes while I'm out there working I'm like, this is so great. I get to watch the sky and see the whether. And then I work for a few hours at it and see how much more I have to do. And it's like, this is too hard. He's a soft spoken kind of guy. A little shy, wears a big beard. When I press him for details about what's going wrong on the farm, he gets vague. Not like somebody trying to hide the facts exactly, more like somebody who hasn't been keeping track of the facts too closely in the first place. Fortunately, his wife Sun Yung is right there and is happy to give particulars, like about the lettuce harvest, which Hilary actually saw as a success. We worked so hard until after midnight. We had harvested at night so it wouldn't get wilted. And we washed it one by one. And we put it in the bag and everything. And we had to get up at 7:00 AM to get ready. And we went to the market. And we made like $15. Wasn't it $16? Wasn't it $16? Hilary asks. No, and I was thinking I worked so many hours, so hard. And while everybody's sleeping, I was working. And it was only $15. And the table fee was $7 $8 or something like that. And I felt really bad. Sun Yung and Hilary are in a whole Green Acres situation with each other. He wants the country. She's trained as a clothing designer, sells her work in a boutique on Madison Avenue in New York City. She's applying for fashion jobs in cities around the country. She helped Hilary grow vegetables for two years, but then she hurt her back so badly bending over that she was stuck in bed for a month. And that was it for her. Farming was never her dream anyway. She grew up in Seoul, South Korea, which she describes as being like Manhattan, but bigger. When she imagined what their farming homesteading life would be like, she remembered this TV show that was popular back in Korea when she was a little girl. I was picturing Little House On The Prairie, but that was no way. And so when you moved in, was there indoor plumbing? Was there electricity? Electricity was there. And plumbing was there. But one winter our kitchen plumbing was frozen and there was no water for a while. And he fixed it. And after that the water smelled like really [BLEEP]. And it still smells not good. It's more than a year now. We have hot water, but cold water smells really bad, like really. It's not that bad, but it is-- all right, it's a little bad. We're standing in the unkempt front yard by their house, which I would describe as midway between messy and squalid. Half the windows are boarded up. Shingles are falling down. It's so badly heated that during the winter, the cat bowl of water in the kitchen has frozen. And they're the kind of back-to-the-landers who not only believe in conserving the Earth's resources and composting, but in the bathroom there's a note telling you not to use the toilet but to use a big, plastic bucket with sawdust that sits there neatly across from it as a replacement. Sun Yung says this is not how a person should farm. But he's not a real morning person. So he can't do anything in the morning. So he can start around noon. Sometimes he would just stay up until 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM. He's doing his photography work on the computer. I don't know about the stying up until 4:00. I've only done that a few times. But yeah, in the mornings I need to warm up before I can start doing a lot of activity I'd say. But then some people will work from 7:00 to 5:00 or 6:00 or whatever. And then they'll have quiet time in the evening. But I just have my quiet time in the morning is how I figure it, anyway. We heard about Hilary from somebody who met him at a conference on sustainable farming. Hilary was there getting tips, going to seminars. He's at a point now where his savings are running down and he's thinking that he either has to make a big change in how he farms or get out. And hearing about his situation, we thought you know what this guy needs is a makeover. Like on "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy" or "Trading Spaces" or "The Swan" Or "Extreme Makeover" or "Extreme Makeover Home Edition." He needs a makeover, a farming makeover. Here, we thought, are two areas where America excels. Two areas where America can compete with any nation on Earth, agriculture and makeover programs. And we at This American Life are proud to be the ones to bring these two great traditions together. We would bring in an expert for a farm makeover. Hi there. Ira. Ira, nice to meet you. Hi, I'm Hilary Hoffman. Hi Hilary. How are you? The farm expert we brought in for the makeover is George DeVault, a wiry, sunburned man in a farmer's cap and aviator glasses. I want see everything. You want to see everything? All the machinery, all the buildings. Kick the tires. I'm serious. So what do you hope to get from George today? Well if had some secret plant that was easy to grow and easy to harvest. And everybody wanted it. And here's how you do it without having to bend down all the time. That would work. Or maybe he'll say, if you don't think you can do this kind of hard work then you better find something else to do. Sun Yung is nodding. Do you want George to say something to talk him out of farming today? We'll of course, yeah, yeah. So the truth comes out. She wants me to quit. George owns a farm in southeastern Pennsylvania that grows organic vegetables and flowers. He's also a writer and editor at Rodale Press. He's put out a half dozen books and tons of articles about this kind of organic farming. He gives lots of tours of his own farm to people who are thinking about getting into agriculture. Hilary shows him around. Here's some grapevines. It's all a very small farm, very small. The first year, I managed to grow a lot of stuff. The second year, the deer found it and just totally ate everything. Vegetables mostly? Even my cover crops just were all gone. They did that to my potatoes last year, about a quarter acre of potatoes we did not have fenced. Ate them right off of the ground. I couldn't believe it. This is pretty much George's technique with Hilary. No matter what kind of calamity Hilary describes, George reassures him that it's happened to him too and lots of other farmers besides. He looks on the bright side. Standing in front of a strawberry patch infested with weeds, weeds are standing over a foot high in every direction. It's bad enough even I can tell it's bad. George declares-- I mean you can see the strawberries. It's not hopeless. In front of a patch of vegetables that he confides later he found surprisingly small, George proclaims-- I'm seeing some very nice, healthy happy potato plants about to blossom. When he spots a broken down structure the size of a small shed, white, wooden window frames for walls and ceiling, concrete floor, George is all can-do American optimism. Hilary is Soviet Russia circa 1973, the Brezhnev era. I see a greenhouse here. Do you? Oh yeah. Do you even have a sink in it? Yeah but there's no water. Well, that's why plastic pipe was invented. You have a well somewhere. I can't use the well for watering. Well with the roof on here and the bigger roof on the big barn over here, you could collect an awful lot of rain water. I can't afford the containers for it. Geoge offered lots of advice that Hilary had no interest in. To fix the greenhouse of course so he'd have a place to start his seedlings. To stop mulching in this labor-intensive way that Hilary had learned back as a gardener, way too time consuming for fields of crops, George said. To build something called a hoop house, where Hilary could grow more months of the year. Hilary needed to triple his production just to start to become economically viable, George said. And George suggested that he trade his 68 horsepower tractor in for something smaller, that he'd use the extra money for things that the farm needed more urgently. And George thought that Hilary might fix up the 100 year old barn. Now this barn is pretty ratty. OK, so? I just haven't cleaned it up yet. Why not? Lazy. You said it. I didn't. Get your butt in gear. I think so. You've been here, what, five years now? Are you are you happy with your progress? No. George, there was something that Hilary's wife was talking about it earlier. She was saying that he gets up too late in the day to be a farmer. Does it matter what time you get up? Yeah it does. Sure it matters what time you get up. What time do you get up farmer? Depends on the day. 8:00, 10:00. What? But then I work till dark. I mean I'm out here doing that. Don't you come in at 7:00, 8:00 and take a couple hours to relax? Hell no. Well I want to. Well some days you can't. Well that's true. You might as well forget the greenhouses then because it can't get up and ventilate it before the sun gets hot, you're going to cook everything. Oh well I can get up and do that. Oh OK, all right. Well I guess there's some truth-- I'm just not a morning person. I have to exercise before I can start working and do anything. I have two herniated discs from many years ago. Ouch. But it still affects me. George explains that some tasks you just have to do in the cool morning hours. If you pick delicate produce in the middle of the afternoon under the sun, it'll go limp the minute you pick it. It'll be junk. We sit down on chairs under a tree in front of the house. George has a friend who tried what Hilary is trying, left a regular job to take up farming. Tried to make a go of it. Said this guy totally put his heart into it, was working his crops all the time, sun up till way past sundown. I mean there suddenly ceased to be a family life. He tried to get his two kids to help him out there is as much as they could. They were 9 and 11. And there were limits to how much they could or would or should do. And he sunk a ton of money into it and basically lost it all. And what wasn't coming together? He was producing a lot of stuff. His crop mix could have been better, more diverse. He wasn't charging enough for things, didn't have maybe enough customers to make it work. Production and weather threw some curves at him. It was a lot of things combined. I mean when you look at the numbers involved in agriculture today, it is really grim what's going on. Say there are 60,000 farms in the state. At least 30,000 of them have annual sales of less than $5,000. Not just net but gross. Less than $5,000 in sales a year. Yet that's half the farms in the state. The numbers are grim. Don't feel bad. We feel like I drove out here and rained on your parade. No, I wasn't having a parade. Oh, OK. I had this great bit hot air balloon. I was hoping you would fill it up and make it rise. In the end, this is what Hilary's up against. One of the open secrets about farming in this country is just how few farmers actually make their full livings from farming. In Pennsylvania, it's only 8,000 out of 60,000 farms. Nearly half the farmers in the state say their primary occupation is something besides framing. And that's true of the country as a whole. Out of 2 million farms in America, 1.5 million lost money in 2002, the most recent year we have agricultural census data for. If Hilary truly buckled down, tripled production next year, did everything right, kept expanding production, in a few years, George says, he might expect total profits of $10,000 to $15,000 a year. Which Hilary says would be enough. They're living pretty cheaply, And which would actually put him into an elite in agriculture. Only 300,000 of the 2 million farms in America make $15,000 a year or more in net profits. But if he's going to do that, Hilary would have to rethink everything, be working all the time. Well that's it. I quit. I quit. You've convinced me. Well. I didn't come here to talk you out of the farming but-- I don't think I can physically do that much work to make that much money. Just doesn't seem possible. I'm working part time three or four jobs plus farming. There are very few farmers I know who do absolutely nothing but farm. I mean I just wanted to live in the country. And I thought I could do it by growing vegetables. And I really like it out here in the country. Yeah, and you have a great spot here. Even when it gets cold I like it. This is what it comes down to for Hilary. He was never dying to be a farmer. He just wanted to live closer to nature, live more simply. My dream was to be able to just watch the sky all day. But you don't have to actually run a farm as a business to have that. Well you have to make some kind of income. But I think there must be an easier way really. I think it is too much work for me. And I will probably spend time looking at another way to make a living out in the country. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you picked a tough road to hoe pal. Yeah I know. I knew it was. And I thought I could do it. But now I'm just not so sure. Well. Later, when we get George away from the farm, away from Hilary, he's pretty blunt about what he thinks Hillary should do. Sell the place, yeah. I mean more than anything he wants to live in the country. That's great. So quit kidding yourself about the idea of making a living from the farm. He'll still have a garden. I'm sure of that. At the end of the day, the person who was happiest to watch how everything unfolded, as you might imagine, was Sun Yung. After all, George was saying the same things to Hilary that she's been saying. I really liked his idea. If you want to do something, commit yourself until you can't do it anymore. Or sick and tired of it or until you die. Or don't do it. But if you want to try, try really hard. And I thought that Hilary with the farming was like that. So I told him that I don't think you really want to be a farmer. I told him maybe thousands of times. Indecision is a powerful force, more powerful than reason sometimes. And the next day, despite everything that had been said during George's visit, Hilary had declared himself completely undecided about whether he should quit agriculture. He'd actually gotten up early that morning to pick strawberries, thinking that maybe, just maybe, the farm life might still be right for him. In the months since that day, Sun Yung got a job offer in the Bronx. And she said yes. She's planning on moving away from the farm in November, which will leave Hilary alone to figure out his next move. Find a job near the farm to support himself, or just leave the farm. Just last week he started shopping around for a camera, which would allow him to get back to the line of work he was in before he moved to the farm in the first place, taking pictures for newspapers. What do you think is going to happen? Well I don't think anything is going to happen within a year or two, maybe longer. But eventually, he's going to live with me where my job is. And what do you think's going to happen? I think she's going to move back. To the farm? Yes. It'll be really nice and fixed up, no air leaks in the winter. And warm and spacious, the opposite of what it is now. How? How would you like to do it? Magic. Yeah, that sounds good. As for the dream of farming, the one that gets so many city people to buy farms of their own, George took time away from his own pea harvest to visit Hilary and to give advice. Partly because in some basic, neighborly way, he wants to get the word out that this kind of farming can be done. He knows lots of people who are doing it happily. You just have to be careful not to get too romantic about it. The dream of farming is like anything else, he says. Like the dream of owning your own business or writing for a living. Or acting, or making a movie, or getting married. You need the romantic vision to get you started. But the reality, it's always more complicated. Coming up, in just 11 years he can run for President. You can get in on the ground floor right now. Here are the audio diaries of his very first race this fall at age 24. 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 show, Put Your Heart Into It. We've arrived at Act Two, which is about somebody in the opposite situation of Hilary, the farmer in the first half of our show. This act is about somebody who is not holding back, not waiting. He has thrown himself completely into an unlikely and difficult cause. Sam Brooks is 24, grew up in Washington, DC and wanted to be a politician. And so a year ago, he decided to run for one of the top jobs in the city, a job that usually goes to a much more experienced politician, at large city councilman. These are the city councilmen who don't just represent one neighborhood in the city. Their constituency is the entire city. DC is mostly black. Sam Brooks is white. But he felt sort of outraged at one of the guys serving as at large councilman, a man who had been in the job since Sam was 10, a man named Harold Brazil. Brazil had a reputation for being out of touch. The Washington Post called him disengaged and a disappointment. Washington City Paper called him "Number one in the city for legislative wishy-washyness, non-sequiturs and other buffoonery." So Sam Brooks entered the race. He started walking door to door in every neighborhood in the city, hundreds of miles. His other opponent, besides the incumbent, was Kwame Brown, who was well known partly because his dad was a big civil rights leader in DC. Sam Brooks kept an audio diary of everything that happened, the fundraising, the ups, the downs. Here it is. It is about 5:15 on Tuesday, January 27. I feel like we've done everything we can to raise money this quarter. We have one more fundraiser on Thursday night. I think we basically hit our number. And maybe people will look at our number and say well, it's what you get when you're a rich white kid and you grow up in Georgetown. I think something like over 85% of my money has come from three zip codes in DC, 20007, 20008 and 20016. And for anybody that has been in DC for a while, you know what that is. That's just rich, white. There's no way around it. I mean it just doesn't look good. Our answer I think is OK. When you're a first time candidate and you grew up in one neighborhood, you raise your money from that neighborhood. If I had grown up in Ivy City Northeast, most of my money would come from there. I grew up in Georgetown, so most of my money will come from there. And hopefully that answer flies. The question for voters this September is going to be real simple. If you think that this city is going in the right direction, then this room isn't for you. And certainly I'm not the candidate for you. You've got a candidate in Harold Brazil whose campaign slogan "Keep the Momentum Going." I look at this city, and I think most of the people in this room look at this city. They look at our schools, 13 kids, now 14 kids have been murdered this year. They look at scandal after scandal in terms of the government wasting taxpayer dollars. we need a fresh start. And that's what this campaign offers you. So thank you and now keep drinking and keep talking. Thank you. It is 5:34 on Thursday afternoon. Woke up today hoping that there'd be a story in the Washington City paper. There was. Said that Sam Brooks had raised an impressive amount of money. And that was exciting. But the story was not that. The story is that council member Jim Graham might run, who's a white, gay member of the council. And who from Ward 1 might challenge Harold citywide. Jim Graham effectively kills my candidacy if he gets in the race. So this has been certainly the biggest day of the campaign so far. And the most stressful day of my life. The problem is that his resume from before being on the council is impressive. And people really respect him. And I really respect the man. He's director of Whitman-Walker. He was a clerk for Jimmy Carter well before that. And in between the two, he had just done an incredible amount of things. So the questions have been all day are, am I going to stay in the race? What's my message now? I mean the message is now just totally different, literally. Jim Graham gets in the race, this whole message of hard work, doing whatever it takes with a fresh approach to tackle these big issues, all of a sudden that's not the message. Because Jim Graham works hard. It's funny. You feel like your message is also why you're running. So you'd think that with Jim Graham in the race, my message no longer has any real rationale, this message of hard work. But he's only going to announce an exploratory committee, so there's some question we might be able to bump him out of the race. That's the hope. He knows that if I'm in the race raising money, continuing to get support, it's going to be really tough for him to win. Because basically when you're a white member of the council, particularly in Jim's case when you're gay, you basically need all of the white vote behind you. You can't have another white candidate in the race and expect to win. And Jim has to know that if I'm in the race continuing to fight, I'm going to get at least 5,000 votes. And so that might just kill Jim and his chances. So I want to welcome a friend to the stage, someone who's fighting the front lines of youth politics by being a young person, showing our generation does count. So please a round of applause-- We're at a rally in downtown DC organized by Mobilizing America's Youth. Hardly anyone is here. And it's pretty much a joke to try to deliver a speech when 15 people are watching. You know I think for far too long we've pushed away from an idealism that this country and this city would be well served by. It is 7:36 on Wednesday, February 25. Just a combination of things really led to a rough few days. Of course the Jim Graham thing continues to hurt. And I had an email from somebody that almost dropped out of having a big fundraiser for me because of Jim Graham. I convinced her to continue to have it. But I don't get the sense she's even probably going to vote for me. And then there's also the fact that this has just been a terrible month for fundraising. I have raised I think no more than $1,500. So I'll get another $800 from my dad. Get him to max out. So that gets us less than $2,500. And so that's disappointing. And people will look at this and be disappointed. And so I'm trying to spin this. But I'm not getting-- people I don't think are liking my spin of the money. And then my Blackberry wasn't working. And I ended up having to buy a new one. And then I get home, charge the Blackberry. I'm taking it the five feet from the charger to the computer to sync it up and I dropped it and broke it. And I didn't have insurance on it. Pretty much felt like I was making a bunch of 24 year old mistakes. It's Monday, 11:54. And a lot of people have been telling me that Jim Graham could give me a deal to get out of the race. Could either offer to endorse me in a race in Ward 1. One, assuming he wins and gives up that seat. Or get me a job or all these things. But the argument has been made to me that maybe it makes sense to do it. I had been worried and it's just-- I do it out of self interest. And my friend Brian's point is the self interested thing to do is to stay in the race. And I'm staying in a race that I'm not likely to win. Very unlikely to win. Very, very unlikely to win. And if I take the deal, I have a chance to win in Ward 1. The self serving thing is to stay in the race and basically stay in just to self-promote all over the city, which is one way of looking at what I'm doing. I don't know. I don't totally agree with that but it's resonating with me for some reason right now. You know a guy like Jim Graham has a lifetime of incredible service to the city and to his community. I think that's just makes him want to get in the race. He just feels like he'd be better, and more qualified and more deserving. And it's hard to argue with that to be honest. He is more deserving. That's the honest truth. Jim Graham is more deserving. I mean if I'm watching this as a voter, watching another 24 year old with the same qualifications, watching this race if it happened it Philadelphia, I'd probably vote for John Graham. I'd probably want Jim Graham to win. Or think he should win. God I'd love to stay in the race. I would love to stay in the race. I just don't know if I'm going to be able to withstand the pressure to get out. And I don't know whether I'm going to have it in my heart to keep it going. It is 6:32 on Wednesday, May 5. And if it's possible to have more of an emotional roller coaster in the past 24 four hours, then I'd be really surprised. From WAMU at American University in Washington welcome to the Kojo Nnamdi Show. It's the DC Politics Hour. On this edition of the DC Politics Hour, Ward 1 council member Jim Graham will join us to explain why he decided against running for the at large seat on the council that Harold Brazil now occupies. Council member Brazil will tell us how he feels about that. How long does it take to say, gleeful, overjoyed, triumphant? But Kwame Brown and Sam Brooks will be along to say, wait a minute. Hold the glee. Forget the joy. There will be no triumph for Harold Brazil in this race. Council member Jim Graham joins us in the studio now. He is the council member representing Ward 1. Jim Graham, welcome. Thank you very much Kojo. Always a pleasure to see you. Enquiring minds want to know, why Jim, why? Well in fact at 10 o'clock on Tuesday night there was no doubt in my mind that I was running. We had a press conference scheduled. We had assembled supporters. We were going. And so it took me a little time myself to reorient to the ultimate decision not to run. I think what it came down to was the fact that it was-- I'm going to use a word I used to use when I was a kid. What I was looking at coming down the road was really going to be icky. I mean I represent the most diverse ward in the District of Columbia. And thus I'm especially sensitive to the issues of race and ethnicity. And in the final analysis when I looked at this, even though I know I had African American support. I have no crystal ball to say I would definitely win. I thought I would win. And I know I had African American votes. But it would have been a divisive campaign. And I think the incumbent would have been very likely to have made hay on that issue. This might be the day it turned around. I mean it's incredible. This time three nights ago, my campaign was over. And the only thing I was thinking about was my next job, my next move. It wasn't if I was going to drop out, it was when. And the next day Jim Graham end his bid. Right now it's Harold Brazil, Kwame Brown and Sam Brooks are the only candidates in the race. And all of a sudden Sam Brooks's prospects went from about 0% of winning to a legitimate, though certainly what would have to be a historic victory, no longer a total impossibility. Jim Graham, thank you for joining us. But as we said, there are other candidates in the at large city council race. And one of them is Sam Brooks. He joins us now by telephone. Sam Brooks, welcome. Kojo, thank you for having me. Another young candidate. Are you also saying that it's time for a change? Time for some youth on the District of Columbia's city council? Is that your main message? Oh absolutely. I mean I think I hope to bring a new generation of leadership to the city. I think it's time and certainly this seat and this incumbent, his time has come and gone I think. How do you get past the age question because you're only 23 years old. Some people will say that you're not politically mature. And that in fact there needs to be a little bit more growing. Jeanette it's a great question. It's a question I don't shy away from for a second. I'd correct you, I'm 24. 24, OK. You just had a birthday. Every year counts here. But it's a question I don't shy away from. I also don't shy away from-- Today when we went on probably the biggest radio show in the city, which I'd been trying to get on for eight months. My interview, which I thought went terribly because I was so nervous-- I was literally shaking on the telephone-- went pretty well. It went well. I mean if I was happy with how it sounded. Race was one of the reasons that Jim Graham said he was dropping out of the race. Is that something that you have considered? After all, Brazil is African American. You're white. Yeah, it is something I've considered. I mean I didn't hear a lot of people talk about that until this week. And certainly as I've walked through every neighborhood in this city in the last 550 miles that I've walked, I don't hear a lot of Washingtonians talk about the color the skin they want this member of the council to be in this seat. They want somebody that's going to fix their schools. And that they want somebody that is committed to the issues that are important to them. And I don't think at the end of the day, it's an issue that going to play very prominently. And it was the first time literally in eight months that I felt like I belonged in the race. I mean I really felt like this was an endeavor in which I could be successful. Summer has been going well. I mean since Jim got out of the race it's been a lot of fun to be running for this office. They haven't all been good days, but there have been a lot of good days. The Fourth of July parade was a lot of fun. Felt like I was a real candidate running for office that I had a chance of winning, which was fun. So what we're doing now is doing a lot of candidate forums at night, trying to get in front of any group of people I can every night. Sam Brooks, some people might say, you're just too young and inexperienced and we can't entrust such a responsibility to somebody who is so unseasoned. What would your response be? I'll tell you, for everybody that tells me it's too young, there are nine people that say I am so excited you're running. There are a lot of people who are very excited. Councilman Brazil has this idea that the only person qualified for this job is the person that's already there. I've always had good luck in debates. I've looked forward to debating Harold Brazil since I filed papers to declare my candidacy on August 1 of '03. Mr. Brazil, are you too old to serve on the city council? I'm old enough to be on city council and I'm not too old to have the experience and leadership on the council. To know the store, to know how it works. It's at once exciting to do well in these debates and to really feel like I'm winning and like I'm the strongest candidate in the field. But the same time I get in the car and go home and realize, really only 20 or 30 people that didn't have an idea about where they were going to vote were showing up at the debates. During the debates there's what essentially amounts to straw polls of the community groups. And we're just getting killed in the straw polls. But they're just not representative of ordinary voters. They're representative of the campaign's ability to turn out people that will vote for them. So if you're Harold Brazil, that means busing in literally busloads of senior citizens. Kwame Brown uses a network that his dad has developed over what's almost two dozen years of activism in DC. And I'm working on a network that's existed for really a couple of months. And it's really not even a very good network. --with some experience and leadership on the council. No time for on the job training baby. There's this weird thing that happens that some people are turned off by because when you're 24 years old, you're not supposed to be running for office, particularly citywide. And so to even have the idea that I could do that is almost bizarrely just really self centered. To think that I'm so great that I can do it. I'm a lot of times almost embarrassed by it just because I always worry it almost does come across as being just really an incredible ego. And some people I think, or at least I worry that some people are turned off by that. But having said all that, this is what I really feel in my gut I should be doing. It's what every instinct I have tells me. It's just a faith that we can be doing better than we're doing. And the faith that I could be somebody that could bring about the changes that would let us do better than we're doing. Sam Brooks. His primary election was two weeks ago. The results, Kwame Brown came in first with 54% of the vote. The incumbent Harold Brazil got 32% of the vote. Sam Brooks, 13%. His new ambition, he hopes to get a job working for a city councilman this fall. His diaries were produced for radio by Teal Krech. A couple of years ago, I was on a flight from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The movie was Sweet Home Alabama, which you'll remember is about a southern girl played by Reese Witherspoon who moves to New York, joins the fashion industry and then is forced to return home and come to terms with her white trash roots. At the end, there's a wedding scene when the character has to explain to her big city husband to be that she's leaving him for her earthy, down home high school sweetheart. You see, the truth is I gave my heart away a long time ago, my whole heart. And I never really got it back. And I don't even know what else to say but I'm sorry, I can't marry you. Into the stunned silence that follows walks Candice Bergen as the jilted fiance's dragon lady of a mother, who coincidentally also happens to be the mayor of New York. After a volley of insults, Witherspoon decks Bergen. And it is at this moment, somewhere between when Witherspoon drawled, "Nobody talks to my mama like that." And her father, Earl Smooter raised his face to the heavens and declared "Praise the Lord. The south has risen again," that something began to happen to me. My face got hot and constricted. A softball rose in my throat that required a surprisingly loud snore to choke back. My breathing grew rapid. In short, I lost it and started to cry. I should say that Sweet Home Alabama is not a very good movie. It's actually a pretty terrible movie. I have no particular attachment to Reese Witherspoon, and I'm not from the South. Also, this was the fourth time I'd seen it. See, my name is Brett. And I cry at movies on airplanes. Not sometimes, always. And not some movies, all movies. Don't believe me? Here's a by no means complete list-- Bend It Like Beckham, 101 Dalmatians, What a Girl Wants, Daredevil. Let me be clear. I'm not afraid of flying. I like flying. And I'm not a crier, at least not on land. Like many men I know, even sensitive ones who know that having a cry can be healthy and good, I passed some invisible line in adolescence when I simply stopped doing it. There have been many times in life that I probably should have cried, actually tried to cry and wasn't able to. Because, of course, I didn't happen to be a 30,000 feet. Needless to say, this can be embarrassing. I once confessed my problem to a friend, and he thought for a long moment before saying, "I'm sorry to hear that. Does it make your mascara run?" Earlier this year, I was flying from Denver to New York and found myself seated next to a big, burly guy with a cowboy shirt a Western belt buckle. Before takeoff we talked about football or college basketball or something. Then they announced the movie. It was Under the Tuscan Sun. I glanced at my macho new buddy. Thought about watching Diane Lane experience love and loss while rediscovering her inner strength at a farmhouse in the Italian countryside. And read the Sky Mall catalog instead. For a long time, I thought I was alone in this. Then a few months ago I was at a party and overheard another guest describe how he fell to pieces watching an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond on a flight to California. I started asking around and found I wasn't completely alone. Greg is 32 year old guy in jeans and a Mets hat who just finished writing a book about college sports. I think it might have been only movie available, Dirty Dancing II: Havana Nights. The parents watch them dance. And they see how special this relationship is. And at that moment they've gone from angry parents to accepting of Javier. I mean I got choked up. As my fellow weepers will tell you, even not watching the movie is no guarantee of safety. Here's my friend Lindsey. So I was on a flight, I believe California to New York. The specifics don't really stand out. But I do remember that it required a $2 deposit for earphones or something. And I wasn't ready to pay the $2 or I didn't have $2. And I decided I'd read my book. But the movie is playing. And I see it, and I can't take my eyes off of it. So I end up watching the entire duration of the movie without sound. And at various points throughout it I started welling up, thinking, wow I can't believe I'm crying at a movie. I can't hear the sound too. And it's Freaky Friday. Or take Stephen, an avid film festival goer and a professional movie critic who can discourse at length on the differences between early and late period Kurosawa. His plane hadn't even taken off. And they were just running this loop of commercials and in-flight programming and stuff. They hadn't started the movie. It was very early on. And there was this Amex commercial. A man traveling through Europe, and I think it was nighttime. I want to say it was raining or something. And this kind of haggard traveler, this businessmen, is walking briskly through the street. And then they close up on a wallet, clearly his, that he had left behind unknowingly. And then you see cut to the hotel where he's checking in. And the woman asks for a credit card. Then he pats himself down and realizes he doesn't have it. He goes into a state of panic. I think that's when I started choking up. And then he gets American Express on the phone. They explain that it'll be OK. He'll have a credit card in the morning. And then I start to relax a little bit. And then he says, wait I'm not going to be in this city tomorrow. I have to travel. And then I started choking up again. And then they said, oh, we'll have it waiting for you in that city. And then I just started crying after that. I was so happy for him and relieved. And it was a pretty tense situation there for about 15 or 20 seconds. This is one of the strange features of our problem. We're less likely to cry at the sad parts of a movie, or financial services industry commercial, than at the happy ones, the parts where everything turns out all right. For instance, in the movie Larger Than Life, which I saw somewhere over the Atlantic a few years ago, it wasn't the moment when Bill Murray is separated from the elephant that his dead, circus clown father has left him as a means to change his life as a down on his luck motivational speaker that had me reaching for the tissues. It was when they were reunited. In fact, the first time this happened to me was during one of the happy scenes I'd ever seen. It was in Big Night, Stanley Tucci's movie about paternal love and Italian food. Midway through the movie, Tucci's character and his brother stage a feast in their New Jersey restaurant. And at one point bring out a whole roast pig. The camera pans across the faces of the guests just amazed by this unbelievable bounty being wheeled into the room. And the lump began to rise in my throat. I found myself brimming over with joy with the sense that somewhere in the darkness miles below, just like on screen, people were laughing, communing, sharing a meal. It was impossibly beautiful, and there was just nothing to do but cry. I've never heard of anyone crying inappropriately on trains, or on buses, or in boats or cars. What is it about airplanes? I remember getting off the plane thinking I should really actually be embarrassed by the fact that I just cried during Freaky Friday, and I didn't even hear the sound to it. But I wasn't It's like, what happens in the air, stays in the air, I guess. The people I talked to offered a lot of excuses. It's the recirculated air, your eyes are dry, you're often tired and leaving people behind. And of course, there's the obvious conclusion. We're all scared to death. But I've been on hundreds of planes, including quite a few tiny ones. One sea plane that landed on water, and one blimp. I've taken the controls of a plane. I've jumped out of a plane. I've searched my soul and honest to god, I find no fear of flying. And all the frequent criers I interviewed felt the same. No, something else happens up there in that weird, hanging state between where you're going and where you've left. Where there's no phone calls to take, nowhere to go, nothing to do. Some strange, overhead compartment of the heart opens up. And critical judgment grabs its flotational seat cushion and follows a lighted pathway to the big yellow slide. Our friend Greg says this actually makes the ride better. Think about it. You're stuck in a seat for five, or 10 or 5 hours. And how would you rather pass the time? Sitting there being a critic? Or just simply giving in? I mean I wouldn't have watched Havana Nights in the waiting area, waiting to get the plane on Earth. No, not a chance. But once you step on the plane, I'm open to and accepting the movie. And then once you do that, it's going to leave you jelly. It turned me into jelly. My own theory goes something like this. My father once told me that the reason squirrels get hit by cars is that evolutionarily, nothing in their little hard wired brains is capable of understanding a large object hurtling toward them at 70 miles per hour. Well even though I fly all the time, nothing in my little hard wired brain is capable of understanding, I mean really understanding, stepping onto a metal tube, hanging in space for a while and then stepping off 6,000 miles away in a place with different weather, different stars, different time. It puts you into a kind of sterile, infantalizing, travel purgatory. Your'e strapped in, given a blanket, a little sippy cup and tiny silverware. Forced to do whatever you're told and borne away at speeds you can't conceive without seeing where you're going. We all deal with this dislocation differently. Many times I've thought, why can't I just have air rage? Why can't I be the guy drinking 14 mini-bottles of Amaretto, surfing down the aisle on the dinner cart, groping stewardesses and cursing? But then, I do a lot of yelling and screaming down here on the ground, even a little groping. What I don't do is cry, not over breakups or reunions or triumphs or deaths. Or leaving home, or coming back, or any of life's other bumps and transformations. And maybe that's the key to my air, what, sorrow? Maybe I cry the tears I should be shedding on Earth. And all you people who don't cry on airplanes, you're probably the ones I see sobbing on the subway, or on street corners or at funerals. You probably get it all out at home. Well boo hoo. Do us all a favor and keep it in the air, you babies. Brett Martin in New York. Our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa. Pollack Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Amy O'Leary. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Torey Malatia, who wants to replace our program with Howard Stern's. He just feels like he'd be better, and more qualified, and more deserving. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. P R I. Public Radio International.
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Here's the story the way we usually like it. There's this guy, and he's behind enemy lines. Maybe he's dropped in there in the middle of the night, maybe he sneaks under barbed wire at the border, whatever. He's there. He's been there a while. Months, years maybe. He's in disguise, working on our behalf. Nobody suspects. No one can tell. He looks and acts just like them. And then, living there in their midst for so long, speaking the language, eating their food, breathing their air, watching their TV shows, something happens. He starts to change. He starts to become more like them. And then, when it's time for him to strike, to launch his mission against them, he hesitates. He's not sure who he sympathizes with anymore. It's a very romantic idea, this particular vision of what it means to live inside the enemy camp. That you lose your bearings and you would forget how to fight because some other impulse inside you would take over. But sometimes this is actually how it happens. There are lots of ways that people get confused about who their enemy is and how to fight them. Today on our radio show we have that story happening to several different people in several different places in several different ways. True stories. WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program we choose some subject, bring you documentaries, interviews, short fiction, found tapes, found writing, anything we can think of on that subject. Today on our program, life behind enemy lines. Our program today in four acts. Act one, Our Own Worst Enemy? In that act, even senior administration officials like Colin Powell now admit that the insurgency in Iraq is getting stronger. We get one of the architects of the president's war in Iraq, Richard Perle, to answer the question, is it our own fault that things are going so badly in Iraq. Act two, Confession. In that act, the true story of a fixer for the Catholic Church and how he came to sympathize with people who he was sent by the church to deceive. Act three, Blood Agent. How microscopic beings inside you and me can control our thoughts and minds, no kidding. Act four, sleeping with the enemy. In which we ask the question, whose side is your girlfriend on, anyway? Whose? Stay with us. Hi. Greetings. Think we met once in the distant past. Yeah, we did. Hi. So Richard Perle and James Fellows. The question that we wanted to talk to the two of you about it is, once we decided to go to war, did the administration do a competent job in planning and executing it? Basically, how good are they at their jobs at conducting the war on terror. And there's a whole list of now familiar charges. Inadequate planning for post-war Iraq, not having enough troops to control the country after the war, the war getting worse each month. Richard Perle, are they doing a good job? I think the administration is doing about as good a job as they can do under the circumstances. Which is not to say it's a great job. I don't think it is. I think a lot of mistakes have been made. And we learn with every mistake. Are there certain mistakes that you think were avoidable? Well, the single largest mistake in my view was in not going into Iraq with a significant number of Iraqis at our side. In not handing authority over more or less immediately after the fall of Baghdad. You criticize the planning. In fact, there was extensive planning. It wasn't always right. But I don't know anyone who, in a situation largely without precedent, can be expected to get everything right. James Fallows, what's your take on this? Well I have to take issue with-- I agree with the assessment that things have not gone very well. On the idea that this was sort of beyond anyone's calculation, I mean, with respect, it's just not true. Most of the expert branches of the government were saying, post-conquest order is the first order of priority. You have to make sure that Iraqis can see that there is stability now that there's a new sheriff in town. There has to be a sense of order. And so this was clearly foreseen and just dismissed. And just to be clear, James Fallows, you're saying in your reporting what you found is that the administration was warned specifically about this kind of looting and this kind of disorder starting, and yet didn't get control of the capital and didn't get control of the country. I'm saying specifically, and anybody who doubts can go to the Army War College website and check these studies, that it was warned that the thing to start doing on the first day, and certainly in the first three days and the first week, was to guarantee public order. Because the thing that was sure to happen when a repressive regime was unleashed was disorder, and disorder in the early period could be profoundly destabilizing. And this simply was ignored. And it wasn't from some pinko group, it was the US Army War College. I'm sorry, it is a big leap from saying that some scholars-- and I don't know who they were-- at the Army War College or at National Defense University or somewhere else prepared a report, and the fact that they prepared a report and there were problems afterward proves that we ignored sensible planning. Let me give you two examples of more sort of direct orders. It is now well known that the Army and its Chief of Staff, Eric Shinseki, were saying, you need more people to do this. You need them to secure the borders. You need them to patrol Baghdad, et cetera. That was deliberately, and as you'll recall very high-handedly, rejected by Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. I remember what General Shinseki was saying. And what he was saying, he was talking first of all about the invasion force. With respect, that's not correct. Shinseki was saying you needed them for security after the fall of Baghdad. Shinseki's experience had been in Kosovo and the Balkans, and he said he'd been in charge of peacekeeping there. And he said based on his rules of thumb, you needed one per x thousand of population. I now forget the ratio. But it would have led to about twice as many troops as the US went in with. Well I certainly agree that we could have done a much better job of establishing order at the beginning. I believe that the way to do that was not by having twice as many Americans on the ground, but by having Iraqis who understood the situation a great deal better than we did. But in a sense, I've got to say as a voter, to me it kind of doesn't matter if it should have been Iraqi forces or it should have been more American forces. I feel like all I see is that you both are saying we needed more troops on the ground to make the country more secure at the beginning, and it was one of the most important things that we could do. And that's led to that kind of problems that we're having now, and they get worse and worse and worse. Well no, you're going way beyond anything I said. OK, how am I going beyond? Well first of all, I didn't say we needed more troops. We needed different troops. If we'd had the 10,000 Iraqis who we should have gone in with, I think we would have been in much better shape. And in particular, I think the looting and the early signs of disintegration-- I think our military commanders misunderstood the implications of the looting. And if you're unhappy with the way that mission was handled, you should be talking to the battlefield commander. From the public's point of view, it doesn't really matter at what stage the breakdown was. We are agreeing that something seriously has gone wrong, and do we blame the military or do we blame the civilian leaders of the military? Well, you can assign responsibility but I wouldn't call it blame. Because this is something we do every day. We're learning. You say that we don't do this every day. In fact, the US has carried out a lot of occupations from the Philippines onward, and none of them has gone as badly as this. Preparing for this sort of thing would have meant it was taken more time, either to bring more American troops there or to get a bigger alliance. Whether European, whether Arab, or whatever. And so all of these warnings were at odds with the idea of getting the war going sooner rather than later. Let's move on to a different subject. One thing that's come up in the two debates is this question of letting Osama bin Laden get away at Tora Bora. It's been brought up in both of the debates so far. Neither the president nor the vice president actually responded directly to the charge. It seems really damning. The suggestion somehow seems to be that the president of the United States or the vice president should have been commanding US forces in Afghanistan at a level of detail that is absurd. The troops in the field who were responsible for handling the situation were not taking direct orders from the president of the United States. I think this is a slight mischaracterization of what the critique is. It's not that Bush or Cheney should have been picking targets the way Lyndon Johnson did. Instead it's two fundamental points. One is that the assignment for the crucial part of this pincer movement was given on the one hand to the Afghan quote, "warlords", unquote on the other side of the border to the Pakistanis, as opposed to being under direct control. There also was clearly a shift in the center of gravity of attention within the Pentagon by early 2002, just around the time of Tora Bora, towards Iraq and away from Afghanistan. Richard Perle? I think it's easy to second guess what went wrong at Tora Bora. The judgment was made that certain parts of that military operation were best handled by Afghans. I can see reasons why people would come to that conclusion. It may not have been the right conclusion, I don't know. But it certainly was not the case that either the president was making the decision at that tactical level, nor I believe is it fair to say that that would have been handled differently if we had not been at that point planning for the operations in Iraq. Richard Perle, you've been at the forefront of saying that we need to turn over Iraq to the Iraqis, and the faster we do it the better off everybody's going to be, and the more of a success this is going to be. I'd like to talk to you just about whether you're concerned at the speed at which that's happened. Back in July, there was a report that the US military put out, just explaining the progress in training Iraqi forces. And a mainstream bi-partisan think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, put out a report. Anthony Cordesman was the author. And it said the US failed to treat the Iraqis as partners in the counterinsurgency effort until April 2004, nearly a year after the fall of Saddam Hussein and 2/3 of a year after major insurgency problems began to emerge. The report reveals massive shortfalls in weapons, vehicles, communications, and body armor. Iraqi forces have about 40% of their minimum weapons needs, about 25% of the necessary body armor. As of July 13th, the US had spent only $220 million of the $2.9 billion, that is $220 million of the $2.9 billion, dedicated to the Iraqi security forces. No single mission is more important than security and no Iraqi popular desire is clearer than that this mission be done by Iraqis. The US has been guilty of a gross military, administrative, and moral failure. Do you agree with that? I do agree with that, yes. I do agree with that. Now, having said that, when you look at the source of some of the difficulties, it's pretty appalling. For example, efforts to get equipment into the hands of the Iraqi security forces were frequently frustrated by the impossible procurement procedures that are written into law within the US government. And is this something that you think that the administration, if it had decided to yell and scream about a little bit more and used the force of the power of the presidency more, could have done something about? Well, Don Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, went to Congress and he asked for some unencumbered funds so that he would have the flexibility to do that sort of thing, and it was turned down. But that's an entirely Republican Congress and Senate. Well unfortunately, they're not in that kind of complete control. Richard Perle, clearly you think that a lot of things have gone wrong. Do you think people should have been fired? Oh, I think there are people who should have, yes. But we never fire anybody in this government. Never. Actually, they tend to get promoted. James Fallows. Well, you would think there would be someone who would be publicly held to some kind of account for this. Clearly political decisions about the size, the timing, and the makeup of this invasion force have had rippling effects we're feeling to this day. And political leaders are usually held accountable for the effects of their decision. James Fallows, you've written about national security professionals, most of them Republicans who you've talked to over the course of two years. I'm just going to read from one of your articles. You say, let me tell you my gut feeling, a senior figure at one of America's military-sponsored think tanks told me recently. In my view, we are much, much worse off now than when we went into Iraq. That is not a partisan position. I voted for these guys, but I think they're incompetent, and I have a very close perspective on what's happening. Certainly in the long run we've harmed ourselves. We are playing to the enemy's political advantage. Whatever tactical victories we may gain along the way, this may prove to be a strategic blunder. Richard Perle, what's your reaction to that? I don't agree with it. I don't know who said it, but I certainly don't agree with it. I don't have any evidence that supports that. I know it is commonly believed that our intervention in Iraq has been a recruitment tool. There is no question that terrorists from around the globe are converging on Iraq. But showing that they have been recruited on the basis of Iraq is another matter altogether. James Fallows? Most of the people who have spent their lives trying to understand the sources of Islamic terrorism have said that what the US has done in Iraq is increasing their recruitment power. The famous International Institute of Strategic Studies report a couple months ago saying that since the US went to Iraq, the worldwide supply of Al Qaeda operatives is up by a factor of two to three. So we've killed them off inside Iraq but we're creating more, as even Donald Rumsfeld said in one of his memos a year or so ago. Well, he raised the question. And I'm impressed that the IISS is able to count the number of Al Qaeda terrorists. I wish they'd tell us now where they are. The conversation went around and around like this. Both Perle and Fallows thought that there had been profound and preventable mistakes at two of the most important jobs in Iraq: securing the country the day after the invasion and creating and training an Iraqi security force. Perle says these aren't the kinds of things you blame a president for. Fallows quoted chapter and verse about people fired and reports thrown away that could have prevented it. Act two, Confession. We turn now to stories about people who are operating behind enemy lines in one way or another. And we begin with the story of a young priest who is sent out on a series of jobs by church administrators to squelch some problems. In spending time out among the people who he is supposed to be deceiving he finds it harder and harder to keep doing his job. Carl Marziali tells the story from Los Angeles. Patrick Wall was just where he wanted to be at 26. He was a monk studying theology at Saint John's Monastery in rural Minnesota. He lived in a quiet room facing the lake. He looked forward to a life of study and prayer. It was late summer, 1991. The first day that school started out, pretty uneventful winter morning. Prayer at 7 o'clock like normal. Went down for breakfast like normal, went back up to my room. Was literally brushing my teeth when there was a knock on my door, which is extremely out of the ordinary. And it was Abbott Jerome Tyson. Well, the abbot's a very quiet guy, and he usually never went up on that floor of the monastery. So he says, may I come in? I said, yes, Father Abbot, no problem. So he comes in, sits down, and you know I've got my books out, I've got a class in 10 minutes. You know, what's up? And he said, well, Father Dan Ward has told me that you would be a good person for this particular job. And we have a situation over in Saint Mary's Hall that we need you to be a faculty resident. The faculty resident is the live-in counsellor at the college dorm. The campus at Saint John's includes a university. I said, "I'd love to be a faculty resident someday. I think it's a great idea." And he said, "No, today." And when I asked Abbot Jerome specifically what it was for, what was going on, he said well, I can't tell you that. We had numerous sexual abuse cases that have been popping up. So ultimately there's only one conclusion that can be drawn. That there was a an allegation that they must have thought somewhat credible or probable, and they needed to pull that particular monk. And off I went. That afternoon, Wall moved his stuff out of his room and into the freshman dorm. His instructions were simple. Put the kids at ease, and don't say anything about the monk you're replacing. He organized a pizza party for the students. He told them he was taking over as faculty resident but that he couldn't say why. There were no questions. Wall didn't know it then, but he was being tested. Unfortunately for him, he passed. His dream was to be a monk as he understood monks to be: devout and learned men who live in monasteries. By showing a knack for damage control, he put himself on a less spiritual path. Before long the abbot appointed him to a sexual abuse response team and sent him to the Church of Saint Elizabeth's in the town of Hastings. He was replacing a pastor who'd been withdrawn for what the monastery called a credible allegation. Wall arrived at Saint Elizabeth's on February 2nd, 1993. Replacing a pastor is not easy. People in a parish tend to get attached to their priest. Replacing a disgraced pastor is harder. A lot of people believe their priest can do no wrong and they are not shy about telling his replacement. They were very forward and forthright and angry. And they said, Father, I'm really sad that you're here. I'm really sorry that you had to come. Because we really liked the other monk and we don't think he should have been removed. And that was it. I said, I'm really sorry that that particular monk had to be removed and I'm here because my abbot asked me to be here. I tried to be as candid and simple as possible, but I felt taken aback, and I felt sad from the very beginning. I didn't enjoy that experience. At first, Wall tried to raise morale. He told parishioners what he himself had been told. That the alleged abuse took place A, some time ago, and B, somewhere else. But it wasn't long before victims at Saint Elizabeth's began coming forward. They would show up unannounced at the rectory, or in the church after mass, and asked to speak to him in private. Then they would start with a tiny revelation. It's unforgettable. It's absolutely unforgettable when they start to tell you. And they only tell you very small, cryptic little things. There are code words for everything. And they've kind of broached the subject to see what you're going to do with it and to see if you're going to actually believe them. And obviously I'm 27 years old, I'm not exactly sure what to do with it. Emotionally I really had no idea what to do with it. So how did you deal with it when the victim or victims came forward and told you about what had happened? Do you try to comfort them, do you try to tell them that-- I mean, what do you do? Do you try to restore their faith in the Church or do you just listen and write up a complaint and send it off? You don't even write up a complaint. Basically, you get a few of the facts and then you pass that on to the diocese. And honestly, unfortunately, it's easy to deal with because these people never go to church again. Because they really view that person as representing God, so it's hard for them to publicly ever celebrate or to practice their faith again. So they just disappear, honestly. Did you ever wonder whether you should make a special effort when they came to you to-- beyond the effort that you might make to convince somebody else to come back to the church-- to do something more for these victims, or to offer them counseling, or something to try to make up for what had happened? It's a difficult situation because you really need to remain neutral. And your natural inclination, especially as priests, is to be sympathetic and to heal. But there's no way that you're going to be allowed to be part of the healing process, because ultimately you're part of the defendant. You are the institution that brought about their hurt. And so you really have to put your professional hat on and keep an arm's distance. Wall survived the scandal at Saint Elizabeth's, and he helped his superiors survive it too. He never told parishioners about the allegations in their parish, and the stories he was hearing in private never became public. After serving a year at Saint Elizabeth's, Wall thought he would come back to the monastery. But near the end of his term he received a letter from the abbot instructing him to report to another parish, Saint Bernard's. The monk there had been having an affair and paying for it with church money. This was not the assignment Wall had in mind, but part of him was flattered. I felt pretty good about it because all of a sudden, I'm 28 years old, I'm an administrator of a parish. I'm being turned loose as the boss. That's a compliment as far as I'm concerned. I really felt I was doing the right thing. Not long after Wall arrived at Saint Bernard's, an agent from the IRS knocked on his door. The agent presented a bill, payable immediately, for $600,000 in back taxes, interest, and penalties for undeclared profits from a church-run lottery. The business manager was not available to answer questions because he had been the other person in the affair and had been removed along with the monk. Wall had to take a crash course in bookkeeping to pay the IRS. The rest of his time at Saint Bernard's, Wall did what every priest does. He celebrated Mass, performed weddings and funerals, baptized babies. And he heard confessions, including those of other priests. Despite the headlines, the percentage of priests who have abused minors is relatively low. Celibacy is another story. In a recent Los Angeles Times poll, only 1/3 of priests said they do not waver from the celibate life. After a while, Wall stopped thinking of broken vows as something foreign to his world. Once you see enough people fall and once you hear enough confessions of different priests, you look at yourself in the mirror and you say, "Am I really any different?" And the chances of me maintaining a celibate way of life without failure along the way are so low that ultimately, either I have to change or the system needs to change. What about-- there must a lot of priests who believe in being priests and have decided that the rule of celibacy is nonsense and so are willing to lead a double life of sorts. Was that-- that wasn't something that you considered? No, that's really not my personality. I'm a terrible liar. Oh, I turn red. I'm really bad. And I had seen priests who maintained heterosexual relationships with women and I saw the effects of it. Because it's a life of contradiction, because the relationship is there, it's exclusive, but you can't profess it and everyone around you knows it's going on. And that's not happiness. That's not a true coming together. I just couldn't see myself doing that. That's just not me. After Saint Bernard's, the assignments kept coming. The next one was an affair between a priest and a nun. After that, a new parish where a teacher had abused a student and the priest was living with his housekeeper. Four years, four parishes, four scandals. There are good, dedicated priests out there, but they're not the ones who get replaced. By the very nature of his job, Wall was acquiring a skewed and depressing view of the priesthood. Did you ever ask not to be given those assignments? Yeah, I did. And I specifically asked to be able to come back to the prep school and teach. But the needs of the monastery were so great at that point that again, it was only going to be another year. I was only going to have to go to Saint Bernard's for another year. So it sounds like a bad construction deal, you know, two more weeks. Give me two more weeks and we'll be done. It just kept going on, kept going on. Meanwhile, the monks he replaced were getting exactly what Wall himself had asked for. They were going back to the monastery, permanently. I'd run across them at community meetings and whenever we had chapter votes, and all that. And it's hard not to be judgmental. The other thing I found hard was that my whole career path was driven by other people's mistakes. And that's the last thing I ever expected a monastic life. I really expected to work in a parish for a year, to go off to grad school, come back, teach, coach football at the university, and to live a pretty darn good life of balance between prayer and teaching and working as a teacher. So they changed my career path, they changed my whole trajectory in life. Without fully realizing it, Wall had been initiated into a brotherhood of priests known informally as fixers, or cleaners. They replaced problem priests, they hide things in the archives, they reassure the faithful. In short, they make it all go away. Visually, he was perfect for the job. He was barrel chested, a former offensive lineman on the Saint John's football team. He was young and friendly. He was the anti-stereotype of a troubled monk. The abbot couldn't have found a better prospect if he had picked a model out of a catalogue. But Wall did more than just PR. He became familiar with the law of the church called canon law. Specifically, with the different archives canon law sets up for storing and hiding information. The first is a historical archives which is just the names, states, people, those kinds of things. Then you have the secret archives. The secret archives. I mean, is that literally what they're called? The secret archives? I mean, why were they set up? They're set up for the protection of individuals. So the bishop has the responsibility to take things that would be considered scandalous, things that might hurt individuals' reputations, and to be able to place them there so they wouldn't easily be exposed. OK. When you call it the secret archives, though, it makes it sound sinister. It makes it sound like it's there for the protection, to really protect the church. I'm not saying that's what it is, but that's how it sounds. What really is the purpose of these so called secret-- why can't everything be in the personnel records and then some items be labeled confidential or whatever? Well, you've got to give Rome credit, I mean they have wonderful procedure. This is things that have worked out for centuries. And that has always been the secret to one of the defenses of the Church. If you don't know what you're asking for, they don't have to produce it. When you were working for the Church cleaning up these situations of abuse and having to tell parishioners some of the facts, but not all of the facts, about what was going on, did you ever feel complicit in the cover-up of all of this? I have some regrets, but I think I did it in good faith. Because, as I was taught and as I believe, that that was my role, to help the Church in the long run and to be obedient to what I was asked to do. And it's only later on that, as I've had greater experience, that I couldn't support it any longer. And I felt that if I was going to stay, I was going to not only support it but I was going to get deeper into it. I was going to be asked to do other assignments, to follow pedophiles. I was going to be asked to be on the finance council to try to figure out ways to mitigate the huge financial cost of childhood sexual abuse by priests and the religious. And I remember having an epiphany and sitting on the porch at Saint Mary's in Stillwater. And that's why I came to the conclusion that this is pretty much going to be my career path. I'd be there for another year or two as the administrator, and then I would go on to another assignment. And I just couldn't do it any longer. After four years of deceiving the faithful about the extent of priests and misconduct, of protecting the institution over the health and welfare of the victims, of covering for the perpetrators and letting the problem fester, Patrick Wall decided he was on the wrong side. On July 31st, 1998, Wall quit the priesthood. He was 33 years old. Leaving was difficult. If you want to leave honorably, you need permission, which doesn't come easily or quickly. It took more than a year in Wall's case. Then, once you're out, there are practical challenges, like trying to get a job with a master of theology on your resume. In the end, it was his experience as a fixer that translated best to the real world. Wall read an Op-Ed in the LA Times by John Manley, an attorney who sues the Church on behalf of sexual abuse victims. He essentially separated himself amongst all the different attorneys in saying that we need to protect the sheep, and not the shepherd. It's not the problem of the victims, it's not the problem of the particular perpetrators, per se, or some particular issue like homosexuality or whatever. The problem is within the institution itself. By this point, Wall was convinced that lawsuits were the only way to reform the Church. He called Manley and offered to help. Soon they were on the phone constantly. Wall took him step by step through Church bureaucracy. Manley was amazed. John didn't know all the different documents that are out there. And then John would be working on things and he'd call me up and say, "Dude, what do I do with this? What does this mean? Where am I supposed to do with it? What are other things-- where else can I look?" And I remember, I think he was quite surprised when I showed him the penal code of canon law and exactly what we need to ask for. He just couldn't believe that it was there. That they would have that level of sophistication. Wall started working for Manley's law firm full time in October of 2002. Using his knowledge of Latin and Italian, he translates and interprets church records. He helps the firm identify and request key documents, like psychological assessments of priests, from the secret archives. The fact that he switched sides, that he's fighting the Church, doesn't seem to trouble him. He believes he's doing what God wants him to do, which is what he's always believed. There's another part to Wall's job at the firm, which doesn't have anything to do with case law. Last week, he stayed on the phone with a man for an hour and a half, listening to him talk about the priest who abused him and who might still be hurting other people. Wall finds himself talking to victims about all kinds of things, everything he was not allowed to talk about before, back when he was a priest. I feel I really do pastoral work when I'm working with victims every day. On every single issue. Before you were part of a holy order, and now you're working with a bunch of lawyers. And it's hard to know these days where priests belong on the ethical ladder, but most people know exactly where to put lawyers, and so it's just odd to hear you talk about this work being more fulfilling in some ways than what you were doing before. Well, we're dealing with people at the lowest ebb of where they're at. They're dealing with the greatest pain they've ever experienced. And one of the greatest things that we find is that they can no longer participate in sacramental life of the Church because of the seven sacraments. The one thing that's really clear is that it takes a priest to administer the sacrament. And every sacrament is either through touching or it's through breath, through words. It's in close proximity to the priest. And that is the symbol of their abuse. So we're dealing with some of the most damaged people within the Church. And it's a very fulfilling ministry, I find in being pastoral, to be with them. Because honestly, we're one of the few symbols of hope that they have. Patrick Wall is married now. He and his wife have a two-year-old daughter, who they plan to send to Catholic school. They all go to mass every Sunday. Carl Marziali attends mass with his family in Los Angeles. Coming up, Enemies on our Turf. Controlling the minds of ants, of rats, and of you and me. This is not some whacked out conspiracy theory, my friend. This is science. Proof in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. 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, Enemy Camp, stories of what it means to work behind enemy lines. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Blood Agent. Nature, it turns out, is full of enemy agents. Living behind enemy lines, doing their work. Parasites, they're literally parasites. Carl Zimmer has written a book about the different strategies that these parasites use to survive, and it makes for weirdly compelling reading. For one thing, who knew how prevalent they were. Most creatures on earth are living inside an enemy. And they are trying to fight that enemy, trying to survive, trying to outwit. Just to give people a sense of the range of things that different parasites do, could you tell the story of the parasite that gets into ants, the lancet fluke. Sure. Well, the lancet fluke is kind of a flatworm. It starts out as an egg on the ground, and a snail comes along and eats the egg. And it kind of irritates the snail's system, so that eventually it kind of coughs it up. And so there you have this sort of clump, kind of snail goo, with the parasite in it. And while it's disgusting to us, to an ant, there's nothing more delicious than snail goo. So the ant comes along and it eats the snail goo and the parasite along with it. So now you have these flukes inside the ant. And once they recognize that they're inside the ant, they start doing some strange things. As the sun is starting to go down, while the other ants are probably heading back to the nest, it gets this uncontrollable urge to climb upward. It wants to climb up. And what it generally does is it climbs up a blade of grass. And what's the advantage to the parasite for the ant to be up there? Well it's not too obvious at first. I mean, it's not like the parasite wants to take in a better view. The thing is that there are these grazing mammals. Sheep, cows. And that's one of their favorite grazing times, towards the end of the day. So the ant goes up there, sheep comes along, chews on the grass. The ant gets eaten, chewed up, dies. But the flukes inside the ant, they can survive the digestive acids in the sheep's stomach. And actually, sheep are where they like to live. They're their final host. What's so amazing about that is not just the control that the parasite is having over the ant, that life cycle that you're describing is so complicated. It's having to go through three different animals over the course of its normal life cycle. Yeah, there are actually some parasites that go through six or seven different animals to get through their life cycle. It's mind boggling. It's really hard to talk about without ascribing a kind of intentionality to them. Which, they don't have consciousness, they don't have brains in any way. It's hard for us to even understand what they're doing without kind of putting that on them. Yeah. Because they, I think, because in a sense they are using us. Or are using other animals or other hosts in such an intentional way. And they seem to know so much. Say, how does a tapeworm inside a fish know that if it makes it flick and flail in a certain way that it will be easier for a bird to see it so they can get inside that bird where it wants to be. It's amazing. And not only do they not have brains, a lot of them don't even have nerves. So it's just this sinister chemical wisdom they have. It seems like all the parasites break down into two different groups. There are the kinds that actually get inside a host and then kill it off in their drive to survive, and then there are others which actually just kind of live inside and are happily living inside forever. They want the host to survive. Could you just tell the example of the creature that eats the fish's tongue? Yeah, this is a particularly creepy one. The parasite in question is called an isopod, which is a kind of crustacean. It looks like a little pill bug or something. But it lives in the water. And what it does is it swims into the mouth of a snapper, a fish. And when it's in there, it eats that fish's tongue. It just devours the tongue completely, but just the tongue. It stops there. But now this isopod, this parasite, does something very weird. It sort of turns around so it's facing front, and hunkers down exactly where the tongue used to be. So if you look in one of these fish's mouths, you see this tongue that has these little eyes on the end of it. It's amazing. And what scientists think then happens is that the fish can then use the parasite as its tongue. And it'll go out and catch some food, catch a fish, and will crush up the food on the back of this parasite. The fish doesn't mind too much if it can still get its meal, I guess. And the fish can then get back to its life. So many of these stories just are such gross-out stories on a visceral level. Well you know, it's funny because it disturbs us when we talk about that when it comes to parasites. But, I mean, why doesn't it disturb us when we talk about a lion. We name football teams after lions, but we don't name football teams after tapeworms. You don't have the Chicago Tapeworms or something that. We don't want to think about it. But we admire these predators, but what are these predators doing? These predators are taking advantage of these other life forms. They're eating it from the outside, I guess you could say. But I mean, to my mind, it's just a lot more cool when they're on the inside trying to figure out how to make this work. Thinking about this as much as you have, do you start to see everything as being parasites? I see a lot of things as being like parasites. Parasites are the most successful life form on Earth. And it could be as many as three parasites for every one free living species, it's hard to say. And if you're not a species that is living inside another thing, then you're a species with something living inside of you. Is one side winning? I'd say the parasites have the upper hand because they're just doing so very well. The parasites have the upper hand? Sure. Yeah. I mean, they have the most species, they're getting around all these defenses. I mean, there are things they do that either we don't know how they do it or if we know how they do it we can't reproduce it. We just stand in awe of it. I know, but we know about them, they don't know about us. We're the ones with the brains and the thinking and the consciousness. Then maybe you're overselling your brain. I mean, the brain is a wonderful thing, but these parasites are able to pull the strings in those brains in a lot of cases. Say, for example, you know, a rat. Rats are very, very smart animals. They know how to learn, they know how to figure out their surroundings. But there's a parasite called toxoplasma, it's a single-celled parasite. And they pick it up on the ground. And when it gets into them, they suddenly lose their fear of the smell of cats. Otherwise, they're totally the same. And then the cat eats them, and then toxoplasma gets into its final host, which is the cat. So even though you've got a brain, you're still being pushed toward your doom by this single-celled parasite. Mr. Zimmer, whose side are you on? I think I'm on the parasites' side when it comes to getting a bad rep. I'm their PR man. Because, Mr. Zimmer, at some point we're all going to have to choose sides in this war. Speaking for the other humans, I want to say you're either with us or against us. You know, it's funny. I have not gotten seriously sick in my life, knock on wood. And I have actually gone to places where there are a lot of parasites around in order to report on how people are dealing with them. And I didn't get sick. I was really scared, but I didn't get sick. I didn't get malaria, I didn't get river blindness, I didn't get sleeping sickness. Wait a second. Are you saying this because they could sense that you are in league with them? Who knows. Maybe they think I'm here to serve their purpose. Carl Zimmer. His book, the perfect reading material if you ever want to have a long talk with an eight-year-old boy, is Parasite Rex. Act four, Sleeping with your Enemy. We have this story about what's hidden inside of us, the secret agents within. From writer Etgar Keret. Among other things, he says that it's a story about his real-life girlfriend. Actor Matt Malloy reads it for us. A warning to listeners before we begin, this story mentions the existence of sex. Surprised? Of course I was surprised. You go out with a girl. First date, second date, a restaurant here, a movie there, always just matinees. You start sleeping together, sex is dynamite, and pretty soon there's feeling too. And then, one day, she arrives all weepy, and you hug her and tell her to take it easy, that everything's OK, but she says she can't stand it anymore, she has this secret, not just a secret, something really awful, a curse, something she's been wanting to tell you the whole time but she didn't have the guts. This thing, it's been weighing down on her like a ton of bricks and now she's got to tell you, she's simply got to. But she knows that as soon as she does, you'll leave her, and you'd be absolutely right, too. And right after that, she starts crying all over again. "I won't leave you," you tell her. "I won't. I love you." You may look a little upset, but you're not. And even if you are, it's about her crying, not about her secret. You know by now that these secrets that always make a woman fall to pieces are usually nothing. And you hug them and say, "It's all right, it's OK." Or "Shh" if they don't stop. "It's something really terrible," she insists, as if she's picked up on how nonchalant you are about it, even though you tried to hide it. "In the pit of your stomach it may sound terrible," you tell her, "but that's mostly because of the acoustics. Soon as you let it out, it won't seem nearly as bad, you'll see." And she almost believes it. She hesitates a minute and then asks, "What if I told you that at night I turn into a heavy, hairy man, with no neck, with a gold ring on his pinky? Would you still love me?" And you tell her of course you would. What else can you say, that you wouldn't? She's simply trying to test you, to see whether you love her unconditionally. And you've always been a winner at tests. Truth is, as soon as you say it, she melts, and you screw, right there in the living room. And afterward, you lie there holding each other tight, and she cries, because she's so relieved. And you cry too. Go figure. And unlike all the other times, she doesn't get up and leave. She stays there and falls asleep. You lie awake looking at her beautiful body, at the sunset outside, at the moon appearing as if out of nowhere, at the silvery light flickering over her body, stroking the hair on her back. And within less than five minutes you find yourself lying next to this guy. This short, fat guy. And the guy gets up and smiles at you, and gets dressed awkwardly. He leaves the room and you follow him, spellbound. He's in the den now, his thick fingers fiddling with the remote, zapping to the sports channels. Championship football. When they miss a pass, he curses the TV. When they score, he gets up and does this little victory dance. After the game, he tells you that his throat is dry and his stomach is growling. He could really use a beer and a nice hunk of meat. Well done, if possible, with lots of onion rings, but he'd settle for some pork chops too. So you get in the car and take him to this restaurant that he knows about and you don't. This new twist has you worried, it really does, but you have no idea what to do about it. Your command and control centers are down. You shift gears at the exit, in a daze. He's right there beside you in the passenger seat, tapping that gold-ringed pinky of his. At the next intersection, he rolls down his window, winks at you, and yells at this chick who's thumbing a ride, "Hey, baby, wanna play nanny goat and ride in the back?" Later, the two of you pack in the steak and the chops and the onion rings till you're about to explode, and he enjoys every bite, and laughs like a baby. And all that time, you keep telling yourself it's got to be a dream. A bizarre dream, yes, but definitely one that you'll snap out of any minute. On the way back, you ask him where to let him off, and he pretends not to hear you, but he looks despondent. So you wind up taking him back home with you. It's almost 3 AM. "I'm going to hit the sack," you tell him, and he waves to you, stays in the beanbag chair, staring at the fashion channel. You wake up the next morning, exhausted, with a slight stomachache. And there she is, in the living room, still dozing. By the time you've had your shower, she's up. She hugs you guiltily, and you're too embarrassed to say anything. Time goes by and you're still together. The sex just gets better and better. And she's not so young anymore, and neither are you, and suddenly find yourselves talking about a baby. And at night, you and the fatso guy hit the town like you've never done in your life. He takes you to restaurants and bars you didn't even know existed, and you dance on tables together, break plates like there's no tomorrow. He's really nice, the fatso guy, a little crass, especially with women, sometimes coming out with things that make you just want to die. But other than that, he's great fun to be with. When you first met him, you didn't give a damn about football, but now you know every team. And whenever one of your favorites wins, you feel like you've made a wish and it's come true. Which is a pretty exceptional feeling for someone like you, who hardly knows what he wants most of the time. And so it goes. Every night you fall asleep with him struggling to stay awake for the early scores on ESPN, and in the morning there she is. The beautiful forgiving woman that you love too till it hurts. Matt Malloy, reading Etgar Keret's story "Fatso." Keret is the author of a book of short stories called The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God. His story was translated into English by Miriam Shlesigner. Publishers take note. "Fatso" is part of a book of great short stories, brand new. It is looking for an American publisher. Special thanks today to Danny Miller, Jennifer Swihart, Tim Lavin, Bob Carlson, Brett Grossman, Scott Carrier, Peter Gray. Music help from conciliary Sarah Vowell. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our shows for absolutely free. Or buy CDs of them. You know, you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife. With a public radio programs best selling books. Even the New York Times, all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Funding for our show is provided by Volkswagen of America and the Phaeton, featuring an air suspension system that can be adjusted to one of four performance settings on the fly. The Phaeton, it's the most Volkswagen you can get without a prescription. More at vw.com. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Torey Malatia, who has just one question for you: Hey baby, wanna play nanny goat and ride in the back? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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At the end of last school year, I got some surprising news, that a public school teacher that I knew named Cathy La Luz, was thinking of quitting teaching. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass, by the way. I knew Cathy because before This American Life started, I was a reporter for NPR's news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And the thing that I reported on more than anything was education. Back in the 1990s, Chicago was going through the most ambitious school reform in the country. And as a reporter based out of Chicago, I spent lots of years in lots of classrooms all around the city. And I can say, hands down, that Cathy La Luz was the single best classroom teacher that I ever witnessed, and she taught at a great school. So last Spring, when I heard that she might quit, and that she might quit out of frustration, frustration with changes at her school, I visited her classroom. It was the day after school ended. She was packing up. Seven, eight. There you go. And I barely walked into her room and turned on the tape recorder when this happened. I was saying that I told all my students that I might not be here next year, so if they wanted a letter of recommendation, they have to give me a letter now. So few of them took advantage of this. But what's funny is a domino effect, is they did it for every teacher. Just in case. They went to my partner. They went to the writing teacher. It was cute. It was cute. Excuse me. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. Give me a minute. Cathy, we haven't even started to talk. I know. I know. I know. Is it just the thought of just not being back at all? It is the thought of not being back, because I really love teaching. And then the other thing is I'm sad because I don't understand really how this could happen, in just a year, nine months. I don't see how this could happen so fast. For the changes this past year, Cathy's school, Washington Irving Elementary, was special in a couple ways. They weren't a magnet school, or charter school, or anything fancy like that. The staff at Irving wanted to prove that you could make school reform work at just a regular neighborhood school. At the start of reform, in fact, Irving was one of the worst schools in the system. But they moved into a brand new building, got an energetic new principal, and it doesn't get more symbolic than this, in 1988 the governor of Illinois signed school reform into law in the Irving gymnasium. TV coverage that night showed him under the unflattering fluorescent lights of the gym with a stack of pens and the thick legal document that was the school reform law. Governor Thompson signed the measure into law in a special ceremony at the new Washington Irving Elementary School on South Oakley. When the reforms go into effect next July, one, school administration will be decentralized. Some of the power goes to parents and local school boards. Principals will be gaining more control over their own schools. OK. Fast forward five years. At the height of school reform in Chicago, I spent a full year at Irving Elementary, filing a story every few weeks for All Things Considered about how things were going there. In lots of ways, Irving became a real symbol of what could be done under reform. Test scores were moving up. Everything was getting better. They started with only a tiny fraction of their students, 15% doing reading and math at national standards. And it got to a point where 2/3 of their students were regularly at or above national standards. This is considerably better than most Chicago schools. But things soured at Irving in the last year or so. The program that the Irving teachers created, the one that was so much more successful than the rest of the school system, was getting dismantled, piece by piece. Cathy started talking about quitting. Here's the reaction she got from a former principal at Irving, Pat Mizerka. I cried. I was so sad. I mean, Cathy is probably the best teacher that I've ever seen. And if she leaves, what hope is there, then, for the others? Cathy's classroom window looks directly out onto a commemorative plaque that says that this was the place where the nation's biggest school reform law was signed. Now that monument seems more like a tombstone. School reform is dead. Everybody in the building, that's just what we say now. It's like if somebody has to complain about it, the way it is, someone will say, school reform's gone. Relax. It's over. Today on our radio program, I'm going to take you back in time 10 years, and explain how Irving Elementary accomplished this thing that is so rarely accomplished in our country. They took a lousy inner-city school, and they turned it into a great school, with no special money, no special anything. They just did things smarter. And I'll explain what happened in just a year to set it back, how things got to a point where an exceptional teacher is now thinking about quitting. From Chicago Public Radio, you're listen to This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Our show today in two acts. Act One, 1994. Act Two, 2004. Act One kind of gives you faith and hope in everything good. Act Two sort of, kind of, does the opposite. Stay with us. Act One, 1994. OK. Let's roll some of the old tape from back in the days when I was a little sir. This is All Things Considered. I'm Robert Siegel. This year, we're following the story of one school, Washington Irving Elementary, on Chicago's west side. Over the past few years this school has boosted reading scores with an innovative program. NPR's Ira Glass has our report. The most striking thing about Washington Irving is that it's an unusually happy school. There's no other way to say it. Happy. When I ask eighth-grader Bianca Cannon to give me a little tour of the building-- OK, I'm just going to stop that right there. This is me in the present. I'm just going play you some old clips and some old stories right now. And a little background first, though, might be helpful. The idea behind the Chicago school reform was to let each school set education policy for itself, instead of some bureaucrats at the central office dictating everything the way they had in the past. And at Irving, they used that freedom to put in place a great reading program, and a great writing program. Both of them were based on a very common sense idea, that they should have kids read lots more than they were and write lots more than they were. More about that in a minute. The other thing they did was institute this kind of teaching that goes under different names. Student-centered curriculum, hands-on learning, holistic learning. The idea is, instead of a teacher standing at the chalkboard, lecturing and assigning chapters and questions from the textbook, and handing out dittos, students are more actively doing stuff. They're working in groups. They're doing projects. It's the kind of thing that good teachers do anyway, when they can. But at Irving, they went further with this idea than any school in Chicago. Teachers worked in teams. They had an hour of planning time every day to scheme out inventive lessons. And it worked. Kids liked it. Here are some eighth graders in Mr. Pearlstein's class back then. In the back of the room, the two Veronicas sit next to each other. The Veronicas remember what it was like years ago at Irving, before they changed the curriculum. You read from a textbook. You answered questions in the back. Read the books. Do the work in the books. It was mostly that. They gave you handouts and everything. So, I didn't really like it. Me neither, because it gets boring. It was boring every day. It's like the whole thing you did the day before. It was over and over and over every day. I hated it. But now every morning I really want to come to school. I want to come to school. I can't miss school. It wasn't always this way at Irving. Just a few years ago, it ranked in the bottom 100 schools in the city. Eighth graders who did their homework and participated in class were ridiculed by the other kids. And as in most Chicago schools, the longer a child stayed in school, the worse he was likely to do. Everyone always used to say, oh, God, by third grade, man, the glaze has come over the eyes. Irving principal, Madeleine Maraldi. They've shut down on hearing, and speaking, and listening, and they don't care anymore. Madeleine Maraldi began with the Chicago schools 33 years ago. She's the kind of principal that nearly everyone, even the school secretaries, calls by first name. Her management style tends toward group discussion and consensus building. In her six years at Irving, she and the faculty have rebuilt the curriculum around two main pillars. Students here read a tremendous amount each day in class, and students here write a tremendous amount each day in class. Writing, in fact, was the first thing the staff decided to tackle. I asked the teachers to come to consensus, to meet and come to consensus on what was the worst subject for the children? And they came up with writing, because they said, oh, they don't want to write, and when they write it's terrible, and they hate it, and it's too much work, and you don't get anywhere with it. The principal and teachers got retrained in a different style of teaching writing. Instead of emphasizing the mechanics of writing, like they used to, punctuation and paragraphing, and so on. The new method had kids first do lots of writing, learn to enjoy and invest in the writing, before they worry about mechanics. You can't be a writer unless you write. So when I say, then, let them write. They have to write every day. Let them write for journals. Let them write about their reaction to a math lesson. Write all kinds of things. Do writing all the time. And people would say, but I can't grade all of it. And I say, well, don't grade it. OK? Don't grade it. In fact, teachers were told emphatically, do not red-line every error in grammar and spelling. Do not discourage the kids. The results of the new program were immediate and dramatic, an outpouring of writing from Irving students. OK. It's me again, in the present. Once the students got to sixth grade, that's when the teachers started grading them and teaching them the traditional mechanics of grammar and spelling and all that, in a very aggressive way. Then there was the reading program. There were studies showing that kids do better in school if they come from homes where people read to them, homes where they're encouraged to read themselves. Since most kids at Irving didn't come from homes like that, the staff decided to give them that experience during school time. One afternoon, I happened to be sitting in Mr. Pearlstein's classroom, when his eighth graders came back from lunch. Watch this, he said. And I saw something that would be unimaginable in many city or suburban schools. Without any instructions from their teacher, the students filed into the room, quietly took out books, and read. They're on automatic pilot, and they just simply read because they enjoy reading. You'll notice that around the perimeter of the room we have hundreds of pocketbooks. You can see the bookshelves on the right hand. And whenever they feel the compulsion, they can simply get up and go and look for a book. Every day, every class in this school does between 30 and 50 minutes of silent reading. Each of these eighth graders is required to read 2,800 pages, per semester, minimum. An A requires twice as many pages. It's a dramatic change from the old days. Principal Madeleine Maraldi says that when they first tried this approach five years ago, they learned just how little students had been reading, when one teacher received this complaint. This is painful. I can't take this. She says, what's the matter? Are you sick? And he goes, no. You're making me read for 50 minutes a day, all by myself. I can't do this. She says, you're in eighth grade. Get real. You can't read for 50 minutes a day? Kid says, no. I've been at Irving for eight years. Reading is you sit in your reading circle. You read a sentence or paragraph when the teacher calls on you, and you are finished with reading for the day. The only way to become comfortable reading is to practice, and this is why so many schools put so much effort into trying to change students' attitudes about books and reading. At Irving, this achieves the scale of a cultural war. Pro-reading propaganda posters and bookworm club certificates line the hallways. The phrase "Read, read, read, to succeed" is the school's mantra and its war cry, repeated so often that even the day before Christmas vacation, as kids said goodbye to their principal at the front door, they knew what she wanted to hear. Can you say Merry Christmas to me? Merry Christmas! And read-- Read, read, read! Thank you, Peter. Everything a book-loving parent would do for his child, teachers do here for these children. They read to the younger kids each day. Grant money buys each child books as gifts to keep. There are frequent trips to the public libraries, and regular class trips to bookstores, where students choose the books that they will share in their classrooms. This one, please. Could I get this one? All right. This is by the same author that wrote Bunnicula. I think that's fine. And can I read this one? You're interested in Power Rangers, Joe? On a trip to a big Barnes and Noble store, the Irving third graders are allowed to spend $4 each on a book. They check with their teachers. Yes. Is this $4? No. See? The price is right there. What does that say? $17.95. So, no. It's not $4. The third graders aren't choosing great literature. It's Power Rangers and joke books, scary books, and mysteries. Older classes tend toward horror and teen romance. Their teachers point out that in addition to these trashy pleasures, the kids do read decent books in a regular literature class. The principal says that the fun of choosing books for themselves is part of what will turn them on to reading. Also-- They see other people in the bookstore. They see adults purchasing books. That's why I like to send them to the public libraries, also, because they see adults in the public libraries borrowing books. I think it's important that they see that there are other people out there doing these things. Since they began this program, reading scores have been climbing steadily at Irving. Depending on which standardized test you look at, the number of students reading at grade level has either doubled or quadrupled in five years. And it's instructive to note that in an era when politicians and educators often look for the quick fix for schools, teacher Joe Pearlstein says that it took three years of tinkering with the program and pushing kids, before he was seeing the kind of results he wanted. At times it was like hell. It was very difficult to do. You have to really be willing to invest the energy to overcome the storm. Hi. Me, again, today. This is one of the most interesting things that I found it Irving, was that even doing everything right, fixing the school was just incredibly slow work. They'd been at it for five years when I was there, and their test scores were only half of what they'd eventually become. It took another five years for them to get there. Remember, this is still an inner city school, with all the problems of any normal inner city school. Over 90% of the families were below the poverty level. Lots of kids in tough home situations. Absent parents. Gangs. Lots of Latino kids who enter kindergarten at Irving speak Spanish, not English. Well, of course, there's some kids who are better than others. Who do you want to see? You want to see a medium-type student? To give you a sense of just what these teachers were up against, and how hard it was to make up for how badly these children had been taught in the past, here's the writing lab teacher, Judith Mensch. I asked her in one of my stories to show me a typical essay from one of the older students. OK. This is a first draft in a longer project from the first marking period. Do you want me to read it? "One day me and my friend was walking to the store. Then a big pit bull jumped out and started to chased us to the store. then he went back. I said, I hope that dog stay where it was. As soon as I said it, the dog chased us to my house. Then my auntie said, Get on away from here. The we don't see the dog, and dog don't see us. Come to find out, the was me Kisha dog." Aside from the grammatical problems in the early sentences, and the pure mystery of that last sentence, there are punctuation problems. No quotation marks, no indenting of paragraphs. She's only able to move these students so far, so fast. And overall, when Ms. Mensch tried during the first marking period to hold these students to tougher standards in their mechanics, it didn't work. They didn't perform. Madeleine was saying that the sixth grade hit the wall. They hit the wall. And I gave out a lot of incompletes, and stuff, and I caught a lot of heat for it, from the parents. And Madeleine basically said, back off. You're expecting too much. It's just too hard. Because they have so much to relearn. It's an interesting question, why, in the end Irving had so much more success than other public schools in Chicago. And a lot of the answer has to do with the way the principal, Madeleine Maraldi, implemented the changes. First off, she didn't force the changes on her teachers. When there was something new to try, she took volunteers. If it worked, other teachers signed up. And as reform progressed, the teachers met and they decided on the curriculum changes together, with Madeleine. The teachers felt like they were in charge of what was happening. Now this might not sound like a very big deal, but one of the most common reasons that school reform fails is a reason that you never hear about, in the press and in the normal political debate about how to fix schools. School reform often fails because teachers kill it. The teachers don't want to do it. They don't agree it'll work. They try it, it doesn't work at first. They fight among themselves, and it dies. The year before I was at Irving, I spent a year at a Chicago high school, Taft High School, where the teachers started all kinds of changes, spent three quarters of a million dollars in grant money, but never came to agreement in four years about how to fix this school. And the bitter politics of all that wiped out the reform there. At the end of four years, the principal resigned. A lot of the pro-reform teachers resigned. And it's not like Madeleine didn't face this problem at first. Remember, when she began, Irving was like any other public school, only a little worse. When she initially suggested making some changes at the school, teachers openly laughed at her. They said the reason kids performed so badly at Irving had nothing to do with the way that they were teaching. It was everything out there. It was parents. It was the community. It was it was drugs. It was teen pregnancies. It was violence. It was gang activity. It was everything outside this building. Those were the reasons why. So that's how it started. As the reforms progressed, three Irving teachers transferred to other schools. It took the rest of the teachers, Madeleine says, a year before they even started to trust her. And she slowly won people over and built her team, to the point where word got out what a special place Irving Elementary was. A place where teachers were encouraged to try new things. A place that set higher standards than the school board had. Really good teachers started to transfer to Irving when vacancies came up, like Cathy La Luz, who we started this program with. She was such an interesting teacher to watch that one of my stories for All Things Considered was simply a typical Friday in her classroom. Here's a big chunk of that story. Great ball players, and great musicians, make the remarkable look easy. And great teachers do that too. Do you like my hair today? I thought you would, Tracy. The school day begins at 10 minutes before 9:00. Miss La Luz picks up her kids in the gym and then brings them to the classroom. No, we don't need the lights today, do we, guys? Part of what makes Miss La Luz such a good teacher is her classroom manner. She seems utterly relaxed, happy, in control, calls the kids baby, sweetheart, angel, and, in Spanish, miho and miha. Most people seem to become someone else when they stand in front of a classroom, like they're playing a character in a drama. Miss La Luz seems like herself. What did I do? You got some different earrings on. You got a new hairstyle. New shirt! Everybody's right. New shirt. Kendel noticed my earrings. And somebody noticed Miss La Luz's new haircut, which is only going to last for today. All right, take our seats. Very sharp. Very sharp. The philosophy of this school is to motivate students with all sorts of active lessons, where the children do projects and express their ideas. The fifth graders' day usually begins with half the kids going to writing lab, where they each write on computers, and half the kids staying for literature, where they read and discuss books in groups of four. Next is math. Last Friday, Miss La Luz had a hands-on activity to help students understand one of the hardest and most abstract ideas in fifth grade math, fractions. OK, you cut it into two pieces, OK? Now, do you understand why this is a half? What does half mean? Students spent an hour cutting construction paper into fractions, halves, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths, preparing actually for a fractions game. Miss La Luz circulated, and helped kids one-on-one. What is this? This number means this is one piece out of two, that there's two pieces all together, and this one says here's one piece out of two. If I showed you something and said one piece out of 16, how many pieces are there altogether? How many slices were the pie cut into? 16. Right. Now, as good as all this sounds, Miss La Luz says that about a third of her students aren't doing math as well as they should. And however wonderful a teacher she is, keeping everyone on task still means prodding the stragglers into action here and there. There aren't too many, one every five minutes or so. This doesn't look finished. What do you mean? Come to the hallway. You are clearly not paying attention, all right? What are you supposed to do once you fold those pieces? Cut them. Have you done that, darling? No. And, if you don't know what to do next-- I pretty much know who needs the nudge, but as long as I don't do it in a disrespectful manner. It has to be a nudge. It has to be, come on, you know what to do. That's why I say "you know what to do." You know. It's not, "Do it! You're supposed to do it!" It's "You know what to do. Do it." Baby, did you do something inappropriate? What'd you do? If I was aggressive, if I was saying, come on, you're not doing your work. What's wrong? What's wrong? They won't get involved at all. They totally disengage. They do what they're supposed to do, only, and they won't get involved in the process. It's meaningless. It's, OK, what steps do I have to follow? You're making me do it, I'll do it, fine. If you make me. I'm not interested in making you. I'm interested in-- almost like-- this is going to sound funny, but almost like a seduction. Almost like a, come on, come on, luring them. You know what you're supposed to do, and appealing to the good in them. Now, baby. Now I'm really concerned about something. Turn around, my angel. What am I concerned about [INAUDIBLE]. Can you tell? About what I said. I would talk [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah, I know you weren't really talking to me. And I also know you would never be rude on purpose to me. I know that you're a sweetheart. I know that. But-- I think that's the mistake a lot of teachers make. They don't appeal to the good in the kid. You know what to do, sweetheart. Do it. That's way more powerful than, you better do it because you have to. You're going to fail. Fine, I'm a failure. Fine. Leave me alone. With some prodding, most of the class is energetically engaged for most of math. As they cut their fraction strips, the kids nearest to me happily chatter away about the Forrest Gump episode of Blossom, and whether Montel Williams is better than The Richard Bay Show. Miss La Luz herself is a graduate of the Chicago public schools, grew up in a tough Puerto Rican neighborhood, and says that she wanted to teach partly because she had so few good teachers herself. At the heart of Miss La Luz's classroom practice is the notion that she wants her students to feel respected, and to feel that their ideas are worthwhile. The day I visited, during their discussion of the book The Bridge to Terabithia, she tried to get them to talk about a point in the book that struck a chord with her, but realized after a few minutes that they weren't going with it. And listen to where they were taking the discussion, namely some alternate endings that they would prefer to the book. She changed their writing assignment to accommodate this. I was going to do a journal response about something else, but you guys already know where you want to go. So if you know want a different ending, or more information, why don't you put down what you wished you could see next in the story. All right! [INAUDIBLE] journal response. Studies show that only 40% to 60% of a school day, in cities and suburbs, is spent in actual instruction. The rest of the time is spent settling down, getting materials ready, giving instructions, taking attendance, moving through the halls, lunch, you can imagine. Miss La Luz is as efficient as any teacher. The day I visited, her class spent about two and a half hours on hard core academic subjects, and another hour and a quarter on various other subjects, band, media arts, gym, counseling. Anyone who learned their fractions in grammar school could tell you that this works out to about 2/3 of the school day spent in instruction. It was low for Miss La Luz, because she decided to forego the usual hour of project time that ends the day, so the kids could end their week joyfully, singing, and then playing outside. I hope we're ready. De Andre? Looks like you need a partner, baby. Come to me. It was the kind of song with funny choreography that went with it. Even the most reserved of the boys played along, sang and danced, and left school last Friday wanting to come back, just as their teacher hoped for. I'm Ira Glass, in Chicago. OK. What kind of moronic policies would you have to put in place to make that teacher think about quitting? We jump forward 10 years in just one minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. If you're just tuning in, all this hour we're hearing the story of an unusually good public school. But in the last year or so that school has gone through some changes. Parts of the program that made it one of the most successful schools in Chicago are being dismantled, and it's gotten to the point where one of the best teachers in the school, who you heard just before the break, Cathy La Luz, is thinking about quitting teaching. So, what happened? Well, a couple things changed in the 10 years since I first visited Irving Elementary. First, the matriarch behind the changes at Irving, Madeleine Maraldi, retired. Fortunately, there was somebody on staff who was trained and ready to step in as her successor, Pat Mizerka, who'd been a seventh grade teacher in the school, then Assistant Principal. She'd been there through most of the changes. If anything, the school got even better under Pat Mizerka. Test scores climbed higher, partly thanks to a tutoring program that the central school board provided the school, and partly, she says, for a reason that is completely surprising. Glasses. That's right. Glasses. Unbelievable, right? Unbelievable. We had a dean of students, Mr. Pearlstein, and he was on top of this. Every child who should be wearing glasses will be wearing glasses. How many kids ended up having to get glasses? Oh, I would say between 30% to 40% of our student body wore glasses. At the end of the process, that is. Grant money paid for the glasses. But during Pat Mizerka's time as principle, the central office of the Chicago Schools started to issue orders, each of these orders small, each of them well-meaning, each of them in a certain way so tiny that, by themselves, they didn't mean all that much. But added up together, they pulled down some of the underpinnings of what Irving Elementary had built. One of the first things to go was the Irving report card. Over the course of a decade, Irving teachers had designed this report card that, in addition to all the regular grades, had a space where students evaluated themselves. Which most kids took very seriously, which was part of getting them to take responsibility for their own work. Pat Mizerka had to deliver the news to the Irving staff, that they'd been ordered to do a report card like the rest of the school system. Oh, they were very upset. And so then I had to relay that the board was looking for uniformity, and they wanted all schools to have the same report card, because when children transfer from one school to another, it's hard, then, for another school to-- if they're not using the same report card-- then to mesh the grades together. This wasn't so convincing to the Irving teachers. The Irving report card evaluated students on the specific things being taught, the number of pages they read, the specific reading skills they did and did not have, in much more depth than the standard Chicago report card. The Irving report card didn't have a D grade. Irving teachers didn't believe in the D, that there should be a grade that admits that, you didn't learn the material, but you should still pass. In short, Irving teachers were giving up a tougher report card for one that held kids to lower, vaguer standards. I remember the shock, and we just sat there. It was just this quiet. Which brings us back to Cathy La Luz. She remembers when Pat Mizerka gave them all the news. I was just, this just can't be. Just erase this? We've been making this report card for, what? 12, 13 years? And we couldn't believe we didn't have a choice. There's that weird feeling of all of a sudden, there's no choice. There's no negotiating, no how about if we say this? And I remember Pat just saying to us, just, no. Before long, the Irving teachers lost something else, something that was at the very heart of their education program. And number 4,732. Who's next? What number are you? Number seven? Over the course of years, the Irving teachers had developed a system where three times a year, every parent had to come in with their child, for an appointment to meet with the teacher and go over their report card. It took a full day and a half, each time they did it. But, the teachers said, it meant everything to get to know the parents this way, and to get them this involved in overseeing their children's education. Seeing it in action, it was hard to imagine why every public school didn't do it. Here's a section of a story that I did 10 years ago about it. In room 306, the two eighth grade teachers sit at separate tables. The teachers' strategy is this. Do not blame the parent, but make the child realize it's his responsibility to do the work, and get the parent to reinforce this. Mr. Paul begins his conference with Cornell Miller with a time-honored teacher technique you may remember from your grade school days. He tells Cornell to explain his bad grades to his mom. Reading. What didn't happen for you to get an incomplete? I didn't read. Well, I read, but I had [? an intermediate ?] for the second marking period, and I had to read for this marking period. Was there a different way you could do this? Yeah. Would you share that with us? I didn't read all the books. That's all. You didn't read all the books. OK, well, why didn't you read all the books? I don't know. He never have a answer for that. Those three report card pick-ups, where parents have to come in with their child, that structure matters. I think that structure is part of our success. Again, here's Cathy La Luz, in the present. Because, you know, what happened one year, we didn't do it. This is before things were going downhill. Some teachers were really, why do this? So one year we didn't do it. We saw drops. Like the reading program that we have, less books being read, less reading happening, less homework coming in to me. Watching the work ethic go downhill in terms of what was coming to us. We had this long talk at the end of the year, where I remember, Pat was a teacher at the time. And she was the first one to say, this was awful. And then you heard other voices. Everybody, wow. What a drop in just taking the classes seriously. We can't do this again. But this year, thanks to a minor rule change in the central school board, Irving has to give out report cards the way that all other schools do. Instead of a total of four and a half days devoted to parent conferences, they'll have one day. Cathy's prediction? If I was going to predict, I predict that what happened that time will happen again. We'll see less output, less parent involvement, less connection with the parent. Last year, after two years as principal, Pat Mizerka had to leave the principal's job for personal reasons. She was replaced by somebody named Rita Ortiz, who came from outside Irving. Very quickly, this new principal got off on a bad foot with the teachers, by insisting on something so basic that she never suspected it could be controversial. Rita Ortiz asked that they turn in lesson plans. At Irving School, we never had to write formal lesson plans. Again, Cathy La Luz. It was, if you like writing formal lesson plans, go ahead. If you like taking notes, go ahead. If you just keep a diary, and my principal read it. You want to show me that? Go ahead. Whatever works for you in planning your day. Your style is your style. Just prove to me that it works. There was a meeting where she announced that we needed to do lesson plans, and she wanted them every-- I believe it was every Friday. Heather Madden teaches Special Ed at Irving. It was a horrible reception. The gasps and, oh my goodness. The rustling of the papers, and just feel the tension in the air. It was horrifying. Typically decisions at Irving had been made in a democratic manner. If there was something new that was going to be taken on, it was always not necessarily brought to a vote. Many times it was brought to a vote. But typically it was discussed in an open forum, and we all got our opinions out and really hashed it out, and come to a conclusion that was agreeable between everyone. From Principal Rita Ortiz's perspective, this really wasn't the kind of thing that bore any discussion. Every school in the system had been ordered to do lesson plans. Irving would do lesson plans. Here's Rita Ortiz. Plans are a part of the teacher observation sheet that a principal, or another administrator involved in classroom observation, uses. It's one of the criteria in observing a teacher. So, were you surprised at the reaction? I was. Coming from a background where not only did I do them, I saw everyone else do them in various situations. I'm sure to Rita, it was just format. It was it was the way things were done. And I understand that. But at the same time, it was really disheartening to watch the atmosphere of the school change, and the atmosphere of the staff change, so quickly. The heart of this change was that the staff wasn't used to being ordered to do things. When the school board would mandate something, like formal lesson plans, the teachers in the past would sit down together with the principal and figure out how to respond. We would come up with something that would meet the board's requirements, but also meet the philosophy and the practices that had always occurred at Irving. And did anybody say to her, look, the way that we usually do this is if the board asks you to do some like this, we talk about it and come up with a solution together? Yes. Somebody said that. It definitely has come up a number of times where, this is how we do it. We like to discuss it out. And when this has come up, what does she say? Honestly, it's more lip service, I feel. It's simply, OK, well I understand that that's how you've done it in the past, but we really do need to get this accomplished, and we really do need to get it done. And it's just more of that there's an agenda at hand. There were other orders just like the lesson plans, all things that were mandated by the board. All well-meaning. Like the rule that every teacher needed to state, or write on the chalk board, at the beginning of every class, which specific objectives in the state education goals would be met by this particular lesson. They had to be on the blackboard. Again, Cathy La Luz. I'd have to say, we're covering standard 1A, and we're going to be using prefixes, suffixes, and root words to understand word meanings. That was supposed to be on the blackboard every day. As if a seventh grader would care? They didn't care. They didn't care. Well, what would happen when you would tell them? Well, the first time, the kids laughed at me. When they were like, what are you telling us, Miss La Luz? Cathy says she understands why the school board is asking her to do this. Lots of schools need rules like this. And I know that's true. I know there are terrible teachers out there, and schools in trouble. So when I look at this, I think this is for those schools and those teachers, that they're trying to bring to a more formal standard. They're trying to say, standards matter. Criteria matter. And we want you, teacher, to meet this level of professionalism and teaching. That's what I think they mean. I really don't think this was just supposed to be crazy. Right, but the problem is, at this school, you guys are already thinking all the time about how do we become better teachers? What can we do? What's the latest? Every single day you all are thinking that. So you guys are so far ahead of this, and yet they're asking you to go back to the most basic kind of thinking. That's how it feels. And I don't mean to disrespect them. They have a tremendous job. I know there are reasons for the mandates coming down. I know there are teachers who shouldn't be teaching. But we're not that school. We're not those teachers. And we've proved it how many times? Now, if Irving had a more experienced principal when these rules came down, she might have gotten waivers to the rules, or fought the board, or figured out permissible ways around the rules. That's essentially what the two principals before Rita Ortiz, Pat and Madeleine, had done. But Rita was new, and she saw it as her job to enforce the rules. And really, maybe the time had passed in Chicago when any principal could have fought the board on these things. Here's Cathy. I remember the last year Madeleine was here, leaving meetings and having teachers say, thank God we have Madeleine. Thank God we have Madeleine. But Madeleine even said to me before she left. We were sitting down at the beginning of her last year, and she said, I'm losing more battles than I'm winning. And she was sad. I'm losing more battles. And I remember looking at her, thinking, oh my God. How much longer will she be with us? And that's when I got scared, realizing that we were going to start being affected by the changes. If Madeleine's saying that, Irving School was not going to be able to stay as protected as we were. We were watching our world crumble. Again, teacher Heather Madden. I mean, everyone was just so appalled that it wasn't going to be the same, and that everything that they had worked for, for so long. It was just this atmosphere of change. Why? Describe more, what did it change from, to? There was a lot more commitment on behalf of the teachers beforehand. Teachers would be at Irving until 6:00, 7:00 at night, just working, making sure things were taken care of. Really just pride in what you were doing, and knowing that everything that you were doing was respected. And I think that, quickly, I know, personally, I didn't spend as much time at school. You watched everyone's posture walking around school, and the looks on their faces, and it was a different group of people, just because we were disheartened. When I asked Rita Ortiz about this, she seems to have been oblivious to all of it, especially to the part that was the most important to the teachers, that they were used to making decisions together, with their principal, coming to consensus. I think-- yeah, I'm just thinking right now about what you're saying. And I can't speak for what was before. Perhaps that was more their style of things, and I don't think that I didn't ask. Did you notice a change in morale, or the number of hours the teachers were working, or anything like that? I really didn't notice a change in morale. Teachers put in their full days, as far as what I was aware. No, I really didn't notice a change in morale. By December of last year, Cathy La Luz had had enough. She was tired of seeing things that were effective, like meetings with parents being taken away, and things that just seemed like busy work added to her day. And I had a moment there. And not just a moment, like a week or two, where I felt like, screw it. You want me to fill out paperwork, I'll fill out paperwork. You want lesson plans, fine. But the time that it's taking me to do this is taking me away from something else, and I'm not going to kill myself to figure out a way to fix that. And we were talking about what's happening next year, I remember it came out of my mouth. I just don't care. Fine. You want me to just hand out a report card? I mean, I had that come out of my mouth, and that's when I thought, I need to quit. I need to leave. If that's how I'm going to be, I can't be teaching anymore if that's what's going to happen. I would never have thought that that could happen to me. I'm telling you. I mean, that's why I became a teacher. I didn't have a teacher I liked, or felt connected to, or felt anything, all of my grammar school career. Never. High school was a joke for me. I'm not going to be that teacher, that kind of person, the kind of teacher I had. I don't want to be a teacher who just gets done what she has to get done. Not sure what else to do, she wrote a letter to the people who run the school system. "This is my message in a bottle," she wrote. "I throw it out, hoping someone will read it and hear me." She said that the demand for uniformity, for every school to be the same, was chipping away at the things that made Irving a good school in the first place. And given how successful Irving was, couldn't they have more leeway to do things their way, which is what made them a success in the first place? Why fix something that's not broken? It's like, what did I think was going to happen when I wrote that? Really. I feel sad when I read that. That letter is still full of hope. What's funny is that letter is still full of hope. I feel like a little girl who has been living in a fairy tale, and is waking up to find out, sorry, this is the real world. Because those are the kind of words I'm hearing about our school. You had 10 great years. What are you complaining about? Most schools don't get this. That's what the older teachers at her school have been saying to her. Be realistic. I've taught only 14 years. We peak out people who have taught 30 years, 28 years, 20 years. And they've seen changes with the board, and different new mandates come down. And so they look at me and they say, you know, things like this have happened before. This is the way it is. You know, Cathy, we were lucky. And now we're going back to the way the rest of Chicago is, and that's the way it is. And this will pass, too, and there'll be another change one day, and there'll be another change, and you just have to roll with the punches. And these are people I respect, and I understand exactly what they're saying. I may not be the kind of person who can do that. That's all. I may not be the kind of person who can just roll with the punches. No. I just don't know I can do that. I suggest to Cathy that she could do what I've seen teachers at lots of other Chicago schools do. Ignore the administration, close your door, and teach. Yeah. If it wasn't going to effect the structure of my day, I would agree with you, because there's other things that have happened that you just roll off your back. But the changes that are happening are affecting what's happening in the classroom. So I'm going to spend a summer thinking about it. And that's how we left it, at the end of last school year. Teachers in America are told two contradictory things about their jobs, that they're professionals who know best what's going to work in their own classrooms, and that they're workers, who are there to carry out orders. Do the curriculum the way others set it for them. Obviously in any school system, a teacher is a little bit of each. And at Irving, the fight is basically about where to draw the line. Even in this era of national education standards, and No Child Left Behind, in theory the idea right now in schools is people at the top set educational goals. Teachers at the bottom should be free to meet those goals, however they see fit. That's a rather delicate thing to manage, especially in a school system the size of Chicago's. It's staggeringly big, nearly a half million kids and teachers, a population equal to New Orleans, or Tucson. In a school system this large, the natural tendency is to want to make everybody do the same thing. It's easier that way. What took place at Irving is so common in a big public school system. And the way it took place is so common, that it just happened at a high school not far from Irving, one that was founded on the same kinds of teacher-centered ideas that Irving was. It was called the Best Practice High School. A new principal came in, was under pressure from above to make their school more like other schools, and it wiped out a lot of the curriculum the teachers had designed. Steve Zimmelman is a national figure in what's called the Best Practice Movement, and was one of the founders of this high school. He says he remembers this principal's job interview. We had a candidate that we thought was strong. She said all the right things. And we were fooled by her. I have to admit. It was a terrible mistake. And the moment she got in there, all of a sudden everything changed. Did she, in the end, not agree with the basic program of what was going on at the school? I don't think so, no. Another thing is that new rules and mandates were coming down from CPS. CPS. Chicago Public Schools. And you see good things being erased, and good reform-minded teachers being very unhappy. And they leave. Yeah. Explain how many of them left. It's painful to think about. But all but a few of the-- all but three or four are gone. Do you think that could happen at Irving? I don't know. What's so crazy about all this is that, officially, the Chicago public school system is in favor of the kind of successful innovation that was happening at that high school, and at Irving. Here's the head of the public school system, Arne Duncan. What I'm pushing very, very hard is to get away from a one-size-fits-all mentality. Those schools that are very high-performing academically, and that have been fiscally responsible, I actually want to do everything we can to remove any bureaucratic hurdles, and to really give those schools much more flexibility. Really give them their chance to innovate. I understand that that's the intent, but I think that what the Irving teachers would tell you is that the times that they've applied for waivers, like with their report card, they were turned down pretty firmly on that. Right. And I would be happy to take a look at that. I wasn't aware of that situation, and so I can't speak to the specifics. So it may well be a legitimate concern, in that case. Obviously, do we do it perfectly in every situation? Maybe not, and that's where we want to continue to change, and frankly change the culture here, so that it is more supportive of that type of innovation, where it's leading to progress. I got to say, hearing you say this, I feel like your heart is in the right place. I think the way that things are getting implemented, it's happening in a way that's making a lot of teachers unhappy at this particular school. Yeah. And again, I don't know all the specifics at that one school. And so where there are issues, I'm absolutely more than happy to look at it, and actually will look at it. Where teachers are really trying to innovate, and take this system to the next level, that's exactly what we want to support. They're doing some great things, in terms of report cards, in terms of spending time with parents. Those might be lessons that really should be informing the entire system, rather than the entire system hurting this. Hello? Hello, Cathy? Yeah. Hi, it's Ira Glass. Hi, Ira Glass. How the hell are you? I'm OK. Well, I'm calling you. It's now the Fall. Summer has passed. Have you got a minute? Yeah. So what did you decide? Well, I went back. I went back, and it's worse than I thought it would be. I don't see how this is going to work. Every time I get another memo, or another directive. We're being told things about the board saying we have to do this and this and this. You need to do this according to the rules of the board, and I really miss that feeling of being trusted. And it's not there anymore. It really feels like us against them, now. And it's terrible. Over the summer the new principal, Rita Ortiz, without consulting her teachers, eliminated the hour of planning time Irving teachers get every day. The teachers and parents raised such a fuss in September about it that it's been put back. I tell Cathy that I spoke with her boss' boss' boss' boss, Arne Duncan, head of the school system. And I play her a tape from my interview, him saying that maybe Irving should be allowed to do some of the things that it wants, and that he would look into that. She was skeptical much really come out of it. I have to say, when I sent that letter, I sent a copy to Arne Duncan. I sent a copy to the next person below him, Barbara Eason-Watkins. And I got a letter saying, basically, sorry. Conformity is what-- using the word-- No. We need coherence throughout the system. And it's a management issue, and I totally understand it. It is a big system. It is hard to monitor a big system. Where are you standing this week, on whether or not you're going to stay? Oh, I'm definitely keeping my eyes open. I'm not thinking I'm staying. What I want to do is go. I want to go. When I was an education reporter, I was always struck by how what happened in schools was such an unpredictable mix of real public policy issues and human personality. The chemistry of the teachers, the way they were managed, always seemed like this X-factor, that nobody really talked about, but that seemed to make all the difference in the world. Not that anybody wants to hear that. Even Irving teachers, like Heather Madden. They don't want to hear it. It can't just be magic. It can't just be fluky things landing people in the right places, and the chemistry being right. It just can't be that. What's the hope for the rest of the schools? What's the hope for Irving in the future? What's the hope for any school, anywhere? I do think there's hope. But it has to do with understanding that it is all about personalities. Seeing what's happened lately at Irving, I think, in a way, Madeleine's greatest achievement wasn't that she implemented great reading and writing curriculum. But it was that she made teachers feel in charge. Now that that's gone, it'll be interesting to see if the kids' test scores stay as high. It'll be interesting to see if, by following Chicago public school rules, Irving sinks to the level of the rest of the Chicago public schools. Well, our program was produced today by Wendy Dorr and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Tom Bachmann and Amy O'Leary. If you want to offer Cathy La Luz a new job, you can reach her at Washington Irving School in Chicago, Illinois. Transcripts and all the old audio of my old series on the public schools is available for free at our website www.thisamericanlife.org. You can also listen to our programs for free, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Or you can download audio of our show at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, best-selling 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 Torey Malatia, who love Kisha dog, but thought Kisha his dog, Come to find out the was me Kisha dog. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Perhaps this question has occurred to you at some point during the last few months. How is it possible that there are people who haven't made up their minds in this election? How is it possible that someone actually hasn't formed an opinion at this point about whether or not they like George Bush? Little children in the most remote villages on Earth, children who don't speak our language or know our ways, have opinions about the president. What more information about him could our fellow American citizens possibly need, you know? Well, for months, we've been looking into this question here at our radio show. And yes, there are lots of people who are undecided, because they just don't follow the news, they're too busy at their jobs, they're raising kids, they don't care. Whatever, it's not their thing. I talked to Martha [? Brennan ?] four months after John Kerry wrapped up the Democratic nomination, but before the convention, about what she thought of him. I know ?] he was in the Navy. I'm pretty sure he was a senator. And I know he's tall and thin. And that's about all I know. But lots of people who are undecided do follow the news, do follow politics. Between 2% and 8% of likely voters are still undecided right now, depending on whose poll you look at. Millions of people, many of them apparently well-informed people who are unhappy with the president but just can't bring themselves to embrace John Kerry. They may decide this election. And so, to understand them better, we've been following a few of them for months now as they try to decide. And we have a scoop. We can tell you how it is they decided. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in four acts, two of them about very different undecided voters, one about somebody courting undecided voters, and one about somebody trying to sabotage undecided voters and all other voters. That story from Jack Hitt, and we swear it will get you yelling at your radio. Act One. James Hackett is one of those undecided voters who does follow politics. He gets his news from NPR and the Wall Street Journal, plus the Atlantic Monthly and Newsweek. He's a doctor in Cincinnati, a diagnostic radiologist, a lifelong Republican. He's never voted for a Democrat for president, and doesn't want to vote for a Democrat for president. I have voted Republican every single time, mainly because I think they are more fiscally prudent. That's the main reason. And that's one of the reasons that I am so upset with Bush, one of many reasons. The Bush tax cut, for instance. If the idea was to stimulate the economy, he says, rich people like him shouldn't have gotten a tax break. If he gives me more money off, it's not going to change my spending pattern at all. And I think that the amount of these tax cuts, if they are continued, if they are made permanent, is going to be ruinous, is going to be a phenomenal burden for my children and my grandchildren. And I feel betrayed in a way, and also I feel betrayed because he was promoting himself as a compassionate conservative, which I also really liked the sound of. And of course, that's obviously not what we got. I mean, you want to know everything that I dislike about what Bush has done? It turns out to be a long list. He disagrees with the president about the economy, gay marriage, abortion, health care issues, stem cell research. He's alarmed at how the president has alienated our traditional allies and eroded America's standing in the world. He doesn't fault the president for invading Iraq. Everybody thought there were weapons of mass destruction there, he says. So I don't fault him for that, but I do fault him for what has happened afterwards. Before the war started, there were multiple think tanks that were talking about the difficulties of governing in Iraq, and he just completely ignored all of that, how you need more soldiers on the ground if you're going to do it. And I think that has been squandered. So Dr. Hackett, you sounds like a prime candidate for somebody who'd be voting for John Kerry. What's holding you back from going to Kerry? Well, there are a number of things. Just as Bush is ultra-conservative, Kerry is ultra-liberal. I mean, I think some people would not call him ultra-liberal, but he's the most liberal man in the Senate. If the Democrats-- I don't know what the heck they were thinking of by nominating such an extreme liberal. I know a lot of guys in my position who voted for Bush, and they don't like him, they don't like the way the country's gone, the way he's going. And if they would have nominated a moderate Democrat, I think this would have been a runaway election. For somebody like me, who has voted Republican all of my life, I shock myself by thinking that I long for the days of Clinton. I can't believe I'm saying this. I would vote for Clinton in a second. I would love to vote for Clinton again. You can't believe you're saying this, why? Did you used to hate his guts? I disliked him. I thought he was-- you know, it depends on what the definition of is is, and you know, all that stuff. But I think what he did was great. I think what he did was very, very good for this country. And I think he actually went against a lot of the Democratic party by moving to the center. But that's how he did some very, very good things. Yeah. Listen to yourself. Yeah, I know. I would never in a million years believe I would say that. It's just, I wouldn't believe it. And can I just ask you, when you say that John Kerry is so liberal, I know that that's said all the time, but do you have in mind any specific things that you know that he's voted for that are too liberal for you? Well, to tell you the truth, I have not gone through his voting record. And I think that's something I should do. I think that's a good point. I think that's something I should do. But I cannot-- you know, actually, that's another problem I had. I went to his website to learn more about him, and actually they didn't talk about his voting record too much on his website. And I'm not sure where to go to get that. Well, listen, I think we're going to want to check back with you and just kind of see how it's going as things heat up. That'd be OK. I'll probably be despairing by then. Hello? Hello, Dr. Hackett? Yes. It's Ira Glass. Oh, Ira, hi, how're you doing? It's Gig Hackett. Gig? G-I-G. It's a nickname I've had forever, and it's just what I go by. So it's early September, it's the week after the Republican convention. You know, when I last talked to you, you said that the next time that I checked in, you would probably be despairing. Yeah, and that is the case. That is the case. You asked me, the last time I talked to you, to give you a call if something happened that may precipitate my movement to one side or the other. And actually, shortly after you said that, I read in Newsweek where Bush had said to this one crowd that he wouldn't do anything different about Iraq. Now, I can't imagine him saying that. I mean, there's so many things after the war that were done poorly, the vast majority of things. You mean the whole post-war planning? Exactly right. Anyway, that was one of the things that I thought, if he's really saying that, there's no way I can vote for him. There's no way. I mean, and as it is, I don't know, I am despairing. I hate both candidates. You know, I just cannot imagine casting a ballot for either one. You know, the next big thing that's going to happen is going to be the debates. Oh, absolutely. Oh, debates, that is what I'm waiting for. That's where people get pinned down. That's where people have to take a stand. Hi, welcome. Hi. Come on in. September 30, the night of the first debate. Gig's house, in the Western Hills suburb of Cincinnati. We've spent enough time on the phone that, yes, now I'm calling him Gig. Well, here, let me introduce you. This is my daughter, Molly. Hello. Hi, Ira. Good to meet you. Written on your arm is? Oh, I had a pep rally today at school. It says frosh. In retrospect, this first debate is now seen as one of the big turning points in this election, a decisive win for John Kerry and an embarrassing loss for the president. Poll numbers started rebounding for Kerry afterwards. But what I saw in Gig's basement rec room that night was almost the opposite of what happened in the country as a whole. And it's worth spending a minute talking about it here. There were seven voters, three for Bush, two for Kerry, two undecided. Cincinnati is Bush country, and most of these seven voted for Bush in 2000. But now, all seven thought the president was doing a lousy job in Iraq and with the economy. Some find the president outright alarming on abortion and social issues. Even his supporters in the group were unhappy with the idea of voting for him again. And they all sat down in front of the TV feeling like they still did not know John Kerry. They'd seen the ads, they'd seen the news, but they still didn't get it. What exactly was he going to do for the country? I do have an indistinct feeling about Kerry. I'd like to know more about his views on the national security issues. Well, ?] first I need to get to know him as a politician. There's Gig's brother, Ed, and his wife, [? Vicki, ?] friends Paul and Jill, Joy, who works with Gig at the hospital. Gig's wife, [? Joann ?], set up refreshments and red, white, and blue decorations on the ping pong table. And almost from the moment the debate started, this group was deeply skeptical of everything that Kerry had to say. When he accused the Bush administration of letting Osama bin Laden get away at Tora Bora, [? Vicki ?] jumped in. I don't ?] believe that. When he said that UN inspectors should been given more of a chance in Iraq, Jill spoke up. They'd continue inspections forever. When Kerry explained, correctly by the way, how missteps in the early years of the Bush administration led to North Korea expanding its nuclear program, nobody in the room believed him. Did you buy that? No, I don't. I mean, I'd like to know more about it. As Gig put it-- Personally, the things Kerry has said in the past, he's said some things that are inconsistent and some things that are just outright false, in the past. And I mean, I really question. When he says something, I don't know if he really believes that or not. Republican leaning voters in Republican towns are probably inclined to be skeptical of any Democrat to start with, but combine that with the largest television ad campaign in political history-- $2 to $4 million dollars in Republican ads each week in Ohio alone, many of those ads calling Kerry a liar, and a flip-flopper, and a liberal-- the result is, even when Kerry says things that are absolutely true, nobody in the room buys it. And because of that, when he lays out a plan, for the economy, for health care, they assume the worst. Gig points out, quite rightly, that John Kerry has still never answered the question from the debate, how would he pay for his health care plan and all the other things he wants to do, and cut the deficit in half, like he promises? He doesn't even believe Kerry's pledge to stick with the war and win the war in Iraq. No, that's the whole point. That's the whole point I'm making. I think Kerry says things-- that's why I don't like Kerry, because I don't trust him. I don't trust what he says. I talked to Gig a lot about who he believed and why in the weeks after the debate. Gig was very aware of the whoppers that the president has told, denying, for example, how badly the war is going, even lying about the number of trained Iraqi security forces during the debates. Or how the president misled the public on the cost of his own prescription drug program. In Gig's view, both candidates lie, the president lies, but even if he lies, Gig feels, the president still has more integrity than John Kerry. If you come down to, you know, somebody acting on their beliefs, I think Bush is more believable than Kerry. I mean, I think, for instance, Bush will make some decisions that are terribly unpopular, they're phenomenally unpopular-- stem cell research, for instance-- phenomenally unpopular, and he will do it because he believes that's the right thing to do. And I disagree with you, but again I would point out-- Well, give me an example. But again, I would point out to you that you probably agree with Kerry on this issue. On what issue? Stem cell research. Well, yeah. Yeah. OK, let me just stop the tape of this interview right there. Gig pointed to examples like this one a lot, things where President Bush stuck to his convictions, like invading Iraq, or his tax cut, or stem cell research, and I found this a little confusing coming from Gig. You know, in all these things where you're saying the President has convictions, and they're unpopular things to do, you don't notice that you side with the other guy. And somehow, you're siding with the president because he's doing something that you don't like. It's crazy jujitsu. You're saying, you know what, you know what I like about that guy, you know why I'm going to vote for him? He take stands that I hate and I disagree with. I can understand how that-- It seems really crazy. That seems odd. I can understand that. No, the reason is, I think-- I don't like Bush. I disagree with a ton of things he does, you're right. I think the thing that you have to have in your president, you have to believe in him. He has to say something, and you have to believe that he is going to do what he says, or that he believes what he says. And I don't agree with what he says a ton of times, but Kerry will not make a hard decision that is unpopular. I believe that. But you value that above somebody who's making popular decisions that you agree with? I know, that sounds crazy, doesn't it? But I think Bush has more integrity than Kerry. But who cares if he has integrity from your point of view, if he has integrity in supporting policies that you disagree with? Well, that's a very good point. In some sense, like, who cares if Kerry is a suck-up? He's a suck-up who's sucking up to you. He wants to do what you want. That's a very good point. Well, see, I guess that's why I'm still not completely decided. I mean, I think that's an excellent point. You know, it strikes me, you keep saying, if only the Democrats had nominated anybody but Kerry, but don't you think, whoever they nominated, the Republicans would have painted them in some sort of way where you would be saying this about them? No, I do not believe that. How? No, absolutely not. But didn't they do exactly the same thing with Clinton? They painted him as a flip-flopper. They went after Clinton big time. Yeah, and on the same grounds. He was an excellent moderate president. There's an example of a moderate president. He was excellent. He was excellent. And you want to know why? Because he was a suck-up. Seriously, that's what-- He was, he felt everybody's pain. He did. He wanted to take the popular position, much like John Kerry. That's why he held all the positions that you held. That's why you like him in retrospect. Because all the things that you like, he looked at polling data, and he said, you know what, most people like that, so who cares what I, Bill Clinton, think, I'm just going to be for that stuff. Absolutely, that's right. He tacked to the right. He co-opted a lot of the Republican issues. OK, so Bill Clinton did that. Bill Clinton basically said, I'm going to look at the polls, I'm going to suck up to whatever the majority of people want. In retrospect, you like him. In retrospect, I like him a lot. OK, so if that's what Kerry turns out to be, he'll look at the polls every day, whatever the majority wants, he's going to give it to them. Well, eight more years of peace and prosperity. Hmm. That's a good point. That's a good point. My conversations with Gig were a source of fascination for me, and I think for him too, because we agreed on so many things: the war, tax cuts, the deficit, social issues. We agreed that the Bush administration seems incompetent at conducting the war on terror. We agreed that John Kerry doesn't really seem to stand for much, and that when he voted for the war in Iraq, it was probably only because he was scared that voting against it would hurt his presidential ambitions, which shows an alarming lack of conviction on his part. We agreed on all of this. And yet, Gig considers himself a Republican, and I consider myself a Democrat. It's perplexing, really. Anyway, weeks pass, more debates, then we get this message on our voicemail here at This American Life. Voice call received Tuesday, October 19. Hi, this is Gig Hackett. I've come to a final decision that I think is very well-reasoned and I'm comfortable with. I don't know if Ira is going to interview me again. I didn't want to bug him in case he wasn't. Right, I wouldn't be curious. Of course I call him, and Gig tells me that he's broken it down. On security, he trusts the president more. On the economy, both candidates are promising to cut the deficit by half in four years, and Gig, he doesn't believe either one, but he doesn't believe Kerry more. I'm not voting, truly, I'm not voting on the basis of party line. I'm not. I would vote for almost any Democrat over Bush. But they've got the most liberal Democrat in the Senate. But actually Kerry isn't the most liberal Democrat in the Senate. He's not? No. No. How can they say that so many times without it being-- well, who is? How do you say that? This is an article from the Los Angeles Times. This article, and a similar one that was in The Washington Post, point out that the most liberal label comes from the nonpartisan magazine, the National Journal. But the National Journal itself has said that the label is misleading. As I told Gig, it's based on Kerry's 2003 Senate voting record, when he missed a lot of votes while campaigning. When you look at his full voting record since coming into the Senate, you find that 10 current Senators rate as more liberal in the National Journal. Kerry is liberal, there's no doubt about it, but he supported the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act. He supported free trade. He supported the Clinton welfare reform. All things that liberals oppose. The moderate Democratic Leadership Council counts him as one of their own. I think that's really interesting. I'll look into it some more. We also talked about Gig's fears of what's going to happen if President Bush is in the White House, and Republicans are controlling the House and the Senate, as they are likely to do again. That was the biggest stumbling block to voting for Bush, was that very thing. So what you're going to have is you're going to have President Bush, and then you'll have a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and then-- I know, I know. See, you're making me feel bad about-- You're going to be OK with the one to three-- no, no, just to play this out-- you're going to be OK with the one to three Supreme Court justices who the president will appoint, probably overturn Roe versus Wade. You're good with that, too? No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm getting depressed again. You know, you're right, that is-- these are very good points. I guess it's up in the air again for me. I'm going to have to think about this. After that phone call, Gig decided on Kerry for a few days. And then, after weeks of, dare I say, flip-flopping, he came back to President Bush. I asked him over and over if, in the end, he's a Republican, he just feels more comfortable with the Republican. And he said, no. He said it was all about the issues. In the end, he thinks the president will keep us safer, despite the debacle in Iraq, and despite the fact that he disagrees with them on almost every other issue. Act Two, Cold-Cock The Vote. There are saboteurs targeting undecided voters, and all other voters besides. Some of these things are so outrageous we felt like we had to devote some air time to it this week. Jack Hitt went to Democrats and Republicans alike to review what's happening. There are already hundreds of alarming stories this election year, and as a public service, I've immersed myself in this hideous sump of pond scum. It's deep here. So deep, that to give you even a bare sense of the sheer profundity of this abyss, I'm going to have to resort to one of the oldest gimmicks in radio broadcasting. That's right, speeded up music. Nevada. Dan Burdish, former director of the state's Republican party, filed a complaint to remove 17,000 voters from the rolls because they had failed to file a change of address card. State law doesn't require it, and in fact, allows you to vote after moving. When asked why he did it, Burdish told the press, I'm looking to take Democrats off the voter rolls. Florida. Senior citizens in Democratic precincts are calling their election boards by the hundreds, reporting that strangers, claiming to be from the elections office, are offering to hand-deliver their absentee ballots for them, even though there is no such program. Wyoming. Secretary of State Joseph Meyer interpreted the statutes there to outlaw voter registration drives, like the kind where a group sets up a card table in a mall or library. One of Meyer's oldest friends, a classmate in both high school and college, is Dick Cheney. Philadelphia. Three weeks before the election, a white Republican alderman named Matt Robb requested that 63 polling stations in African-American neighborhoods be relocated, thereby making it more confusing for 37,000 Democrat-leaning voters. Florida. Once again, as in the 2000 election, the state compiled a list of felons to be barred from voting. Throughout this election year, Governor Jeb Bush's administration struggled to keep this a secret. After a lawsuit forced it into the open, people quickly saw that, while some 23,000 Democrat-leaning black felons were barred from voting, almost the same number of Hispanic felons in Florida, who tend to vote Republican, were somehow not on the list. There are some stories, though, where you really want to slow down and relish the details. Take New Hampshire. On Election Day two years ago, the Democrats offered their voters a hotline to call if they were disabled or aged and needed a ride to the polls. Early in the morning, the phones started ringing continuously, but when the volunteers answered, the callers would hang up. This jammed the lines, and legitimate callers couldn't get through. The Democrats complained to Verizon, which immediately traced every one of the calls to a Virginia company called GOP Marketplace. After a police investigation, the president of that firm, and a former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican party, both pled guilty to criminal charges and admitted that they had hatched the plan to have callers from GOP Marketplace jam the line in order to prevent elderly and disabled Democrats from getting to the polls. But that's not the end of the story. The court documents refer ominously to an unindicted co-conspirator, a national strategist who arranged the entire dirty trick. The Democrats launched a civil suit to find out how far up the line the order went. In October, the Democrats' lawyer, Steve Gordon, scheduled a routine deposition of one of those involved. 20 minutes before they were all to meet in Gordon's office, a call came in. It was the Justice Department of the United States in Washington, John Ashcroft's office, issuing an emergency halt to the deposition. The deposition would have to be postponed until after the election. This federal intrusion into local politics was so ham-fisted and extraordinary that it got tongues wagging all over the state. And soon enough, the tongues shook loose the identity of the mystery phone jammer as one of President Bush's top strategists, Jeffery Tobin, the regional director of Bush/Cheney '04 for the entire Northeast. Two weeks ago, he resigned. In the past, all these tactics would have been found out by the media weeks after the election, when the perpetrators would be long gone, and the damage done. But this year, the internet is ready. Every day, new accounts of political scamming surface on blogs like Atrios or Daily Kos. There's even an archive of dirty tricks maintained over at [? erepost.com ?]. And when you browse these sites, once hidden patterns suddenly appear. It's sort of like how historians say that serial murder was only discovered after the invention of the telegraph, which allowed cops to quickly share evidence. This year, the blogs have allowed us to see, for the very first time, the wide, wide world of serial vote suppression. For example, let's look at the accounts of two librarians who've never met, from opposite sides of the country. In September, Megan O'Flaherty, a librarian in Medford, Oregon, got a letter. The letter that came to me, it's on Sproul & Associates Incorporated letterhead. "Our firm has been contacted to help coordinate a national nonpartisan voter registration drive. We would like to be able to register people to vote in front of your location." That name, Sproul & Associates, I want you to remember that. Now let's leave Oregon and fly off to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Holly McCullough, at the Carnegie Library, got a similar request. Nathan Sproul for a nonpartisan registration drive. But things weren't what they seemed. Holly, for example, had patrons complaining that the Sproul workers were quizzing them about who they would vote for. So both Megan and Holly started digging. And here's what they found out. Sproul, it turns out, is a partisan group, run by Nathan Sproul, the former director of the Arizona Republican Party, and the state's Christian Coalition. Sproul has received more than $3 million in contracts this year, from no less than the Republican National Committee, to pump up party registration. And, these last two weeks, Sproul has been popping up everywhere, in as many as 10 states. Let's soar off to one of them, West Virginia. Lisa Bragg is a temp worker there who signed on with a half dozen other temps for work described as customer service. She remembers it required a day of training. They presented us with some paperwork, and on one of the papers, on the top of the paper, it says Sproul & Associates. And it's a script, a voter registration script. And it gives you different scenarios, one is for Bush and one is for Kerry, as to how you would speak to people. Do you remember sort of what those scripts were? It's right in front of me. I kept these forms. Oh, really? Oh, great. Can you just, like, if you were approaching me on the street, how would you? OK. I would say, hello, we are doing a simple survey. If the election were held today, would you vote for President Bush or Senator Kerry? If you were to say Bush, I would say, great, well, this is a very important election year, are you registered to vote at your current residence? If you would say no, I would say, all right, can you please fill out this voter registration form? If I had said Kerry, what would you have said to me? Thank you very much for your time. I will report this. Oh, so you wouldn't hand the person a registration card at all? No. Lisa says she quit. She didn't like all the secrecy and covert operations involved. On another sheet of paper, it says-- they were telling us, if the media approached us, to go to a pay phone and call this number. They didn't want us talking to the media. And when you called that number, what were you supposed to just say? The media's coming. The media's coming. I don't know. Stop, the media's here. I don't know. I didn't want to be put in a position like that. Not only was I lying to people about what I was doing, but I was going to hide from the media? That's crazy. OK, Tinkerbell, are you ready to fly off to the next spot? Look, there's Nevada. This week, though, what happens in Vegas isn't staying there. It's the latest chapter in the Sproul story, one that will soon get told in criminal court. A former Sproul worker has hired a lawyer named Paul Larson, who explains the upcoming case. This young man didn't do the screening process and just registered everybody who would let him do it. This is according to his sworn affidavit. The organization indicated to him that, we're not paying you to register Democrats, and actually tore up several of them in front of him, which he retrieved from the trash and we provided to the court as exhibits. Two more former Sproul workers in Nevada, and others in Oregon, have stepped forward with allegations of more registrations being ripped up. No one knows how many may have been destroyed. So these people, all Democrats, will not be able to vote at all. They think they are registered, and may show up at the polls on Election Day to learn that there is no legal way, provisional ballot or not, that they could vote. In response to the Sproul story, Republicans in Nevada have said that Democrats engage in similar tactics. Chris Carr, the executive director of the state party, made public three Democrat registration forms with nonexistent addresses. This is the way these stories go. Both sides make charges that seem roughly the same, but on this issue, there is a qualitative difference between Democrats and Republicans. I called both camps and asked them to give me their worst stuff about the other side. Here's what the Republican spokesman, Scott Hogenson, said. We have been compiling hundreds of pages of media reports from all over the country of documented cases, of investigations, of fraudulent voter registration cases, everything from police in Ohio investigating a pro-Kerry effort to submit faulty voter registration forms and pay the people with crack cocaine, to a gentleman in Denver, Colorado, who brags and laughs on television about having registered to vote 35 times. The number and degree of faulty, and questionable, and outright fraudulent registrations is really quite stunning in its depth and breadth. He sent me a copy. It's all newspaper clips, many of them unverified charges. There are a few that check out. There really was, for example, this white guy working for an outfit affiliated with the NAACP, who registered voters under names like Mary Poppins and Jeffrey Dahmer. And it's true, he was paid in crack cocaine. Very bad, and a great story. And then there was the Colorado guy who registered himself 35 times. Also true, also very bad. But the reason you're going to be hearing about these two examples over and over in the official Republican talking points in the next few days is that that's the best they've got in their hundreds of pages. Strange enough, reading the very stories they sent often undercut their main argument. For example, that Colorado guy, here's a line from the article the GOP sent me. Quote, "Just because you register someone 35 times doesn't mean they vote 35 times," end quote. Let me repeat. These are quotes from the official Republican vote fraud press packet. Where there are real cases of registration fraud in this compendium, they usually involve poor people getting caught, not trying to fix the vote, but trying to squeeze a few extra bucks, or, OK, a nice chunk of crack, out of these organizations that stupidly pay the temps a fee for each registration card turned in. But don't take my word for it. Again, the GOP's own clip file. Registration irregularities are, quote, "Not an attempt to commit fraud, but rather the result of greedy workers who get paid for every voter they sign up, or already registered voters who forget and register again," end quote. Meanwhile, the incidents of vote suppression on the Republican side involve massive numbers, and soon enough, actual jail time for high-ranking officials connected directly to the party. Chuck McGee, the executive director of the New Hampshire GOP, is scheduled to be sentenced. Sproul is awaiting trial. Then this Florida's felony purge list, which almost knocked 23,000 African-Americans off the voting rolls, while keeping arguably the same number of Republican-leaning felons free to vote. Recently, the Sarasota Herald Tribune broke the story that Governor Jeb Bush, the president's brother, ordered the state to proceed with the felony purge list, even though the database company that put it altogether informed him that it was so hopelessly flawed he should, quote, "Pull the plug." So are they all the same? Is the crackhead faking a handful of registrations for Jeffrey Dahmer the same kind of thing as wiping 17,000 voters in Nevada, 23,000 voters in Florida, 30,000 voters in Ohio completely off the rolls? The other part of the ground war that's being waged this weekend is to make you think that they are. Jack Hitt in New Haven. Remember this number when you're voting if anybody tries any of these tricks on you, 866-OUR-VOTE. Dozens of democracy-loving lawyers standing by for free to help you. 866-OUR-VOTE. Coming up, a Navy recruit has to decide on who his next boss will be, that is, who the Commander-in-Chief will be. 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. Today on our program in this election week, undecided voters and others. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, One Son, One Vote. Now an undecided voter who is just 18 years old, in the tiny town of Selma, Indiana, outside of Muncie. He just graduated high school and signed up for the Navy, hoping to become a Navy SEAL and fight in the war on terror. He doesn't follow politics. He's voting for the first time. His three big political influences, in no particular order, are TV, his brother, and his mom. OK, TV you know. His brother was part of the invading forces that went into Iraq, served there until last August, now he's a financial adviser in Washington, DC. His mom is a nurse at a VA hospital and a major in the Air Force Reserve. She's volunteered to go into Iraq next year. One of the two is for Bush, one is for Kerry, TV is no help, which leaves Matthew in a pretty uncommitted place. Sarah Koenig dropped in to see how the decision making is going in this, Matthew's first presidential election. When I get to his house, it's around five in the evening on the day of the first presidential debate, and the ever encouraged youth vote is sitting on the sofa. The TV is on, a skateboarding show, but he's not really watching. Instead, he's inspecting a large mechanical disk that looks like, and in fact is, a robot. I'm picking the string out of this Roomba because it's-- you know what this is? No I don't, what is it? They roam around the house vacuuming, but I got it caught on this roll of string when I left it today, so now I've got to take it all out. If you talk to Matthew for a few minutes, you realize he's the perfect person for a vacuum that doesn't require you to get off the couch to use it. He's 18, living in his mom's house for the moment. He's not working. His job, he says, is getting in shape before basic training. His mom leaves him lists of things to do: clean his room, peel potatoes and put them in the crock pot, turn on the crock pot. But he kind of ignores the lists, he says. I'm more of a lazy, kind of, try to get away with things. He's one of those undecided voters who's undecided because he doesn't follow politics. But his mother and brother have very strong opinions about politics. They spend hours on the phone debating, tossing around phrases like up-armored humvees, and intercontinental ballistic missile shields, and Donnie Rumsfeld. It's a little like those Sunday morning politics shows. I heard Kerry say-- and I thought this was a terrible thing to say-- he's going to pull all the troops out within three months of him being elected. He didn't say that. He said that he anticipated that they could begin the process. And so, whenever the terrorists that are over there hear that, they think, oh, all we have to do is hang in here for six more months and we're home free. Well, it's worth noting that the Iraqis-- Don't get TV? Actually they do get TV. It's shocking. Yeah, that's the problem. So I think that that just makes them think, we can hang in there, and I feel like he put soldiers' lives in danger saying that. Overall, the Chasteens are a pretty typical Midwestern, Bible Belt family. Monica worked incredibly hard and raised her three sons in a comfortable, one-story house, with a big backyard bordered by a cornfield and a flag out front. They all went to the Nazarene church. David, the oldest, is 26 now. As a kid, all of his friends were from church. He didn't listen to secular music or swear. And like many people in his family, he thought joining the military was the right thing to do, the honorable thing to do. Plus, his family didn't have money for him to go to college, and there aren't that many good jobs in Indiana. And in 2000, he liked George Bush for president. He gave money to the campaign, and he put a bumper sticker on his car. He especially liked the idea of compassionate conservatism. I remember the State of the Union after September 11, where Bush came out and said, we're going to do the hard right over the easy wrong. And the hard right is we're going to send special forces guys into these holes where these Al Qaeda guys are hanging out. We're going to kill them. And then we're going to double the size of the Peace Corps, and we're going to send young Americans out into the Middle East to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we're the good guys, and that we're here to help, and that we're not here to invade, we just want to make the world a better place. And I remember, at that moment, I was talking to my wife about it, and I'm like, right there, that's the President Bush that I voted for. That's a brilliant idea. And in that moment I was so glad that I had voted for him. But then the president started talking about invading Iraq, which David thought was, and I quote here, "insane." He thought they should stay focused on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. David was in the Third Infantry division, which would be the first to invade Iraq. He was a specialist in weapons of mass destruction. He saw the official intelligence on those weapons. So I start looking at the intelligence, which comes from the CIA and the DIA. And the analysis all said the same thing, which is, we're pretty sure they have chemical weapons, but we're real sure they're not a threat to the United States. Basically, the argument was Saddam Hussein is a little goofy in the gills, but he's a rational actor. We know what he wants. And what he wants is to stay in power. Nothing would guarantee him losing control of his country faster than using chemical weapons against the United States, or helping a third party use chemical weapons against the United States. There's a long way between that and a mushroom cloud in Iowa, which was always the implication of the Bush administration. I remember sitting on the border of Kuwait, jokingly telling my commanding officer the day before the invasion, I'm still holding out for a diplomatic solution. He met CIA officers who told him they'd been pulled off looking for Al Qaeda to come to Iraq. He saw Iraqi kids whose legs had been blown off. And he saw the Peace Corps' budget cut, rather than doubled, as President Bush had promised. The problem is that on almost every other issue but Iraq-- taxes, abortion, the role of government in general-- David disagrees with John Kerry. But he's planning on voting for him anyway. I want to vote for Bush so bad. I want to vote for Bush the candidate. But he's just a completely different president than he was in 2000, than the guy that I voted for originally. That's about as pro-Kerry as it gets in Matthew's house. In the other corner, in the red trunks, is their mom, Monica, a tiny, attractive woman with long blond hair. She's on the official presidential prayer team, which means she gets notices through church or the internet to pray for the president's health and safety, and that he will be surrounded by wise counselors. She doesn't know yet when she'll be deployed to Iraq next year, but she's also really disturbed by the war, not so much why we attacked in the first place, but how it's been managed: on the cheap, with bad planning, too few supplies. She's outraged by this story she heard during her training about medical people over there, people like her, who had to choose to let someone die because they didn't have enough IV fluid. But she doesn't wholly blame the president for all that. She blames his advisers. She thinks Secretary Rumsfeld should be fired. David's been lobbying her to consider Kerry, flooding her with emails, but she can't vote for Kerry, or for any pro-choice candidate, period. And she actually thinks David is the one who might reconsider. If anyone budges, it'll be David. I want to budge. I want to budge so badly. But you know. Yeah, it'll be David. For one thing, his mother's praying for him, that the Lord will give him wisdom. Well, I think your prayers have been answered. And then there's Matthew, a sweet, dreamy kid, with huge brown eyes, who's afraid to be home alone at night on his quiet country street, and who loves animals. Neptune. His cat. Daisy. A friend's dog. Anyhow, this is the same Matthew who sleeps with a machete by his side for protection, and wants to go fight in Iraq someday as a Navy SEAL. When it comes to this year's election, Matthew is so new to it all, when I ask him about the political parties, he kind of gets them backwards. But what's interesting is that even someone as politically unplugged as him is getting information, not always perfectly, but still, it's trickling in. So he doesn't know exactly how a bill becomes a law, but he knows George Bush's spotty National Guard record. And he's not quite sure what the president does for a living, but he knows that Kerry served in Vietnam, and that he protested afterward. I don't think it's right just to vote out a president just because, you know, things aren't going our way really. I think he deserves longer than four years to kind of get what he needs to get done. But then again, that might be a huge mistake. He's anti-abortion, he doesn't like the Patriot Act, but mainly, he wants to vote for the man he likes better, the one who's just a better, smarter person. And his mom and David haven't been exactly helpful as he tries to figure out which one that is. They lay out the facts in the best way they can to make whatever they want you to be convinced of sound very good, and everything else just sound ridiculous. So what's an issue where they've done that for you? Well, one thing, and I'm still not sure, is Dave feeds me a good story about John Kerry's war record. And from what I've seen on TV, what he said was about right. And then I mention it to Mom, and Mom says, oh, he only served a month. And he killed women and children, and he ratted out all of his comrades. And, you know, they'll argue and say, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're stupid, you're stupid, or something like that. And then, all right, I'm going to bed, I love you, good night. And they hang up. And I just kind of listen. Good evening from the University of Miami Convocation Center in Coral Gables, Florida. They're on, Mom. --to the first of the 2004 presidential debates. All of us sat on the sofa watching. Monica agreed with a lot of things Kerry said about the war, but disagreed with other things. When you know something's going wrong, you make it right. That's what I learned in Vietnam. And I'm going to lead those troops to victory. You know, we didn't have a victory in Vietnam, and I really think that Kerry would end this war the same way Vietnam was ended, which Vietnam was the only war we've lost. So he may get us out, but I don't think he'll get us out victoriously. Matthew was completely silent during the debate. I thought he wasn't paying much attention. At one point, he wrapped himself in a comforter and put on a winter hat with ear flaps, and I was sure he was going to fall asleep. But when it was over, it was clear he'd been listening closely. I was really impressed by Kerry through the whole thing. I like the fact that he had mentioned something about trying to build the special forces, kind of trying to change our tactics on how we're fighting these people. And Bush just kind of sounded like an idiot, I thought, most of the time, just stuttering and he kept repeating himself. Kerry seems like he was a lot more competent, a lot sharper. I just liked him a lot more, just from listening to him talk. Did you get bored sometimes? Yeah, I got real bored when I was listening to Bush. Really? Really, like Kerry actually held your interest and Bush didn't? Yeah. I always played with the cats while Bush was talking. Do you feel like if you end up going to Iraq, you'd feel safer and sort of in better hands if Kerry were president? Yeah. Because I believe he said that he's in favor of sending more troops there, which means, the more troops we have the safer we are. If I'm over there fighting, I'd definitely like to have better supplies and more guys watching my back. We called David, and he and his mom argued for nearly an hour about the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, about whether Kerry could pay for his proposals. Monica asked David if we would lose Iraq the same way we lost Vietnam if Kerry became president. David told her we'd already lost Iraq. At the end of the night, though, David was so happy with Kerry's performance that he said, for the first time, he could vote for him with confidence. Matthew was for Kerry, too, but he said he'd keep his mind open a crack for President Bush, and watch the next debates. Monica said she still supported the president, but in a wobbly sort of way. This week, nearly a month later, I talked to all three of them again. David was holding steady. Monica says she was considering not voting for president for the first time in her life. The sudden news of that 360-ton pile of explosives found missing in Iraq had especially ticked her off. And Matthew? In the space of one month, he'd gone from a Kerry leaner to an anti-Bush zealot. He sent me an email-- more like a screed-- after he'd seen the Michael Moore movie. Here's part of what he wrote. "This man should never have taken a step in the White House in the first place, and it is our responsibility to make sure he doesn't ever take another step in it again after election night. With all this swirling in my brain, I'm forced to second guess the wisdom of adding my name to a group of poor fools fighting this weird personal vendetta in the Middle East. What sort of punishments will be laid down if I take a stand?" Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our show. Act Four, He's Got Legs. Now our preview of the coming ground war on Election Day. We end today's program with someone trying to convince the unconvinced and get the convinced to the polls in Columbus, Ohio. Lisa Pollak has the story. Andy Mills is in his house, getting ready for his first day of door-to-door canvassing. He's never done anything like this before, and he's a little nervous about it. In his regular life, Andy is a college professor, used to speaking in front of audiences, never at a loss for words. But he doesn't like selling things, or the idea of intruding on people at home, asking nosy questions. Luckily, MoveOn PAC, the anti-Bush group that Andy's canvassing for, has given him a script-- the rap, they call it-- to help him know what to say today. He's been practicing the rap all morning, playing both sides, alone in the kitchen. And before we leave, I make him do it for me without the script. OK, so I guess I'm supposed to knock on your door. And then, hi, is Lisa home? And then she'd say yes. I'm Andrew Mills, and I live in the neighborhood, and I'm working on the upcoming election, and I wondered if you've decided who you're going to vote for for president? And they'll say, John Kerry. And I'll say, oh, that's great, that's great. Well, I'm working with MoveOn PAC, and we're just collecting names and some contact information for Kerry voters for our Get Out the Vote campaign, I wondered if you would-- great, yeah, sure. Going real well. It's going well. It's great. In the kitchen it's fantastic. For voters who prefer the president, the rap is just a sentence, thanks, and have a nice day. And if they're undecided, well, the rap doesn't offer as much guidance here. No talking points on the war, no arguments about health care, no secret formula for closing the deal. Hadn't role played that as much as the easy one. But, so, have you decided who you're going to vote for for president? No, I haven't really made up my mind. Well, can I ask you what issues are important to you in the election? And I don't know really where to go from there. We head to Andy's assigned precinct, only five minutes from his house, a leafy neighborhood near the Ohio State campus. There are more Buckeye football banners than either Kerry or Bush signs. Andy's anxious to talk to his first non-imaginary voter. Well, this one's 2286. This is easier said than done. This one looks vacant. Yeah, I don't think anyone's living here. As we continue down the block, it becomes clear that many of the people on the MoveOn list have in fact moved on. Hi, is Cindy here? Does she not live here anymore? She moved on. OK, thanks. Is Kyle or Greg here? No, do they not live here? OK, I just have an old voter registration list. Hey, hi. Hi, is Michael or Nathan here? They're not? They don't live here anymore? At house after house, people come to the door. Statistically speaking, some of them must be voters, yet Andy does nothing to plug his candidate, or even start a conversation. I'm doing some canvassing for the election, do you have a second to talk? Actually, I'm kind of in the middle of some homework. In the middle of some homework? OK, no problem. Thanks. Bye. I've got to respect that, being a professor. Working on homework. Do you believe it? He didn't look like he was in the middle of working on homework. If waking up is working on homework, then maybe. Let me see what you're working on. No class. When he does meet Kerry voters, it's a love fest. They sign the sheet pledging to vote for the senator, and they linger at the door with Andy, agreeing that Kerry won the debates, and that the war is a disaster, and Andy walks away thrilled, another one for his team. With the Bush voters, it's not a love fest, but everyone's cordial. The biggest surprise, for me anyway, is our one undecided voter, a chatty guy named Joe, just out of college. Before today, I thought this was the whole purpose of canvassing, to persuade voters who are still on the fence, but when I actually see it happen, I realize why it's not the point at all, why Andy's script doesn't even bother with talking points. While we're on the subject, I mean, you think back to like World War II, I mean, look at all those people in Germany, a lot of those people were-- not that it's happening here, but all that stuff can be going on, and we could be totally oblivious to it, because we're not informed, you know what I mean? Andy talks to the guy, and talks to the guy, for almost 20 minutes. But Joe's such a ramble of random and conflicting opinions, I honestly believe no one could have swayed him. Later, an organizer tells me that this is exactly why the thousands of canvassers going out in the next few days aren't really trying to persuade. They're trying to rally the voters already on their side. Simply making face-to-face contact with people can boost turnout on Election Day up to 12%. Down the block, in a white duplex, we meet this woman. She's 76 years old, tiny, with thin gray hair. Hi, is Mary home? That's me. Mary, hi, I'm Andrew Mills. I'm with MoveOn PAC. I wondered if you've decided who you're going to vote for in the election? Do you care to say? ZZ Top. For president? Mmhmm. Mary stays inside and presses her nose to the screen door while we talk. She's not a ZZ Top fan, she says, but she's got nine kids, and some of them are. He's not on the ballot in Ohio. That's all right, it's a write-in. You're going to write-in ZZ Top? I don't think we have much choice. You don't know think we have much choice? No. You wouldn't rather see John Kerry in office, rather than President Bush? No. It doesn't really matter that much, which one of them, to you? Like I said. OK. And you've sort of made up your mind about that? Oh yeah. At this point I can't help myself. I know I'm supposed to keep my mouth shut, but I don't understand her vote. Have you been happy with the way things are going in the country? No. I don't think we've got any business in Iraq, and I don't believe in abortion, so, you know. I mean, that's my two main problems. And so it's really split, because it's kind of like one guy-- Yeah, one's got us into war, and the other one's, you know, kill babies. I can't handle that. That's tough. That's tough to decide which one's more important. ZZ Top sounds like more fun to me. I've gone out with other canvassers for this election, and each time I was struck by how inefficient it seemed, how few people you reach for all the hours you spend. Today, Andy knocks on 60 doors, and talks to a grand total of 17 people, 10 for Kerry, four for Bush, one undecided, one who won't say, one ZZ Top. In four hours, Andy didn't persuade anyone of anything. If anyone's been changed today, it seems to me, it's Andy. This morning, he was nervous, not just about knocking on doors, but about the election, what's going to happen if his guy doesn't win. But now he sounds relaxed, energized, even inspired. He's standing in the cluttered living room of a Kerry supporter named Marlene, who's sitting in a bathrobe, surrounded by prescription bottles, not sure if she's healthy enough to get to the polls. Well, you know, I think it's going to come down, every vote in Ohio's going to count. We can do it. I mean, it may be just a few hundred votes. Yeah, all pull together. You know, if we all turn out for him. It could be this neighborhood. It could be it's Columbus that's going to turn the election. Put him over the top. I hope so. Yeah. So I'll tell you what, I may come by again just to make sure you got your absentee ballot, and if you didn't, we can arrange for someone to get you to the polls on Election Day if you need a lift. You know, because I want to make sure you get your vote counted. Andy's the first to admit he might not have much to show for the day. But after all the worrying about what's going to happen on Tuesday, it was a relief to get out and actually talk to people who'll be voting. The Kerry voters were reassuring. The Bush voters weren't demons. The abstract, mean-spirited, frightening battle for the future of everything that we've been seeing on TV turned into the simplest, least threatening thing in the world: two people standing on a porch, talking things out. Lisa Pollak's a producer on our show. The media's coming, the media's coming. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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My mom was a therapist and she saw hundreds of couples where somebody in the couple had cheated. And then the couple tried to stay together and work it out, and that's how they ended up in couples counseling. And my mom said this thing nearly always happens in this situation. This thing happens where the person who cheated confesses. Tells the spouse as many details as the spouse wants to hear, which usually is a lot. And in fact, you kind of have to tell them everything they want if there's going to be any kind of forgiveness. And so it's just all this painful detail. What happened this particular day when you said you were here and did you say I love you to the other person? Just like the incredibly painful, incredibly hard stuff. And the person who cheated says that they know they were in the wrong, and they want to work it out, and they're sorry. They're so, so sorry. And then weeks pass, and everybody tries to get along. And at some point, the person who cheated starts to feel a little better. You know, they confessed. They cleared the air. It's a new beginning. But their spouse is living still, in a world of pain. The spouse doesn't trust them. The betrayal was so huge, the lies were so big, the spouse is still wary. And still, little bursts of anger. They're not over it. And here's where it gets complicated. The person who cheated starts to get impatient. They feel like, come on, I confessed. I said I'm sorry. I've done everything I can do to make this right. But you just won't let it go. And the other person can't let it go. A very hard thing for both of them. A very hard thing for any couple to get through. And it almost always happens. The apology wasn't enough. And really, there are so many situations where apologizing doesn't do the trick, where it doesn't satisfy both parties. And not just big situations, these can be the tiniest situations in the world. Sarah Vowell, one of our contributing editors on the radio show says that she was running late on her way to meet a friend for breakfast. I was on the subway and I realized I didn't know where breakfast was. I was, I don't know, 15 or 20 minutes late, which was just the most agonizing 15 minutes of my life of me running up and down 9th Avenue trying to remember where I was supposed to meet him. You know, I got there and he had wondered where was I was, but he brought the paper and he was fine, so I spent the entire breakfast apologizing. Then when I got home I sent him an email apologizing. Then before I went to bed I sent another apology email. Then the next time we had breakfast I was 15 minutes early and then had to talk about how I was early this time. And it's just so stupid. And I realized at that point, the apology sickness becomes a kind of narcissism. Like, all you think about is yourself and you feel like, oh, my actions affected this other person so much I need to just constantly apologize. When really, it wasn't that big of a deal. This happens all the time. The apology can go wrong for either person in the transaction. Even the apologizer. I feel like he totally accepted my apology. It's more like I didn't accept my apology. [LAUGHTER] There's moments where you apologize to somebody and you're not doing it for selfish reasons, but because you really want them to know you're sorry. And where they really hear what you're saying and your eyes lock and everybody knows that it happened, the apology happened. Those are almost pretty rare, I think. Today on our radio show, we have three stories of people groping their way toward I'm sorry, toward this moment of apology. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three acts. And let me just say right here, it's a politics free program. Let's have a little break. Act one, "Repeat After Me." In that story, David Sedaris, his sister, and a talking bird. Act two, "Dial S for Sorry." In which we have a little visit with Mr. Apology and his wife. Act three, "Two Words You Never Want to Hear From Your Doctor." In that act, a movement to try to get people who do not like to say they're wrong to say they're wrong. Stay with us. Act one, "Repeat After Me." This story was recorded in front of a live audience. Here's David Sedaris. Although we discussed my upcoming visit to Winston-Salem, my sister and I didn't make exact arrangements until the eve of my arrival when I phoned from a hotel in Salt Lake City. "I'll be at work when you arrive," she said. "So I'm thinking I'll just leave the key under the ower-ot near the ack door." The what? "Ower-ot." I thought she maybe had something in her mouth until I realized she was speaking in code. What are you on a speaker phone at a methadone clinic? Why can't you just tell me where you put the god damn house key? Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I just don't know that I trust these things." Are you on a cellphone? "Of course not," she said. "This is just a regular cordless. But still, you have to be careful." My sister's the type who religiously watches the fear segments of her local eyewitness news broadcasts. Retaining nothing but the headline. She remembers that applesauce can kill you, but forgets that in order to die you have to inject it directly into your bloodstream. Announcements that cellphone conversations may be picked up by strangers mixed with the reported rise of both home burglaries and brain tumors, meaning that as far as she's concerned all telecommunication is potentially life threatening. OK, I said. But can you tell me which ower-ot? "It's ed." She told me. "Well, edish." I arrived at Lisa's house late the following afternoon, found the key beneath the flower pot, and let myself in through the back door. A lengthy note on the coffee table explained how I might go about operating everything from the television to the waffle iron. Each carefully detailed procedure ending with the line, remember to unplug after use. The note reflected a growing hysteria. Its subtext shrieking, oh my God, he's going to be alone in my house for close to an hour. She left her work number, her husband's work number, and the number of the next door neighbor, explaining that she didn't know the woman very well, so I probably shouldn't bother her unless it was an emergency. PPS, she's a Baptist, so don't tell her you're gay. The last time I was alone at my sister's place, she was living in a white brick apartment complex occupied by widows and single middle-aged working women. College hadn't quite worked out the way she'd expected. And after two years in Virginia, she'd returned to Raleigh and taken a job at a wine shop. It was a normal enough life for a 21 year old, but being a dropout was now what she had planned for herself. Worse than that, it had not been planned for her. As children, we'd been assigned certain roles-- leader, bum, troublemaker, slut. Titles that effectively told us who we were. As the oldest, smartest, and bossiest, it was naturally assumed that Lisa would shoot to the top of her field, earning a master's degree in manipulation, and eventually taking over a medium-sized country. We'd always known her as an authority figure, and while we took a certain joy in watching her fall, it was disorienting to see her with so little confidence. Suddenly she was relying on other people's opinions, following their advice, and withering at the slightest criticism. Do you really think so? Really? She was putty. My sister needed patience and understanding, but more often than not, I found myself wanting to shake her. If the oldest wasn't who she was supposed to be, then what did it mean for the rest of us? Lisa has been marked most likely to succeed and so it confused her to be ringing up gallon jugs of hardy burgundy. I had been branded as lazy and irresponsible, and so it felt right when I, too, dropped out of college. I went to live with Lisa in her white brick complex. And when I eventually left her with a broken stereo and an unpaid $80 phone bill, the general consensus was, well, what did you expect? I might reinvent myself to strangers, but to this day, as far as my family is concerned, I'm still the one most likely to set your house on fire. While I accepted my lowered expectations, Lisa fought hard to regain her former title. The wine shop was just a temporary setback and she left shortly after becoming the manager. Photography interested her and so she taught herself to use a camera. Ultimately, landing a job in the photo department of a large international drug company where she took pictures of germs, viruses, and people reacting to germs and viruses. On weekends, for extra money, she photographed weddings, which really weren't that much of a stretch. She got married herself and then quit the drug company in order to earn an English degree. When told there was very little call for 30 page essays on Jane Austen, she got a real estate license. When told the housing market was down, she returned to school to study plants. Her husband, Bob, got a new job in Winston-Salem and so they moved, buying a new three-story home in a quiet, suburban neighborhood. It was strange to think of my sister living in such a grownup place, and I was relieved to find that neither she nor Bob particularly cared for it. My sister's home didn't really lend itself to snooping and so I spent my hour in the kitchen making small talk with Henry. It was the same conversation we'd had the last time I saw him, yet still I found it fascinating. He asked how I was doing. I said I was all right. And then as if something might have drastically changed over the last few seconds, he asked again. Of all the elements of my sister's adult life, the house, the husband, the sudden interest in plants, the most unsettling is Henry. Technically, he's a Blue-fronted Amazon. But to the average layman, he's just a big parrot. The type you might see on the shoulder of a pirate. How you doing? The third time he asked, it sounded as if he really cared. I approached his cage with a detailed answer and when he lunged for the bars I screamed like a girl and ran out of the room. "Henry likes you," sister said a short while later. She just returned from her job at the plant nursery and was sitting at the table unlacing her sneakers. "See the way he's fanning his tail, he'd never do that for Bob. Would you, Henry?" Bob had returned from work a few minutes earlier and immediately headed upstairs to spend time with his own bird, a balding, Green-cheeked Conure named Jose. I thought the two of them might enjoy an occasional conversation, but it turns out they can't stand one another. "Don't even mention Jose in front of Henry," Lisa said. Bob's birds squawked from the upstairs study and the parrot responded with a series of high piercing barks. It was a trick he'd picked up from Lisa's border collie, Jessie. And what was disturbing was that he sounded exactly like a dog. Just as when speaking English, he sounded exactly like Lisa. It was creepy to hear my sister's voice coming from a beak. But I couldn't say it didn't please me. "Who's hungry?" she asked. "Who's hungry?" the voice repeated. I raised my hand and she offered Henry a peanut. Taking it in his claw, his belly sagging almost to the perch, I could understand what someone might see in a parrot. Here was this strange little fat man living in my sister's kitchen. A sympathetic listener turning again and again to ask, so really, how are you? I'd asked her the same question and she'd said, oh, fine. You know. She's afraid to tell me anything important knowing I'll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I'm like a friendly junk man building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there. But my family started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up. And they're sick of it. Conversations now start with the words, you have to swear you will never repeat this. I always promise, but it's generally understood that my word is no better than Henry's. I'd gone to Winston-Salem to address the students at a local college, and then again to break some news. Sometimes when you're stoned it's fun to sit around and think of who might play you in the movie version of your life. What makes it fun is that no one is actually going to make a movie of your life. Lisa and I no longer get stoned and so it was all the harder to announce that my book had been optioned. Meaning that, in fact, someone was going to make a movie of our lives. Not a student, but a real live director people had heard of. "A what?" I explained that he was Chinese and she asked if the movie would be in Chinese. "No," I said, "he lives in America. In California. He's been here since he was a baby." "So now we have to be in a movie?" She picked her sneakers off the floor and tossed them into the laundry room. "Well," she said, "I can tell you right now that you are not dragging my bird into this." Once, at a dinner party, I met a woman whose parrot had learned to imitate the automatic ice maker on her new refrigerator. "That's what happens when they're left alone," she'd said. It was the most depressing bit of information I'd heard in quite a while. And it stuck with me for weeks. Here was this creature born to mock its jungle neighbors and it wound up doing impressions of man-made kitchen appliances. I repeated this story to Lisa who told me that neglect had nothing to do with it. She then prepared a cappuccino, setting the stage for Henry's pitch perfect imitation of the milk steamer. He can do the blender too, she said. She opened the cage door and as we sat down to our coffees, Henry glided down under onto the table. "Who wants a kiss?" She stuck out her tongue and he accepted the tip gingerly between his upper and lower beak. I'd never dream of doing such a thing. Not because it's across the board disgusting, but because he would have bitten the [BLEEP] out of me. While Henry might occasionally have fanned his tail in my direction, it was understood that he was loyal to only one person. Which, I think, is another reason my sister was so fond of him. "Was that a good kiss?" she asked. "Did you like that?" I expected a yes or no answer and was disappointed when he responded with the exact same question, "did you like that?" Yes, parrots can talk, but unfortunately they have no idea what they're actually saying. When she first got him, Henry spoke the Spanish he'd learned from his captors. When our mother died, Henry learned how to cry. He and Lisa would set each other off and the two of them would go on for hours. A few years later, in the midst of a brief academic setback, she trained him to act as her emotional cheerleader. I'd call and hear him in the background screaming, "we love you, Lisa!" "And you can do it!" This was replaced, in time, with the far more practical, where are my keys? After finishing our coffees, Lisa drove me to Greensboro where I delivered my scheduled lecture. This is to say that I read stories about my family. After the reading I answered questions about them, thinking all the while how odd it was that these strangers seemed to know so much about my brother and sisters. In order to sleep at night, I have to remove myself from the equation, pretending that the people I love voluntarily chose to expose themselves. Amy breaks up with a boyfriend and sends out a press release. Hall regularly discusses his bowel movements on daytime talk shows. I'm not the conduit, but just a poor typist stuck in the middle. It's an illusion much harder to maintain when a family member is actually in the audience. The day after the reading Lisa called in sick and we spent the afternoon running errands. Winston-Salem is a city of plazas, mid-sized shopping centers each built around an enormous grocery store. I was looking for cheap cartons of cigarettes and so we drove from plaza to plaza. Lisa had officially quit smoking 10 years earlier and might have taken it up again were it not for Jessie, who according to the vet, was predisposed towards lung ailments. "I don't want to give her secondhand emphysema, but I sure wouldn't mind taking some of this weight off. Tell me the truth, do I look fat to you?" Not at all. She turned sideways and examined herself in the front window of Tobacco USA. "You're lying." "Well, isn't that what you want me to say?" "Yeah," she said. "But I want you to really mean it." But I had meant it. It wasn't the weight I noticed so much as the clothing she wore to cover it up. The loose, baggy pants and oversized shirts falling halfway to her knees. This was a look she'd adopted a few months earlier, after she and her husband had gone to the mountains to visit Bob's parents. Lisa had been sitting beside the fire and when she scooted her chair towards the center of the room, her father-in-law said, "what's the matter, Lisa, getting too fat? I mean, hot." "Getting too hot?" He tried to cover his mistake, but it was too late. The word had already been seared into my sister's brain. "Will I have to be fat in the movie?" she asked. "Of course not," I said. "You'll be just like you are." "Like I am according to who," she asked, "the Chinese?" "Well, not all of them," I said. "Just one." She tugged at the hem of her shirt and asked how much I thought he weighed. In truth, he was half her size, but I lied, giving him an extra hundred pounds. Normally if at home during a weekday, Lisa likes to read 18th century novels, breaking at 1:00 to eat lunch and watch a television program called Matlock. By the time we finished with my errands, the day's broadcast had already ended and so we decided to go to the movies, whatever she wanted. She chose the story of a young English woman struggling to remain happy while trying to lose a few extra pounds. But in the end, she got her plazas confused and we arrived at the wrong theater just in time to watch, You Can Count on Me, the Kenny Lonergan movie in which an errant brother visits his older sister. Normally Lisa's the type who talks from one end of the picture to the other. A character will spread mayonnaise onto a chicken sandwich and she'll lean over whispering, "one time. One time I was doing that and the knife fell into the toilet." Then she'll settle back in her seat and I'll spend the next 10 minutes wondering why on earth someone would make a chicken sandwich in the bathroom. This movie reflected our lives so eerily that for the first time in recent memory she was stunned into silence. There was no physical resemblance between us and the main characters. The brother and sister were younger and orphaned. But like us, they'd stumbled to adulthood playing the worn, confining roles assigned to them as children. Every now and then one of them would break free, but for the most part they behaved not like they wanted to, but as they were expected to. In brief, a guy shows up at his sister's house and stays for a few weeks until she kicks him out. She's not evil about it, but having him around forces her to think about things she'd rather not. Which is essentially, what family members do. At least, the family members my sister and I know. On leaving the theater we shared a long, uncomfortable silence. Between the movie we'd just seen and the movie about to be made, we both felt awkward and self-conscious, as if we were auditioning for the roles of ourselves. I started in with some benign bit of gossip I'd heard concerning the man who'd played the part of the brother, but stopped after the first few minutes saying that, on second thought, it really wasn't very interesting. She couldn't think of anything either and so we said nothing. Each of us imagining a bored audience shifting in their seats. We stopped for gas on the way home and we're parking in front of her house when she turned to relate what I've come to think of as the quintessential Lisa story. "One time," she said. "One time I was out driving." The incident began with a quick trip to the grocery store and ended unexpectedly, with a wounded animal stuffed into a pillowcase and held to the tailpipe of her car. Like most of my sister's stories, it provoked a startling mental picture. Capturing a moment in time when one's actions seemed both unimaginably cruel and completely natural. Details were carefully chosen and the pace built gradually. Punctuated by a series of well timed pauses. And then. And then. She reached the inevitable conclusion and just as I started to laugh, she put her head against the steering wheel and fell apart. It wasn't the gentle flow of tears you might release when recalling an isolated action or event, but the violent explosion that comes when you realize that all such events are connected, forming an endless chain of guilt and suffering. I instinctively reach for the notebook I keep in my pocket. And she grabbed my hand to stop me. If you ever, she said, ever, repeat that story, I will never talk to you again. In the movie version of our lives I would have turned to offer her comfort, reminding her, convincing her, that the actions she described had been kind and just. Because it was. She's incapable of acting otherwise. In the real version of our lives, my immediate goal was simply to change her mind. "Oh, come on," I said. "That story's really funny and I mean, it's not like you're going to do anything with it." Your life, your privacy, your bottomless sorrow, it's not like you're going to do anything with it. Is this the brother I always was or the brother I have become? I'd worried that in making the movie the director might get me and my family wrong. But now a worse thought occurred to me, what if he got us right? Dusk. The camera pans an unremarkable suburban street, moving in on a parked four-door automobile where a small, evil man turns to his sobbing sister saying, "what if I use this story but say that it happened to a friend?" But maybe that's not the end. Maybe before the credits roll we see this same man getting out of bed in the middle of the night, walking past his sister's bedroom, and downstairs into the kitchen. A switch is thrown and we notice in the far corner of the room, a large, standing bird cage covered with a tablecloth. He approaches it carefully and removes the cover, waking a Blue-fronted Amazon parrot. Its eyes glowing red in the sudden light. Through everything that's come before this moment, we understand that the man has something important to say. From his own mouth the words are meaningless and so he pulls up a chair. The clock reads 3:00 AM, then 4:00, then 5:00 as he sits before the brilliant bird, repeating slowly and clearly the words forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me. David Sedaris. That story appears on his Live at Carnegie Hall CD and also in his new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Coming up, what your six year old could probably teacher your doctor. No kidding. 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, apologies. Stories of people struggling to apologize against some difficult odds. We've arrived act two of our show. Act two, "Dial S for Sorry." In 1980, a New Yorker named Allan Bridge set up a telephone line that he called The Apology Line. And the way it worked was that you could call and confess to anything you wanted and you'd be recorded. Or you could call and you could listen to other people's confessions. And over time-- this is all pre-internet days. Over time, the whole thing turned into this little community of confession. People recorded messages responding to each other's apologies. Mr. Apology, Allan Bridge, would leave messages responding to messages himself. Or sometimes he would call callers off the line and talk to them. Back in 1997 we played some recordings from the line on our program. We've never rerun it and we thought it might be appropriate to hear some of them today. Yes, I'd like to apologize because I have broke the town hall windows, I flooded the basement, I broke windows on the back of a store uptown. I feel pretty bad about it because I did so much violence. I'm only 16 years old. I did so much violence and if I was caught, I'd be in juvie hall for a pretty long time I'd say. I'm sorry for harassing the Republican officials, making the bomb threats and the death notices. I'm sorry for the terrorism, the fire bombing that the guy paid me to do to some guy's house. I'm sorry for the burnings in the streets of Smithtown, Long Island. I'm sorry for the way I'm calling right now. I'm calling by way of a phony credit card. I'm sorry for harassing the teacher in school. I feel bad about it. I'd like to have a new lease on life. What else? I'm sorry for just harassing a lot of people. For causing pain to my family. I felt so sad I was sick. I was sick by it. That's all I have to say. So long. Yeah, I want to apologize for something and maybe-- well, I guess it's too late to apologize for it, but I want to apologize for it now. My mother was bedridden for a while and she had to get social security and welfare. And I had no job and I had no way of making money. And when she was hungry or thirsty I used to make her give me money to give her a drink. Like she'd have to give me $5 for a glass of water, $10 for a sandwich. Now she's passed away and I can't say I'm sorry to her. Because I know what I did was probably the most horrible thing in the world and I'll never be able to say I'm sorry to her. I hope I go to hell and burn there for this because it wasn't right. And if there's some way that she can hear me I just want to tell her I'm sorry. Thank you. I've never told anyone this except my shrink. I accidentally killed my younger sister when I was a very small child and it's haunted me all my life because I didn't really mean it. It was just a game to me and I was really too young to realize what I was doing. And I was putting her head inside a plastic garbage bag and putting a rubber band around her neck just to see her face turn blue. I guess it was a lot of fun and I didn't mean anything bad to happen. But I guess I didn't realize what would happen if I did this too long and she suffocated. I hid the plastic bag and I went out of the house. My parents weren't home. And they never found out. They thought it was crib death. They never found out I did it. I've never been able to tell them. I think it would hurt them worse than losing her to find out that I did it. I kind of wish my parents could hear this tape, but I guess they never will. Hi, I'm a runaway and all I want to say is that I'm kind of sorry that I left. See, I'm 15 and I saw your number in the newspaper. When I saw it, I had to call because I mean, you walk around on the streets all day long just looking for someone that just might say, hey, want a place to go? Come with me. They'll give you food and everything. And they won't ask or anything back. That's all I want. I guess I take up too much time on the tape. But I just got to talk. The Apology Line doesn't exist anymore. Mr. Apology, Allan Bridge, died in August of 1995. When he did, the line was deluged with hundreds of messages from its regular callers, grieving. His wife, Marissa, says it was never clearer what The Apology Line had meant to people. For years, people had used it to talk about all sorts of experiences. I think that maybe the word "apology" means something bigger than just saying you're sorry. Or at least maybe not the word, but the line came to mean to people a place where one could go and bring their feelings. To confess not necessarily about doing something wrong, but to confess about having a feeling. When he was alive, would you ever call the line or be tempted to call the line? I called the line in the beginning when I first knew him, before I moved in with him. I called the line from time to time. And you'd apologize for stuff? Well, yeah, sometimes. But more to get his attention than anything else I think. So he wouldn't forget about me up in Washington Heights where I was living. What would you apologize for back then? Do you remember what you would say? Oh, they were all like, you know, just to get his attention. Things like, I'm really sorry I was flirting with another guy or something like that. Much part of the mating game. But once you actually had a real relationship with him, you wouldn't call the line and you didn't feel a need to ever? No, but one thing that really struck me was after he died, I really turned into an Apology Line caller. Someone I would define as Apology Line caller. And the line was over, so when I really needed the line it wasn't there. I was just completely lost and I would have loved to have been able to call The Apology Line and have someone like Allan on the other side, very sympathetic and understanding, to help me get through it. But unfortunately, that didn't happen. I'm a much darker person than I was before he died and I think that I understand the caller's and the line much better than I even did before. He died in this scuba accident where he was hit by a jet skier who then fled the scene and wasn't caught. Have you thought about the kinds of people who would call the line, who used to call the line all the time, who had done bad things to other people and hurt other people, and then would flee the scene and nobody would ever know. Have you thought about those jet skiers in terms of that, in terms of the people who used to call the line? Yes, in fact, the person that hit him would also be a prime candidate for The Apology Line. Because we think that he knew that he did something because there were witnesses that saw the accident and they saw someone on a jet ski hit him. They circled around once and then took off. Yeah. But you can imagine those people actually calling the line? If they would have called the line, if the line had existed for them, what would have happen? What would Mr. Apology have said if he were around to say it? I think he would be pretty pissed off, but he would forgive them. I think that's how he would have gone for it. I think he would have been angry that he was hit. That was a total accident. But I think that if they would have apologized for hitting him he would have forgiven them. Because I think that forgiveness was a big part of his personality. I think he really believed in the power of forgiveness. And everyone can be forgiven if they're sorry. I think that's something that he really believed in. Marissa Bridge. The Apology Line is still down, but there's a website with clips and transcripts and a CD for sale, www.apologyproject.com. Act three, "Two Words You Never Want to Hear from Your Doctor." There are somewhere between 44,000 and 195,000 fatal medical errors in hospitals every year, depending on what study you look at. But those errors don't translate into 44,000 to 195,000 apologies from doctors. Starlee Kine says this may be changing, but very, very slowly. Five years ago, 39 year old Michael Lang had a stomach ache that was causing him a lot of pain. That night he checked into the local emergency room. The staff looked at him briefly and decided his condition wasn't too serious. The family says his mother talked to a nurse and requested an ultrasound, but that was rebuffed. Michael was given morphine for the pain and told he'd be able to go home the next morning. Overnight, he died of an internal hemorrhage and blood around his heart. The hospital called Mike's parents and told them that his condition had worsened, but not that he had died. They got in their car and rushed over. This is Mike's sister, Roxanne. On the way there my parents start talking about taking him somewhere else, not realizing that he was already dead. And when they arrived at the hospital, no one was there to meet them and they took the elevator up to the second floor. And when the door opened, a lot of the nurses were standing there whispering. And when my mom looked at one of the nurses, she knew and she turned to my dad and said, he's dead, Ray. And they ran down the hall to his room where Mike was lying in the bed with the IV still in his arm. It was hanging over the side and my dad tried to put it under the sheet, but was unable to bend it. The thing that they remember the most is going over to him and trying to hug him. And he was, you know, stiff and cold. That's their memory of their son. It's not just the fact that the doctors didn't catch what was wrong with their son, but the way they were treated by the hospital that haunts Roxanne's family. How they were disregard when they asked for an ultrasound. How they were allowed to drive over thinking Mike was still live. And then how no one was waiting for them with the tragic news once they got there. In the weeks that followed, the things the hospital did just made it worse, as far as the family was concerned. When asked why they hadn't been more attentive to Mike, the hospital said they'd been busy that night with an emergency accident. They denied all responsibility for Mike's death. The town in Wisconsin where this happened is small. Roxanne's parents go to the same church as the hospital's CEO. Roxanne says they never talk. It's awkward. Almost the only communication they've had from him was in a letter he sent after Mike's death. He basically said Mike didn't die of a medical error and we have no responsibility for his death at this hospital. We had several committees that investigated it and reviewed everything and we made no mistakes here. Basically, he said we didn't have any part in it. But still, no answers. Still no apologies. No? No. And the thing about the letter was is he addressed them by their first names, Ray and Betty. Dear Ray and Betty. To me, that was an insult when I read that. I was just like, how can you be so familiar with my parents when you can't even apologize for their son dying in your facility? Well, see, an apology, why do you apologize to somebody-- because you did something wrong? This is the CEO of the hospital, John Landdeck. He and Roxanne don't see the situation the same at all. For him it's like this-- the hospital wasn't at fault from Mike's death. An independent medical commission that looked into the case cleared them of wrongdoing. And besides, he's not even sure the hospital didn't apologize. To the extent that we failed to communicate our sympathy with them, that's bad. But you know, a family facing the sudden loss of an otherwise normal, healthy, young man doesn't always hear and see everything that's going on either. And those nurses might have said things and we might have and the doctor might have that they completely missed in their grief. Do you think when the family started saying stuff like, you know, there was a medical error, he died of a medical error. It was the hospital's fault, stuff like that that the hospital went on the defensive though? Well, we tried not to. I'm sure that everybody felt that way. If somebody says you're bad and you know you're not and the first thing is to set out to prove that you're right. This is really like any fight when someone asks for an apology. One side wants to prove it's not their fault, the other wants acknowledgment that their feelings are valid. There's a lot of talking past one another. Is part of the reason that you think you and your family and other families need to hear an apology so badly is because you're afraid that maybe when they don't say they're sorry that they don't actually feel sorry? Most definitely. I remember from Mike-- in Mike's situation-- is we just wanted somebody to publicly acknowledge the fact that he died and that that was an awful thing. You know, whether he died of an error or not, it was an awful thing that he died. And nobody was saying that. The reason doctors and hospitals don't apologize is actually pretty simple. It all comes down to malpractice insurance. I think historically the party line has been gag orders. This is David Sousa, president of Medical Mutual Insurance Company. As people like us, as an insurance carrier, have seen our society become more and more litigious, it has caused us to go to our physician insureds and to caution them, unfortunately, that anything and everything that they may say in the context of a medical error, can be used against them to prove their negligence if they are sued by that patient. When those kinds of things started happening, we started counseling doctors, much to our chagrin, you need to not have these conversations with your patients. Or if you do have to have them, they've got to be almost sterile in nature so that the patient can't come back and use that against you if they try to sue. Over time, that has had an incredible chilling effect on the ability of doctors to just openly communicate with their patients when something goes wrong. And you actually had these conversations with doctors where you would advise them to not say anything? Repeatedly. Repeatedly. Absolutely. This is all changing though. The shift began back in the '80s when Lexington, Kentucky Veteran's Hospital lost a series of malpractice suits and decided to try an experiment. The doctors were told that they had to disclose fully and immediately any medical error to patients. And also, apologize if it was appropriate. In 10 years, the hospital went from having some of the highest legal costs in the state to some of the lowest. Meanwhile, the laws in certain states started changing so that when a doctor apologizes it can't be used against them in a lawsuit. There are now laws like that in nine states. Some apply to any kind of apology made in any civil suit. The new ones specifically apply to medical errors. Again, David Sousa from the insurance industry. Now in our state here North Carolina, a statement made that is tantamount to an apology can not be used against that health care provider to prove negligence in a court room. That's huge. It really opens the door now for us to say, now not only do we believe it's the right thing to do, but now you're protected when you do it. And that's huge. That's just giant. The apology. The apology. [LAUGHTER] Tucked away in the basement of Johns Hopkins Medical School through a door that I thought was a fire exit, in a little room that reminded me of the smoking stairwell from college is a movie studio, an instructional movie studio. Dr. Albert Wu, an associate professor at John Hopkins, is shooting a training video here. It's called, "Disclosing Errors and Adverse Outcomes. The Who, What, Where, When, How, and Why of Disclosure." Or as I like to call it, being a doctor means never having to say you're sorry. Unless something goes wrong, then you really should. For the past 15 years, Dr. Wu has been researching how doctors handle medical mistakes. He's talked to patient about what they actually want to hear and then traveled around presenting his findings to doctors via the magic of PowerPoint presentation. His video walks doctors through the process of telling their patient something went wrong, baby step by baby step. Tips for disclosing. Before beginning, make sure the patient or family member is comfortable. Try not to put a desk or other barrier between you and the patient. Give the patient the opportunity to talk and ask questions about the situation. Do not ignore or dismiss strong emotions, even if you would prefer to do so. If the patient is enraged acknowledge this by saying, I can understand why you are angry with me. In the case of personal responsibility, express personal regret and make a sincere apology. You should say, I am sorry that I did this. And that's that. There's no complicated formula or magic combination of phrases. It literally comes down to teaching doctors how to say the actual words, "I'm sorry." Dr. Wu tells me that when he first started out, doctors didn't even have to tell their patients when they did something wrong, let alone apologize for it. He remembers on his first day as an intern he went to a woman's hospital room to give her a routine checkup and she had a heart attack before he could even start. A nurse was there with him. And the person at the head of the bed said, give this. And so I took this syringe and squirted 10 milligrams of morphine into the patient's IV. And it turns out 10 milligrams of morphine is a lot morphine. What she intended me to do, I think, was for her to get maybe a milligram. Or maybe two. But not 10. She had been breathing very rapidly [HEAVY BREATHING] and it was about as clean a cause and effect relationship as one could ever see. I gave her an overdose of morphine and she stopped breathing. The woman was rushed off to an emergency room and was ultimately OK. Dr. Wu, on the other hand, wasn't doing so good. I was left there standing in the room. Hospital rooms look funny when there is no hospital bed in them. The bed had been wheeled right out of the room, syringes had been ripped out of packaging, and bottles had been hung, and there was all of this stuff all over the place. And I just sort of stood there with sort of that tingly feeling that starts in your spine and goes up to your neck. It really is a little bit like the walls are closing in on you. Unfortunately, this head nurse was standing in the corner with her arms folded and she looked at me and said, "that was a lot of morphine." And we talked a little bit about what seemed to have happened and what might have been done differently. And then, in the end, she said, well, "I don't think that anyone really needs to hear about this." And that was it. So as far as I'm aware, the patient's attending physician never heard about what had happened, the patient certainly never heard what happened. And I was relieved that I'd been let off the hook, but still felt a little uncomfortable. When you make an error that hurts someone, you feel like you're the only person who has ever done such a thing. You feel completely isolated. There's a funny dynamic that's in effect. Doctors would like to believe that they help people. Patients desperately would like to be helped. And through a process of mutual denial, it's easy for everyone to pretend that this sort of thing happens rarely in any event, or should not happen at all. When in fact, it's quite common. In a funny way, I think it's a relief to know that there is a policy that one should disclose errors that harm the patient. So doctors feel relieved when they apologize to their patients. And often, they want to apologize to their patients. But Dr. Wu says that doesn't mean they're any good at it. So often there's an apology followed immediately by an excuse. A small medical apology industry has recently sprung up with books, videos, and seminars, like this one with 40 doctors in North Carolina, set up by a local insurance company, and taught by Dr. Gerald Hickson from Vanderbilt University. He warmed up the crowd by telling the story of a pregnant woman who was treated so poorly by her doctor that she vowed never to get pregnant again, just so she wouldn't have to see him anymore. At this seminar, it becomes pretty clear that most medical errors aren't dramatic. They're not matters of life and death. Most of them are things like forgetting to follow-up and giving your patient a referral, or being half an hour late while your patient sits in the waiting room. Also, it's not always exactly clear if the doctors are to blame or not, even in the most seemingly cut and dry cases. Something else we often see that I worry about is an apology with what I call assignment of responsibility. A finger pointed in a direction to say, well, Ms. Jones, I'm just so terribly sorry that the nurses at this institution clearly can't count right. Right? You know exactly what I'm talking about. In the years since Roxanne's brother died, she has sat on panels with doctors and policymakers talking about the need to be honest with patients and admit their errors. And she's met with doctors who have been trained in this whole new way of apologizing. And she's glad for the effort, but says that a real apology isn't only about the words. The response that I get now when people find out, especially from health care that I lost a brother through medical error, they are in a hurry to say, I'm very sorry for your loss. Because that's what they're being taught. That they should say I'm very sorry for your loss. And for the most part, everybody's very sincere about it and I appreciate it. But you can see it's that they've been taught that phrase. That that's the phrase they should use. How can you tell? It's like the rush they need to get it out to me and this is the phrase that is used. You know, I'm sorry for your loss. So everybody in health care now learns how to apologize the right way according to all the training that's going on out there. So everybody that ends up having an error is going to hear the same thing. And they're going to hear it over and over again by people in health care the same way. And eventually, it's going to mean nothing to them because it won't be real anymore. It will be a programed response. And then there are some doctors who are simply never going to change. At one of the apology seminars I went to I met this doctor who told me that he's so afraid of being sued that he tries to avoid talking to his patients all together. He actually said the words, "I live in fear." Not surprisingly, he was leery of letting me record him. He told me that is was one thing to role play apologizing in a seminar of your peers. It was quite another thing to say it to an actual patient. He said every doctor he knows has been sued for malpractice. He just wants to reach retirement, which is eight years away. "I hope I make it," he said. He's terrified of saying something that will land him in court, no matter what his insurance company tells him, no matter what laws protect him. So he just tries to say nothing at all. Starlee Kine in New York. Well, our program was produced today by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Amy O'Leary. The Apology Line story that was act two of our show today is on our first greatest hits CD from Rhino Records. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free, or buy CDs of them. Well, you know you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife. 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 Torey Malatia, who has something that he wants to share with everybody. Something he wants to say. Torey? I'm sorry for harassing the Republican officials. Good you got that off your chest. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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When my friend Jack was 22, he got a job on a small newspaper in Bend, Oregon. Basically he just talked his way into his job through sheer force of personality. He knew nothing about journalism, or what you're supposed to do in writing a newspaper story. One of his first assignments was a local school budget meeting. Everybody else's story was 350 words, 600 words. Mine was 7,000 words. I had just written every word that had occurred at this budget meeting, which was eight hours long. Like in chronological order. In chronological order. The meeting began at 9:00 AM. The first issue was how many No. 2 lead pencils to buy from Portland, and could we get a deal from Salem instead? Months pass. Jack gets better at this job, has friends in the newsroom. There are people younger and greener getting hired, which might think they're a little better, and he feels like he's getting the hang of things. He gets what seems like a very nice bonus. Now this paper, the Bend Bulletin, was owned by a guy named Robert Chandler. Jack remembers him wearing a 10-gallon hat to work and smacking young reporters in the head with Strunk & White if they made grammatical errors. Chandler had installed, long before many big city newspapers had them, a computer network in the newsroom. This is 1980. Personal computers, word processing, passwords, all this stuff was all brand new. One late afternoon, it was an afternoon paper, so after closing everybody fled pretty much. I was sitting there by myself, and I was just fooling around with the computer. I typed in Mr. Chandler's name. You mean you typed it in as the user name? Yeah, as the user name. I was just guessing. What would be a password that Robert Chandler might use? I had been out to his house I guess the week or two before, and I had met his grandson. I don't remember what his name was, but let's just say it's Sam. So I typed in "Sam" for the password, and bling, all of a sudden his account opened up. I had access to everything in the entire computer system. The managing editor at the time was a guy named Vic Roddick. I went into his file, and there were all the bonuses. I made, I can't remember, but I think it was like $7,800 a year, and he had given me like a $400 bonus. I saw everybody's bonus, and I saw everybody's annual paycheck, and I was at the bottom of the list. I was doing the worst of everybody in the room. I was flattened. Because you looked around the newsroom and you just thought, "These are my peers." Not only my peers, but there were some of them that I thought were worse than I was. I had to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't their equal. I was bad. I was really bad at what I was trying to do. It meant I suddenly had these weird resentments of my colleagues. Part of what's horrifying about finding out information that you're not supposed to know is that it actually robs you of your own kind of self-deception, your own fiction that you're actually doing OK. What's so crazy about this whole painful story is that he didn't go into the computer system hoping to actually find anything out. It just seemed like it would be sort of fun to snoop around. Spying for spying's sake. Oh, I was-- yeah, it just felt thrilling. I just wanted to see if I could get inside. I didn't have any idea. I didn't have any motive for going into his file. There was nothing I was even looking for. I mean, it is the hacker's impulse. I've hung out with hackers, and one of the strangest things about them is that they often, once they get in, they have nothing to do. I was there when they would hack into the very depths of AT&T's telephone computers. And we'd get in, and they'd say, "OK, here we are, we're in." And I'm like, well what do we do now? Well, we're in. We can make a phone call for free. You know what we ended up doing? We ended up like giving my phone in New York three-way calling for free. That was what we ended up doing. You hear a lot about professional spies. There's an entire genre of fiction and film and TV shows devoted to these people. Plus, the last few years spies are constantly in the news. The ongoing debate over how well the CIA does its job figuring out threats to our country. But today on this program, we devote an hour to those who have been overlooked. The amateurs, people like you and me spying on coworkers and neighbors and sometimes complete strangers. As in Jack's case, not knowing what the hell they're doing. They are playing with fire. WBEZ Chicago. It's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in four acts. Act One, The Lobbyist. A man discovers a secret channel on his cable service, and finds he cannot stop watching. Act Two, Life with the Haters, in which a mom with a new baby succumbs to the temptation to use her baby monitor for purposes it was not intended for. Act Three, Mystery Shoppers. In that act, ordinary people going undercover in coffee shops and chain stores. Act Four, Stop Bugging Me. In that act, counter-espionage in the suburbs. Stay with us. Act One, The Lobbyist. This story comes from one of our contributing editors, Jonathan Goldstein. He's now the host of a program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called Wiretap, where the stories are sometimes fully true, sometimes partly true, sometimes entirely untrue. This is from that program. I guess it was back in February, and I had just installed a new VCR. When you set up a new VCR you have to put in the new channels, and there's an auto selection. So I press auto, and it's just whipping through channel two, three, four, five, six. And it goes way up the band. The numbers are going higher, and higher, and higher, and higher, trying to find a station. And it locks in to this station, and I'm looking at it. I'm going, "This is really bizarre. I think I'm looking at a lobby in an apartment building." The image wasn't great. There's no audio track. It's just a silent-- it's a security camera, I guess. But you don't live in a building that has a lobby, right? Right. Right. So you're getting reception of a lobby that is not your own? Right. Right. I mean, if I was living in a high rise, I wouldn't have been surprised to see my own lobby. It's a lobby in another part of the city, or in my town, or wherever. But you don't know where? Not a clue. Not a clue. I have this neighbor downstairs, and he's got 155 stations. He's got a satellite dish, and he's always bragging about how clear the reception is, and all these great channels. He can get like David Letterman on LA Times, so his life's great. And so just as a joke, I said, "Yeah, but do you get the lobby channel?" And I start explaining about this lobby that I'm getting on channel seventy-something. He says, "No," but that he would scan through and see if he indeed got it. But of course he didn't. I think there's a certain point, I think it's in March, where they start running a lot of re-runs. There's basically only about five shows that I watch religiously each week. Just out of habit, after walking the dogs or whatever and coming back at 9:30, I automatically go to those shows. Of course, they are re-runs. And then sort of thought, "Oh, I've always got the lobby to look at." I decided to just program it, keep it programmed on my dial. On the speed dial. On the speed dial. So just as you're flipping from NBC to CBS to FOX, you have the lobby right alongside of them. Yeah. Yeah, it's in the lineup. In the winter-- I'm not a jock, but what I like to do when it's really cold on the weekends is a watch golf, because when I watch golf, everybody's in a balmy part of the world, and the sun's shining. But at a certain point it just becomes tedious, and I thought, "Well, I'll see what's going on in the lobby." So I go back and forth from golf to lobby, and to be honest, after not very much time, the lobby won. It was far more interesting, even though there was nothing going on. Then I thought, "Unfortunately, I have to go to work on Monday. I wonder what happens at key hours in the lobby? For instance, is there a rush hour in the lobby, like from 7 o'clock in the morning, or 6 o'clock in the morning, or at the end of the day? So I thought, "Well, you know what? I'll just start taping it." You started taping it? Yeah, I start setting up my VCR to record the lobby at peak hours, and see if there was any traffic. See if anybody was using the lobby. So at this point how many tapes have you amassed? I guess only three. I had LP, so I've got like about six, seven hours of footage. On each one. Yeah. So that's like 18 hours. Yeah, something like that. And then I figured, why not, I can just fast forward through it. The first time I was watching, I was thinking like, is someone going to come walking in? That would have been the highlight. That was my goal. But no one ever walked in. So I'm fast forwarding through it, and all of a sudden I see something. There's an image of a woman standing right in the center of the lobby, boom. And it looked as though she was wearing a pillbox hat, which caught my attention. I was on to something. I wasn't clearly wasting my time. So all of a sudden there she is. There's this person standing in the middle of the lobby. And I sort of forget that I'm actually watching someone in the lobby, because I'm just so surprised to see anything at all. Sure enough, she starts going through her purse. She starts fumbling, she bends down, she stands up, and she looked in her hand. I assume she found her keys. She stops, she pauses, and then she just walks out of the frame. And goes in. I guess she goes in, yeah. Every time I fast forward through these tapes to see what else is going on in the lobby, if I do see a person, it's her. And she's always wearing this pillbox hat, or what seems to be a pillbox hat. It's interesting because she seems to fumble. She doesn't always lose her keys, but like she'll walk. She'll be standing there, and she'll sort of like seem to trip on something and grab for balance. But she's sort of fumbly? Yeah, she's a fumbly person. But her hat stays on her head, so that's OK. I would be home, and I'd start preparing dinner. I'd look up, and I'd see the clock. It would be like 5 o'clock. Instead of like running into the kitchen, I would just like turn on the TV set and see if I could catch a glimpse of her live. Bingo, there she was. Pillbox hat. About what time was this? Same time. Same time, like somewhere around the dinner hour. Yeah, and I thought this is like a little weird. Weird that I'm actually stopping what I'm doing to see if a person who I don't know is coming into a building. On a daily basis. Yeah. How long have you been doing this? I guess about a month. I really didn't think anything of it. I mean, I have a full life. I work. I enjoy what I do. I have things to do. And yet for some reason, when you start watching someone, I don't know if you're fantasizing, or you just imagine what is this person all about? I guess I sort of figured she was like in her late 30s, maybe 40, had some sort of a regular job. It wasn't as though I was attracted to her like physically, but it was just someone else out there that I was getting to know via my TV set. One night I'm watching, and she comes in with someone, and it really threw me for a loop. I thought, "Who is this person with?" She came in with a man? Yeah. And there she is walking with this guy. I don't know if I was hurt. Then I thought, "This is ridiculous." I mean, this person has her own life. I'm just watching part of her life. I don't really know what's going on the rest of her time. Anyways, it seemed as though there was a guy, and they seemed to be comfortable together. How could you tell? She was laughing, Once I remember them coming in together. As usual she dropped her keys, or something comes out of her hand. She bent down to get them, and I thought, "How come he's not bending down and getting them for her?" I thought, "What kind of relationship is this?" One night after I watched the two of them come into the lobby, I thought, "Well, I wonder what's going to happen? I wonder if this guy is really going to stay around for a long time?" I kept the tape running just in case I'd miss something, but I went into the kitchen and made dinner. And I sat down in front of the TV and watched it. You watched while eating dinner? I watched TV, the lobby. I was wondering if I would see this guy leave. He didn't leave. And how late did you end up watching until? I watched until around midnight. And he didn't leave? No. I watched it for about six hours. Put in another VHS tape, and I put it SLP, long speed. He never left. He never came out? No. Hours and hours of tape, and I just sort of fast forwarded through it, but no, he never left. And I thought, "Good for her." And that's it? Just "good for her?" Yeah. Nothing else? No. Not a little something else? Mmm. I was like now growing-- I was becoming concerned for her happiness. But it's over. Whatever it is, it's over. And so I thought, "OK." As the grand finale, I went over and I actually deleted that channel. So the lobby channel-- So now when you go from say PBS to FOX it just goes straight. Yeah, straight through. Straight through. No shots of the lobby-- nothing. No more lobby. No. It's gone. It's over. Yeah. I wasn't disappointed, but it was just like, I don't know. It sort of signified the end of winter. Spring was coming, and it's time to move on. Jonathan Goldstein talking with Burt Covit on the CBC program Wiretap. That story, just to be completely clear, was a work of fiction based on true events, rendered as radio interview. Act Two, Life with the Haters. Beth Lisick has this story of spying that starts out innocently enough with a baby and a mom. My baby is a terrible sleeper. Sometimes he wakes up 10 or 12 times a night. So I heard about this book called The No-Cry Sleep Solution, a title that my friend is now using for his Morrissey cover band. The book says to get a baby monitor, and at the first sign of any disruption, you're supposed to rush in and start petting the baby back to sleep. There's also an elaborate system of charts and graphs they want you to fill out to keep track of everything he ate that day, how long he napped, at what intervals he's waking up at night. So at this point almost a year after he was born, we're clearly feeling crazy enough from sleep deprivation to actually try this. Night one: after an hour of rocking him in the rocking chair, he finally passes out. I flip on the baby monitor and sit at my desk. The next thing I know, his crying is coming through the speaker. I've fallen asleep sitting up. I check the time and write it down in my binder. 8:06, 24 minutes after I put him down. Night three. I nearly jump off the couch when I hear it. At first static, and then the voice coming in like a walkie-talkie broadcasting in my living room. "Yeah, so if you want to come around and fire one up, you know where I'll be. I got two or three for you, a'ight?" It's a phone conversation. It only takes me a second to figure out that it's got to be my neighbor, who everybody calls Lil' Mo. So I dim the lights and peek through the curtains, and there he is pacing back and forth in front of my house. "Yeah, I'm outside the haters'," his voice on the baby monitor says. Man, I really wish he wouldn't call us that. He hangs up the phone, leans against my fence, and a few minutes later a car pulls up, and he gets in. Four years ago I bought a house in a rundown East Bay neighborhood on the Oakland border. My block is always full of trash, empty forties and blunt wrappers littering the sidewalk. The border of the city is ideal for drug dealing, so there's a lot of that going on. Some low-key prostitution too, but that didn't bother me. I'd lived in rough areas before. What really freaked me out was moving somewhere residential, and having real neighbors. Mostly I was afraid of chit-chatting. After years in the city, I didn't know the etiquette. I didn't want to embark on a long-term relationship of waving and smiling and chit-chatting about clogged gutters and car break-ins. And it didn't help that I was a complete specter of gentrification on my block, the first lower-income white lady to move into a working class black neighborhood. My first strategy was to be really, really nice to everyone. I actually convinced myself that this was a good plan. The first couple months in the house, I sort of went overboard with the niceness. Later I found out that my neighbors were making fun of me for engaging in animated conversations with crackheads and psychotic people, people they themselves never talked to. "Why is she letting Jimmy hustle her with that stolen Tivo?" they wondered. "How come she's talking so long to Crazy Delfine?" I quickly changed strategies and decided it would be easier to ignore everyone. I kept it friendly with George, an older man who lived on one side of me, and with JoJo, the neighborhood gossip, who would come over while I was getting my groceries out of the car and give me the crime blotter, who got shot and why. But basically I started minding my own business again. I stop waving. An old lady on the other side of me? Never spoke to her. Her name was Eunice. One time I got her mail by accident. Instead of running the letter over, I put it in my mail slot for the postman to deliver. The reason for this was that Eunice's grandson, Lil' Mo, hated us. He dealt weed, and was always sitting in his driveway or on his front steps, which would have been fine except that he was such a jerk. He'd harass women walking down the street, even if they were with their kids, calling them whores. He'd actually get up off his porch and follow them down the street, yelling at them as they ran away, tugging on their kids' arms to hurry up. The first time I walked by and said "Hi," he looked right at me and said, "Hater." He'd yell it at me in the middle of the day when I went to my car. He bragged about his Glock and his Uzis to everyone in the corner store, and I could tell a lot of people in the neighborhood were intimidated by him. I definitely was. So that's his voice that's showing up on my baby monitor. Night four, I finally get the baby to fall asleep, and come out and turn on the monitor. I read for a while, and then peek out the curtains and see Lil' Mo sitting in his car in the driveway. Maybe he's on the phone. I get up and switch channels on the receiver to check in with him. Nothing. The other day I got up the nerve to ask JoJo about him. She said that Lil' Mo doesn't even live in that house. He just comes over to deal out of his grandmother's yard. So my next door neighbor who hates me is not even my next door neighbor. That's when I start becoming slightly obsessed with him. Day five, yes, I'm trying to listen during the day now. When my husband takes the baby out, I say that I'm going to take a nap, but then I see Lil' Mo and his friends in the driveway next door. Two of them are talking on their cell phone, so I run and switch on the monitor to see if I can get anything. Nothing. I switch channels. Nothing. I go back and forth trying to jar it into place. What's wrong with this thing? Why isn't it working? Maybe I should just get one of those police scanners that pick up everything, something reliable. Having heard him mention me that one time, I'm convinced that he's constantly talking crap about me. Night six, I'm watching a movie with the volume turned down so low that I have the subtitles playing on the DVD. The volume on the baby monitor, on the other hand, is turned all the way up. I hear static, and then I hear Lil' Mo start yelling at somebody, I think his girlfriend. His voice gets so loud that I turn off the monitor and just listen to it coming from outside the house. Night eight, all the lights in the house are out, and the baby's been asleep for a record three hours in a row. I'm laying on the couch dozing when his voice comes in. This time it's super clear. "I told you Antoine is going to drive her. You know I can't drive no more." As usual, I can only hear his side of the conversation. He's saying, "Teresa's picking her up," and, "She be doing it every day or some [BLEEP]," and then, "It's a liver, the liver and the bones." Somebody's sick. I figure he's talking about his grandmother Eunice, and I think, "Poor lady." She hardly ever comes out of her house. Whenever she does, there's always a big commotion. "Miss Eunice," people yell and wave. Even the teenage boys who are usually jerks are really nice. The first time I spoke to her, she came out on her back porch while I was in my back yard. She was wearing a flowered housecoat, and called out to me. When I said "hi" back, she laid into me for not pruning a huge fir tree whose branches were hanging into her yard. "It's blocking all the light in my house," she said, shaking her head. Then she got a little nicer and told me that the people who lived in my house in the '60s planted their Christmas tree one year, and it turned into that monster. I apologize about the overhanging branches, but the tree is over 25 feet tall, and I couldn't do it myself. I couldn't afford to pay someone, so I never did anything about it. Day 10, there's a car idling in the driveway next door. One of Lil' Mo's friends, or maybe a relative, is in a green late '70s Cutlass that I've never seen before. There are six or seven people standing on the lawn looking up at the front door. Something's going on. I get myself outside and stand there, quite possibly for the third time ever watering my yard with a hose. I'm watering a pile of weeds. Then Eunice comes out of the house. She's extremely frail, and is wearing a purple jogging suit. It takes her forever to get down the stairs. She finally reaches a car, and I hear her say to this total gangster guy over the booty bass thumping on the stereo, "Is this my chariot?" I look up, and she's smiling. She waves to me, and I smile and say "hi." After she drives away, I walk up to the fence and ask Lil' Mo, even though I know the answer, "Is that your grandmother?" He's nice to me, and tells me that she has cancer, and is going in for chemo. "She'll be all right," he says. And then, "We own this house, you know." I go back inside and feel crappy about what a terrible neighbor I've been to this old lady. She's dying of cancer while I'm really busy training the jasmine plant to wind around the arbor. I could have trimmed that tree for her. I can't remember why I was so convinced that I couldn't deal with my neighbors in the first place. I keep the monitor on all day. I'm hoping he'll say more about Eunice, but I just pick up two more drug deals. He gets a person to drive by, then they get in the car and go around the block. I've seen it a hundred times before, but I'm still compelled to go to the window and watch. Day 12, I hear a car pull up next door, and look out the curtains. A young woman is helping Eunice up the stairs to her house. I make a batch of chicken soup, put it in a Tupperware, and spend most of the day trying to find the perfect time to bring it over, ideally when Lil' Mo is not out front, which is hardly ever. I have to admit, part of me hopes that if I bring her soup, maybe he'll stop calling me "hater." I try switching on the monitor to see if he's planning on going anywhere, but all I get is a bit of political poetry from the pirate radio station. I wait until he leaves his yard to go to the apartment building across the street before I walk over. Way too obvious. He sees me going up the stairs to their front door, and he runs back across the street, saying, "What do you want?" I tell him I'm just bringing soup to his grandma, and he lets me in. The house smells pretty terrible, like burned Twinkies and rotting vegetables. He leads me back to her bedroom, and pauses for a second and says, "What's your name?" I tell him, and he goes inside the room and says, "The lady from next door is here for you." He walks out, and I go in and find her sitting up in bed, watching a movie. Her bedroom door has a shoe rack hanging from it that is filled with videotapes, mostly comedies and musicals. I tell her I heard she was sick and brought her some soup. She's really sweet. She gets out of bed and tickles my son's chin, asking me questions about how old he is, what he's doing. I follow her into the kitchen, where there's a big swarm of fruit flies and piles of dirty dishes. I think of all the time her grandson spends hanging out front when he could at least make sure her kitchen is clean. She takes the soup from me, and we chat a bit about the weather. A couple days later, I'm out walking my kid in the stroller, and my neighbor Maynard from a couple doors down says "hi." We usually say "hi" to each other when he's out washing his car, but this time he turns down his stereo and throws his chamois over his shoulder. "Touch the cooler," he says, and points to a Styrofoam cooler on the ground. At least I think that's what he says. I'm not really sure what he wants me to do. Did he just say, "Touch the cooler?" I stand there for a second, and then he tells me that's what they say in New Orleans, where he's from. It means, "grab a beer." I really want to accept his offer, but its 10:00 in the morning. We talk for a bit, and I realize that he knows all of our names, when we go to work, the fact that we were gone for a few days last month. He knows we have feral cats living in our garage. He says Lydia from across the street told JoJo, and then JoJo told him that I brought Miss Eunice soup the other day. He wants to know what kind. I'm almost surprised he doesn't know already. So the neighbors are watching me as closely as I'm watching Lil' Mo. Day 16, I bring Lil' Mo's grandmother food about four or five more times, but now I'm bolder, and will do it when he's sitting out front. I don't even bother to check the baby monitor before I walk outside. One time I brought a whole lasagna, because there seemed to be a lot more people hanging around the house lately. Mo followed me in, but then he stayed outside the door lurking for a bit. Eunice looked a lot sicker, really skinny. She joked that maybe my food would fatten her up. Mo leaned his head in and nodded to the lasagna on top of the dresser and said, "So what is that?" "Lasagna," I say. "Meat lasagna?" "Yeah, meat lasagna." He stopped calling me "hater" after that. It's not like we talk that much, but at least it's not uncomfortable anymore. Sometimes he just nods or gives me a "what's up" and then lets me in the house, and I've totally stopped trying to listen to his conversations. About a month after I first brought Eunice soup, she dies after getting two more blood transfusions. That day the whole street is crowded with people drinking and kids running around, and I go out and touch the cooler with Maynard and JoJo. He tells me if I don't want the gang kids sitting on my fence, I should just go up and tell them to please get off of it. So I do, and they're really cool about it, and they haven't sat on it since. One day I hear the screeching of tires and a bunch of people yelling, and go to the front window. There are three unmarked cop cars and a van outside. Lil' Mo is there on the phone, and I run to switch on the baby monitor. Where is it? I can't find it. I call my husband's cell phone and ask where the monitor is. He says he put it in the storage closet because the baby's sleeping fine. He didn't think we really needed it anymore. I grab it, plug it in, and get a bunch of static from the police radios. Of course we need it. Beth Lisick is a writer in the Bay Area. Coming up, spies working for a monarch named Burger King and for a clown named Ronald. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and 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, Spies Like Us. stories of amateur spies and the consequences of their spying. We've arrived at act three of our program. Act three. There are companies that want amateurs to go into chain stores and fast food places, pretend to be regular customers, and then report in on how things are going there. The job title, mystery shoppers. A trade association says that there are now tens of thousands of people doing this job. Mostly it's freelance work. It's secretive, and they're not supposed to talk about it. When our producer, Lisa Pollak, went on to a mystery shoppers discussion board on the internet looking for interviewees, it kicked off this debate there about whether chain store employees might be listening right now to the radio to get tips about how they're being surveilled. Lisa was able to get a few mystery shoppers to talk with her, and to let her tag along as they spied. Pat's assignment tonight is pretty routine, a stake-out at a coffee shop. She won't let me follow her. She's afraid I'll blow her cover. But she's agreed to wear a wireless mic so I can listen in while she checks out the store. We have walked in, and I'm looking. The first thing I see are three employees behind the counter. I see a merchandise display. Everything looks really well-stocked here. I'm looking at the floor, which does have a few pieces of paper on it. Took a quick look at the condiment table, which looks very clean and well-tended. And I'm kind of walking away because the customers in the store are looking at me talking to myself here. I can't tell you the name of the coffee shop, or where it is, or the kind of drink that Pat's pretending to be interested in. I can only tell you that she's about to walk up to the counter to administer a test, to see if the woman behind the cash register is familiar enough with a drink to tell a customer what's in it. Hi. Can I help you? Well a friend of mine at work the other day had something called a [BLEEP]. What is that? The clerk nails it. She knows all four ingredients. "It's really good," she tells Pat. "You should try it." It does sound good, but I think I'll just have the latte. Two minutes later, I know because she timed it, Pat carries the drink out to her van. She takes the lid off the cup and weighs it on a cooking scale. She gets out what looks like a small meat thermometer and drops in the coffee. While I'm waiting for the thermometer to register the temperature, I'm writing down the notes about the shop. I'm writing down the name of the employee who served me. She was wearing the correct uniform, but the jacket was over the uniform, and I will check later to find out whether that's regulation, because at this point I don't remember. But I'll check and make sure. This assignment will take Pat about an hour. That includes the report she'll write when she gets home. For this she'll get about $5, plus reimbursement for the coffee. It's the freebies that attract a lot of mystery shoppers. Movie tickets, meals, a free night in a hotel, undercover of course. She won't get rich this way, but Pat likes the work. She's a full-time mom who needs a little part-time income, something with flexible hours, close to home. She prefers the simpler assignments, convenience stores, casual restaurants, where she doesn't have to be too sneaky, or pretend she's someone she's not. One assignment she won't do, she says, requires the mystery shopper to go to a fast food restaurant and order two meals, inside and at a drive through, in one visit. Pat says it's a dead giveaway. You know, they've seen you in the store looking around. They've watched you go into the bathroom, perhaps staring at the floor, which the average customer doesn't necessarily do. If they're overly friendly at the drive through window when you do that part of the shop, you know you've been made. Pat says if she gets made, if they figure out who she is and confront her, she won't get her money for the job. Mystery shoppers worry about this stuff. It's the kind of thing they discuss on their online message boards. In fact, there's an official mystery shoppers protocol for what to do if you get caught. It's been very much emphasized that if you're ever approached and asked if you are a mystery shopper, it's drilled down, deny, deny, deny, deny. This is Lynn, or at least that's what she asked me to call her. You're supposed to ask the person, "What's that? What's a mystery shopper?" And other mystery shoppers that I've read about on the internet have said things like, "Mystery shopper? Is that something special? Did I win a prize?" I don't think I could pull off that kind of ignorant effectively. Lynn considers mystery shopping less of a job than a hobby where she gets paid. Unlike Pat, she takes the jobs that require some performance skills. Once, while fake shopping for a mortgage, she invented a husband named Steve, a biologist with a terrible credit history. Another time she pretended to be a member of a fringe religious groups to see if a leasing agent would still rent to her. I've gone into complete acting mode. I have pretended to be a graphic artist that is looking for a real estate space to rent. And I went in, and I had the appointment. When I got to the leasing office, they had one of those reader board signs that was welcoming my company. They had my company name, my fake company name. It was bizarre. And then I got really into character, and the woman at one point was talking about what kind of design work I do. I didn't have anything prepared for discussing what my visual style is, so I rolled up my shirt sleeve and showed her my tattoo, and told her it was an original design, and that that was representative of my work. Aren't you sitting there feeling like, oh, this person must know I'm faking it. She must know I'm a mystery shopper. Are you worried about that? I don't worry about that. I worry that people think I'm an idiot. I had a shop where I had touch 1,250 pieces of clothing and not buy any of them, and not get noticed by any of the staff. What? 1,250 pieces of clothing in a clothing store. I was checking to see if you've got something on a hanger, and the hangar says size eight, is that blouse really a size eight? It wasn't just literally that you had to touch them, you had to look to see if the size matched the hanger? I had to pull out the tags on all of those clothes. If they knew that I was a mystery shopper, they didn't say anything about it, but it's really hard to do that and not feel like they're not noticing that you're out there touching everything. Did you have a little story for yourself? Like oh, I have OCD or something if they asked you what exactly your problem was? Well I've used that in the past, but-- You have? Well, yeah. But that explains like why I need to talk to everybody in the grocery store, or why I have to go to produce, and then why I have to go back to produce. I have to go to produce three times, and I'm not going to be satisfied until I talk to the produce guy. If people look at me a little askew, like your behavior seems odd, I'll just say to people, look, I have OCD, and just get really hostile. I asked Lynn if she thinks people get fired because of the reports she writes. She says she doesn't know, but she'd like to think they don't. Later I call a mystery shoppers trade group, the Mystery Shopping Providers Association, which represents the companies who hire the shoppers. They say their Association discourages the use of mystery shopping for punishing or firing workers. It's a tool meant for training, they say, to help employees improve. Either way, Lynn has no qualms about doing it. She seems honestly surprised when I suggest there's something deceitful or unfair about watching strangers without their knowledge and then evaluating their work. I don't feel like it's a lie or a deception. I feel like it's more akin to acting. But it is a deception. Well, yeah, OK, fair enough. Yeah, it is a deception. But it's in the service of something. I'm not doing this just to screw with you, because I think it is legitimate to evaluate people who work in the service industry on an objective basis. Other people get evaluated in their job, she says. Why not service workers? Why not salespeople at Target or McDonald's? And it's not like those workers don't know what's happening. Jack Elam works at a Starbucks in Chicago. He's the only person interviewed for this story who was willing to give his actual full name. He talked to This American Life's intern, Amy O'Leary. The minute she brought up mystery shoppers, he immediately launched into a list of everything they're looking for at Starbucks. You're graded on your speed of time. You're also graded on quality of service, temperature, dress codes, store appearance, and things like that. And then they grade you on it. Don't you ever feel like you're being spied on though? Not really, no. I think that's good in a sense that it makes a lot of stores stay up to code, follow all the rules and regulations. Yeah, I don't see a problem with them. They can come visit anytime they want. Jack's had other jobs like this, and he says it just comes with the territory. And sometimes he wonders about the mystery shopper when it gets really busy, or when there's an especially tough customer. What if it's them? It could be a 99-year-old lady come up and order something, and it could take her 45 minutes to pay for it because she's counting one penny at a time. That could be your mystery shopper. You never know. So you have to be nice to everybody? Yes. Yes. Like I said, you never can tell. Ever since I started work on this story, when I'm at any chain store, I'm acutely aware that all of the things being said to me come from a script. I mean, everybody already knows that, but seeing it from the mystery shopper's point of view was like going backstage and really seeing how things work. Here on a piece of paper were the questions the clerks were supposed to ask me, the number of minutes before I'm supposed to be greeted, the products they're supposed to promote. At this one electronics store, the mystery shopper I was with asked the sales girl about vacuum cleaners. On cue, she walked over to the exact model she was supposed to be pushing that day, and looking right at us in a completely sincere tone of voice, told us that she thought this vacuum was the one we really needed. There's nothing evil or wrong about any of that. It just makes you feel weird. Lynn told me she'd had a similar feeling, but working as a mystery shopper made her realize what most jobs in most stores are really about. You look at companies that pay these minimum wage jobs, and then they'll have a 16-page questionnaire asking, did this employee do this, this, this, and this, and it's an astonishing amount of behaviors to have to evaluate. They want to know if you smiled, if you presented this, did you offer the new veggie dog, did you do this, did you do that? I mean, if somebody goes up and says this is what I want, and you get it for them and give them their change, that's all they really need. And it's these people who make hardly any money, and the things that they have to do are ridiculous. Well, ridiculous if you're the person who has to smile and suggest veggie dogs 80 times a day. Not so ridiculous if you're the manager who needs to move veggie dogs. In the end, Lynn has a lot in common with the kid behind the counter. They're both working for big companies, trying to help those companies turn out a consistent product everywhere all the time. They're both making near minimum wage. One of them just happens to be watching the other. Lisa Pollak is one of the producers of our program. Act Four, Stop Bugging Me. It's almost a law of nature that wherever there's a spy, there's a counter-spy, somebody using counter-espionage techniques to catch somebody doing espionage. And so if you think that someone is spying on you in your home, you can actually hire somebody to help you with domestic counter-espionage. Jane Feltes visited one of their suburban outposts. A couple times a week someone calls the hotline at Special Solutions Inc., a counter-surveillance company in Des Plaines, Illinois, thinking that their place has been bugged. That's when Mark Amerazian springs into action and readies his equipment. Let's see, we have sweep units here, which will pick up any type of microphones. Night vision, parabolic microphones-- Mark Amerazian is a counter-spy, and he dresses the part. Black T-shirt, boots, and a bomber jacket. His hair is slicked back, and he has a goatee. He talks and acts like someone playing a cop on TV, everything's just a little too polished. Mark has promised to take me with him on a sweep to debug someone's house. He works out of a retail store called Spy Source, which is next door to a dry cleaners in the suburbs. There's a mannequin at the door wearing a trench coat, hat, and sunglasses, James Bond posters everywhere, a half-dozen glass display cases packed with electronics, and novelty items like X-ray specs and disappearing ink. One of the first things I notice is that what they sell at a counter-surveillance store looks a lot like the stuff they sell at a surveillance store. He points out a display case full of what seem to be everyday objects. Covert cameras are usually-- like this one's a clock. Here's a dictionary that has a camera in it. Teddy bear. Where's the camera? You're not going to be able to see it. Mark says these kinds of cameras, with lenses literally the size of a pinhole, hidden in everyday objects are exactly what we'll be looking for on our sweep. So he shows me a tool that his company has designed to detect them, the SpyFinder. Mark pulls the consumer model out of his pocket, the SpyFinder Personal. It's made of black plastic like a remote control and contoured to fit in your hand, with a red plastic lens that you look through surrounded by flashing infrared light. What it's going to do is it's going to flash out, and if there's a camera there, it's going to detect that pinhole lens, the chip inside, and bounce back a red light at you. So if you want, I'll hold this microphone for you, and then just take this, press that button, look through it. So right now let's look at the clock. I turn to the store clock hanging on the wall. Scan the clock up and down. Where do you see the camera in there? Do you see it? Oh, I see it. There it is in the six. It's in the six. I flash the SpyFinder around the rest of the room. The whole place lights up. Everything's a camera. The smoke alarm, the plant, a pair of sunglasses, a radio. They're all watching. It can make a person paranoid, a paranoia that Mark is only too happy to indulge. He tells me a story of a hidden camera that was found in a Hooters changing room. He says they can be anywhere. Locker rooms, tanning salons. A lot of people fake and bake. If you're faking and baking, why not have a SpyFinder with you before you're actually taking off your clothes and getting into a tanning booth? Do a quick sweep. See if there's a camera watching. I just came-- come on in, I'm sorry about the leaves. No-- Today we're doing a sweep for a woman who feels that someone's bugged her house. She greets us at the door in a velour jogging suit. I had expected anybody needing counter-surveillance would be somebody with money, and Mark had described his clients as corporate execs and semi-celebrities, or people in the middle of a high-stakes divorce or lawsuit. But we're at a squat brick bungalow behind a bowling alley and a fast food chicken joint. Her house is sparsely furnished. It's just her and her 6-year-old granddaughter. She immediately asks me if I'm recording her. She won't tell me her name or why we're here. Mark starts putting his gear on, headphones, a hand-held meter, and a few antennas he points around the living room. If there were an audio transmitter in the room, a listening device, it'd have to give off a signal. Right now we're not getting any type of signals showing me RF radio frequency being transmitted. So so far so good. Then he plugs a voltage meter into the phone line. It's reading a 44.7. This is a normal voltage reading. If there was something on your telephone line like a recorder, or if there was a tap on your outside line, it would be reading something low, like maybe a 20. So this is fine. The woman follows Mark around while he does the sweep. He looks in vents for cameras, and climbs under a desk to check the wiring on the computer. There's a unit that you can attach to the back of these computer keyboards, and whatever gets typed, it's going to record it. You what? I never thought of that. Something being on the computer? Yeah, I never thought of that. You looked startled when he said that. I was. I was. I should have thought of that, and I never did. I can't get much out of her, and what she does tell me doesn't really add up. She tells me her suspicions started a few months ago. She said a guy came to the house claiming to be from the water company. She thinks he may have planted some sort of eavesdropping device. When I ask her who she thinks he really was, and why he wanted to spy on her, she won't tell me. All she says is some things were done that made her uncomfortable, and she wants to put her fears to rest. In all, the sweep takes Mark about 20 minutes. He doesn't find anything, which is how it goes for him nine times out of ten. Everything gave us a negative reading. There's nothing here. Thank you very much. I feel much better. So you feel a lot better? I do. I do. Don't have to whisper anymore. If you go into somebody's home or office, and they say, gee, I think my phone's tapped, and you check the phone, and there's no tap, that doesn't mean there wasn't a problem. Kevin Murray has run Murray Associates, an eavesdropping detection and counter-espionage firm, for over 30 years. If Mark is a suburban beat cop, Kevin is the director of the FBI. He deals with Fortune 100 companies, and he thinks what Mark and I did was kind of half-assed. It's not what they show on TV. It's not the guy with the box and an antenna that comes in and wanders around the room wearing headphones and magically finds things, because most of the time it isn't electronic. There are much easier ways to get information. For instance, Kevin says most spies just dig through your trash, or make friends with your sister-in-law or your hairdresser. Bugging can be really expensive and difficult. Plus, here's something you never think about, you constantly have to go back and change the battery. Which is why most large-scale bugging operations only happen in the corporate world. Kevin once caught an international corporate spy in the act. He was transmitting secrets at a big company. On another job, Kevin found a hidden camera above an employee's desk. Turns out the guy's coworker, who was competing with him for a promotion, was watching him make personal calls to his girlfriend and reporting each and every one of them-- date, time, and length-- to the boss. Occasionally Kevin himself becomes a player in the corporate schemes he's uncovering. We were brought into a company, and the president of the company says, "I want you to check these offices." He points us over there. He didn't say he suspected anything. We were just doing this just proactively, just to make sure. It's good policy. It's good security practice. So we get in there, and we start working. The next thing you know, we're up above the ceiling in the conference room, and we find this wire. Can't quite identify it right away, so we follow it out, and lo and behold it goes across the hallway in one direction over to the president's office, and is laying on top of his ceiling with a microphone. I say, great, what a great find. Well we get on the wire again and follow it backwards across the hall, through the conference room, across another hall, and into another executive's office. And we look at it, think uh-huh, OK. On the surface it looks like one of the executives is bugging the president's office. But on close inspection, it's not hooked up the right way. It can't work. This is a setup. It posed a real ethical dilemma to us, because it appears that the president is looking for a rubber stamp way of firing an executive, and it's not true. So what'd you do? We reported it to him, and we also reported the fact that we didn't think it was a viable eavesdropping attempt. This thing couldn't work. But he probably fired him anyway. And from our point of view, it's put there to look like an eavesdropping attempt. By you. No, I didn't say "by you," because I don't know who put it there. I didn't have enough proof. But I could tell he had kind of a long face, and said, "OK, thank you, boys." I asked Kevin if stories of hidden cameras everywhere, like the ones Mark kept telling me when we are on the sweep, if those are just paranoia, or maybe a guy is just trying to drum up a little counter-surveillance business. I mean really, with everything we're supposed to be afraid of when we go to the tanner, bacteria, blindness, cancer, should we really worry about peeping toms? Absolutely. Really? Absolutely. No. All I can say is I don't make it up. Just go to SpyBusters.com, and every week or so I throw in all the news stories of peeping tom cameras and everything else. I think I have about six or seven years' worth of news stories there. And these are only, remember now, these are the failed attempts. These are the ones that got caught. It's the tip of the iceberg. Kevin says only one out of five calls he gets is from someone who's just being irrational and paranoid. In his experience, if you think you're being spied on, you probably are, or at least something's amiss. Maybe your boyfriend's going through your purse. Maybe your best friend's a gossip, and that's why other people know your business. But you don't need to hire a spy to figure that out. Jane Feltes is a producer on our program. Well our program was produced today by Diane Cook and myself with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Ms. Amy O'Leary. Special thanks today to Patrick Keefe, Shane DuBow, Carrie Miller. Our website: www.ThisAmericanLife.org, where you can listen to our programs for free or buy CDs of them. Or you know 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. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, or as he likes to be called by the many, many guests to our program, "The Cooler." I'm not really sure what he wants me to do. Did he just say, "Touch the cooler?" 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. This is my detective book. I would go to the library and get all these books out on the FBI, take notes, learn words. So this book, just to describe it, it's an old, loose-leaf notebook with 1960s-era flowers all over it and stickers all over the cover. Really tacky stickers. How many of us today have had a moment where we entertained that dream of being a private eye, of being Kojak or Columbo or Rockford or-- there are just so many. Well, I'm Ira Glass. And, of course, every week on this program we bring you a variety of stories documenting every day life in these United States. And on today's program, we're going to hear a number of stories about people who want to be detectives, adults and children. And we'll begin with one of the purest expressions of this desire you could possibly find. And that is a child's handmade detective notebook. Andrea DeFotis brought it in. And one of the things that's interesting about it-- and I think this is probably a typical problem for many armchair, wannabe detectives-- is that it records her desire to gather clues and solve cases. But sadly for her, she was leading a life where there were really not that many cases to be solved. OK, here's "Mystery Update File, June 6, 1981." How old were you? 11. You were 11. OK, "June 6, 1981, 4:33 PM. No new mysteries. How depressing." Next entry, "June 7, 1981, 5:34 PM. No new mysteries. June 8, 1981, 6:07 PM. No new mysteries." This goes on. But I change the words to make myself feel better. "No new cases." "No new cases." [UNINTELLIGIBLE] OK. The book is divided up into sections with names like Solved, Unsolved, though if you look inside it, you cannot tell the difference. The things inside Solved and the unsolved stuff, they're exactly the same. There's a section on how to secretly code messages. There's the record of a successful case where Andrea found her sister's necklace, a very tough case. It was on the ground, behind a bureau. There are pamphlets on the FBI on subjects like fingerprints, a pamphlet called How You Can Help the FBI Stop Embezzlement and Fraud. There's a vocabulary section, something that many adult detectives really don't spend enough time with, I think. The vocabulary section has tough words and phrases in it like "Treasury Enforcement School." Officially, at some point, I had a club with my friend, Tammy. And so this is the Q and A of qualifications for Tammy. Qualifications if she could get in the club? I guess to be sneaky, or to be a detective or part of the FBI club, something like that. The first question is "Do you know who Agatha Christie is?" Her answer was, "I have heard of her." Number two, "Do you know who Donald J. Sobol is?" Answer, "No way." I don't either. Neither do I. But I knew in 1981. But I don't know now. Number three, "Do you think you are sneaky?" Answer is yes. Why? "Well, I sneak snacks. And spying is fun, but I'm too tall for it." "Do you know what the four types of fingerprints are? Do you have a magnifying glass? Do you have talcum powder? Do you ever look at wanted posters? Do you ever read Alfred Hitchcock mysteries?" And then there was scoring. And the tie-breaking question-- I guess she needed it, yeah, because she tied-- "What are the three things you should take on a mystery?" What are the three things you should take on a mystery? Well, of course, Ira, it's a flashlight, a compass, and a magnifying glass. And at age 11, Andrea DeFotis wrote to the FBI and got an application to become a special agent. She's still got it in the notebook. It's 11 pages long. It asks if you've ever had an alias. 11-year-old Andrea wrote, "Yes, Peanut," her nickname at the time. Employment history for the 11-year-old Andrea-- "None." "Are you interested in the fingerprint examiner position in Washington, DC?" 11-year-old Andrea says, "Yes." "Are you willing to proceed to Washington, DC, or any other duty station at your own expense?" 11-year-old Andrea says, "Yes." References-- Anne Fotzikis, turns out to be her godmother. The application asks, "Number of years acquainted?" Andrea writes, "11." I thought that I would be a great FBI agent because I had 20-20 vision. And I read that that was one of the things you needed. You're not allowed to have glasses. Right. And I don't know if I still have 20-20 vision, but I did. But then I read-- I got really depressed. In fact, here it is, quotes from The Story of the Secret Service. "A man who wants to join the Secret Service must be between 23 and 30 years old, at least five feet eight, and not over six feet two in height." Must be a man? Yeah. And then I got upset because I realized I wasn't going to probably be tall enough. But listen to this-- And you're not a man, not to put too fine a point on it. What is it about this dream of being a g-man, a detective, a spook, a sleuth, a private eye? Fill in your own-- there's so many words for this. It's like Eskimos having so many words for the word snow. Well, today on our program, the dream of being a private eye, and how that dream measures up to reality. Act One, Wannabes. Writer David Sedaris tells the story of two armchair detectives in his own family, and how they handle a crime wave that occurs right under their own roof, in their own home. Act Two, Real World. I go on a stakeout, me, with a real private eye, right here in Chicago, in a location so profoundly sinister that I cannot even disclose it to you on our program. Stay with us. Act One, Wannabe. Detectives are just one of those things, like amnesia, or asteroids hitting earth, or talking animals, or seven-year-olds with the wisdom of adults, one of those things that just seems to occur a lot more in the movies then they ever do in real life. But I suppose so many things fall into that category. Why detective stories, though? Somebody once said-- and I would agree with this-- that every good story is a detective story, meaning every good story in any genre raises some big question at the beginning, some thing that we want to find out. And then the process of the story, the reason why we keep reading or watching is that we just want to know. We want to know what is going to happen. What is the thing? We want the answer. Mysteries are just the purest form of this. They offer the satisfaction of this kind of story in the purest possible way. The question couldn't be clearer. There's a crime. Who did it? And by the end, all is revealed. Light is shed. We know the answer. So they're hard to resist. The problem, of course, is if you see so many detective stories, if you read so many, see so many TV shows, that you start believing that you can actually do what the fictional characters in the shows are able to do. We have this story from writer David Sedaris about his own family. My mother had a thing for detectives, be they old, blind, or paralyzed from the waist down, she just couldn't get enough. My older sister shared her interest. Detective worship became something they practiced together, swapping plot lines the way other mothers and daughters exchanged recipes or grooming tips. One television program would end and the next one begin, filling our house with the constant din of gunfire and squealing tires. Downstairs, the obese detective would collect his breath on the bow of the drug lord's pleasure craft, while up in the kitchen, his elderly colleague hurled himself over a low brick wall in pursuit of the baby-faced serial killer. "How's your case coming?" my mother would shout during commercial breaks. Cupping her hands to the side of her mouth, Lisa would yell, "Tubby's still tracking down leads, but I'm betting it's the Chinesey guy with the eye patch and the ponytail." Theirs was a world of obvious suspects. Looking for the axe murderer? Try the emotionally disturbed lumberjack loitering near the tool shed behind the victim's house. Who kidnapped the guidance counselor? Perhaps it's a 30-year-old 10th grader with a gym bag full of bloody rope. It was no wonder these cases were solved so quickly. Every clue was italicized with a burst of surging trumpets. And under questioning, the suspects snapped like toothpicks, buckling in less time than it took to soft boil an egg. "You want to know who set fire to the skate ranch? All right, it was me. You satisfied now? That's right, me. I did it, me. Give me a pair of skates and a book of matches, and I'll burn this whole town down. Do you hear me?" It's easy to solve a case where none of the suspects were capable of telling a decent lie. It seemed that anyone could solve a murder, just so long as they had a telephone, a few hours of spare time, and a wet bar. My mother had all three ingredients. The more suspects she identified over the course of a season, the more confident she became. Together, she and my sister would comb the local newspaper, speculating on each reported crime. "We know that the girl was held at knifepoint on the second floor of her house," Lisa said, tapping a pencil against her forehead. "So probably, the person who robbed her was not in a wheelchair." "I'd say that's a pretty safe assumption," my mother answered. "While you're at it, I think we might as well eliminate anyone confined to an iron lung. Listen, Sherlock, you're going at it all wrong. The guy broke in, held her at knifepoint, and made off with $300 in cash, right?" "And a clock radio," Lisa said. "$300 and a clock radio." "Forget the clock radio," my mother said. "The important thing is that he used a knife. All right now, what kind of a person uses a knife?" Lisa guessed that it might have been a chef. "Maybe she was at a restaurant, and the cook noticed she had a lot of money in her pocketbook." "Right," my mother said, "because that's what cooks do, isn't it? They crawl around the dining room floor, looking through purses, while the food sits in the kitchen, cooking itself. Come on now, think. Who uses a knife to commit a crime? In a world of guns, what kind of person would use a knife? Give up? It's just two little words, drug addict. It's just that simple. A professional thief would use a gun. But even a second-hand gun costs money. A drug addict can't afford a gun. They need all their money for their dope and smack, the hard stuff. These dopers have a habit to feed every minute of every day, which means they're always on the lookout for their next mark. This was a heroin addict who followed the girl home from the bank, parked his car around the corner, broke into the house, and robbed her at knifepoint." "If he can't afford a gun, what's he doing with a car?" Lisa asked, "And what about the clock radio?" "Screw the damn clock radio," my mother said. "And as for the car, it was stolen. He took it last Thursday from that couple on Pamlico. You saw the report in the paper, the brand new Ford Mustang, remember? You thought it'd been stolen by gypsies. And I said we don't even have gypsies in this part of the country. I said the car had been taken by a dope addict who'd use it for a couple of burglaries before selling it to a chop shop. Bingo, there you have it." She crushed her cigarette and used the butt to trawl an X through the residue at the bottom of her blackened ashtray, her way of pronouncing that this particular case was closed. "What's next on our roster?" Vandalism at 318 Poole Road, breaking and entering at the Five Points Pharmacy, a hit and run traffic accident in the parking lot of Swain Steakhouse. It was always the work of a drug addict or a former police officer, a renegade, a rogue. To hear my mother talk, you'd think the sunny, manicured streets of suburban Raleigh were crawling with heroin addicts, the needles poking through the sleeves of their tattered police uniforms. It embarrassed me to hear her use phrases like "copping a fix" and "pusherman." "I have to go now," she'd say to the grocery clerk. "My mother-in-law's back at the house, jonesing for her lunch." "I beg your pardon?" they'd say, "Come again?" Only on network television did people talk this way. "I call the TV," they'd say. It didn't matter what you were watching when my mother or sister laid claim to one of the televisions. You surrendered it the same way cars gave up the road at the sight of an advancing ambulance. I couldn't bear the detective shows but made it a point to regularly check in with The Fugitive. This was the story of Dr. Richard Kimble, a man on the run. Falsely accused of a crime he did not commit, we were told in the opening credits that "he changed his name and his identity." The notion of identity was illustrated by a can of shoe polish sitting on what appeared to be the scuffed surface of a motel dresser. This had me stumped for months. "What?" I asked. "Would nobody recognize him with freshly shined shoes? Did he use it to blacken his face? I don't get it." "His hair, stupid," my sister Lisa said. "He used it to dye his hair." Lisa liked The Fugitive because, she said, "He's easy on the eyes." The way she saw it, Dr. Kimble needed only two things, a one-armed suspect and the love of a good woman. She failed to understand that despite his brooding good looks, a man of his nature could never be happy. Unlike her nightly lineup of swinging gumshoes, the Fugitive had both a soul and a memory, and would remain a haunted man long after his wife's true killer had been brought to justice. Most programs discouraged you from concentrating on the hero's dark inner workings. If the girlfriend was gunned down at her makeup table, you knew there'd be another one next week to replace her, no questions asked. The Fugitive had no fancy convertible or stylish wet bar. He was cut from a different cloth, my kind of cloth, the itchy kind. Lisa wouldn't know a sensitive loner if he crawled into her lap with a fistful of daisies. And it annoyed me when she labeled The Fugitive as "my kind of show." It was one thing to sit in front of the television, second-guessing a third-rate detective program, but quite another to solve a real case. We were well into our summer reruns when our household was shaken by a series of very real crimes no TV detective could ever hope to crack. Someone in our family had taken to wiping their ass on the bath towels. What made this exceptionally disturbing was that all of our towels were fudge-colored. You'd be drying your hair when too late, you'd notice an unmistakable odor on your hands, head, and face. If nothing else, life in the suburbs promised that one might go from day to day without finding stool samples in their hair. This sudden turn of events tested our resolve to the core, leaving us to wonder who we were and where we, as a people, had gone wrong. Soul searching aside, it also called for plenty of hot water, gallons of shampoo, steel wool, industrial scrub brushes, and blocks of harsh, deodorizing soap. The criminal hit all three bathrooms, pausing just long enough to convince the rest of us that it was finally safe to let our guard down. I might spend 20 minutes carefully sniffing the towel, only to discover that this time, they'd used to washcloth. "Well," my mother said, thumbing through the newspaper one Sunday morning, "the person doing this is one sick individual. That much we know for certain." "And they eat corn," Lisa said, patting her head with a T-shirt. The most recent victim, she had washed her hair so many times it now resembled the wiry, synthetic mane of a troll doll. Everyone had their theories, but no one had any hard evidence. Discounting my parents, that still left six children and my grandmother, all possible suspects. I eliminated myself. And because the towels were carefully folded, I excused my brother, who, to this day, cannot manage such a complex activity. It must smart to use a towel for such a delicate purpose. And I watched as my family took their seats at the table, waiting for someone to cry out or flinch. But nothing came of it. My mother and sister had always thought themselves so wily and smart. But when pressed for a suspect, they said only that this case was beneath them. If someone were to be murdered or kidnapped, they'd rise to the occasion and finger the guilty party within an hour. This particular case, however, fell under the category of aggravated mischief, and was therefore unworthy of their professional attention. Whoever it was would listen to their conscience and confess sooner or later. And in the meantime, my mother would stock the linen closet with white towels. Case closed. Later that month, someone went through my father's top drawer, stealing a knee sock packed with 112 liberty silver dollars. I knew my father's drawers as well as I knew my own. Everyone did. That was how you occupied your time when you had the house to yourself. You rifled through my father's drawers before moving on to his second hiding place in the shed. I had seen and counted these coins many times. We all had. But who would go so far as to steal them? My father gathered us together in the dining room and listened as we each took turns denying any involvement. "Dollars come in silver? I never knew that. Does the government issue them in a knee sock, or was that your idea?" "OK," my father said. "all right. I understand now. Nobody took my coins. I guess they just got tired of living cooped up in that dresser and decided to roll out the door and spend themselves on candy and magazines. That's what happened, isn't it? Oh, they're probably out there as we speak, having themselves a grand old time, aren't they?" His voice visited its highest register, and he rubbed his hands together as if he were considering a tray of rich desserts. "Free at last. Free at last, with their whole lives ahead of them. Can't you just feel the excitement? Doesn't it make you just want to throw up your hands and scream?" He lowered his voice to deliver a series of ultimatums I didn't quite catch. My mind was snagged on the thought of those jubilant silver dollars, raucous and dizzy with their first feelings of independence. I pictured them splitting into groups and traveling by night to avoid any excess attention. It might prove difficult to roll over grass and leaves, so I imagined them huddled in the carport, deciding it best to stick to the roads and sidewalks. The thought of it made me laugh. And when I did, my father said, "You think this is funny? You're getting a chuckle out of this, are you? I'm glad you find it so amusing. Let's see how funny it is when I search your room, funny guy." On television, a search warrant guaranteed that your home would be trashed. And this was no different. Mine was the only clean room in the entire house. This was my shrine, my temple, and I watched in horror as my drawers were emptied and my closets brutally divorced of order. While searching my desk, he came across a gold-plated mechanical pencil my father recognized as his own. It had once occupied the same drawer as his coins. And I admitted that, yes, I had taken the pencil. But I hadn't really stolen it. There was a big difference between the two. You steal things that you covet, while you take things the original owner is incapable of appreciating. The pencil had spoken to me of its neglect, and I 'd offered to put it to good use. Taking is just borrowing without the formality. I'd planned on returning it once it ran out of lead. What was the big deal? The moment my father and his pencil were reunited, I became the prime suspect, tried and convicted on circumstantial evidence. There was nothing I could say to change his mind. Falsely convicted of a crime I didn't commit, there was only one thing I could do. The shoe polish was kept in the linen closet. I chose black. The Fugitive's hair always looked perfectly natural. It blew in the breeze created by oncoming trucks as he stood beside the lonesome road, bidding farewell to a town unable to appreciate his unique gifts. My natural hair looked pretty much the same way. But once the polish dried, my hair hardened into a stiff, unified mass that covered my head like a helmet. I went to bed and found my sheets and pillow smudged and ruined. My face and arms were bruised-looking, and everything stank with the rigid, military odor of a buffing rag. It was no wonder the Fugitive was a loner. I liked the sheen and color of my new hair, but found I needed to slick it back in order to maintain a clean forehead. This hair of mine was bulletproof. Perhaps that's what the Fugitive saw in it. You could've pounded my head with a golf club, and I wouldn't have felt a thing. I carried my soiled sheets into the woods, knowing that from here on out, things were going to be different. I had crossed over the edge, and there was no turning back. Having changed my identity, my next step was to find the real thief and clear my name. My mother and sister were fond of saying, "The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime." This was a bit of dime store wisdom picked up from one of their television programs, but I thought it might be worth a try. It was certainly true of whoever was wiping their ass on the towels. But then again, they had no choice. The bathroom was where we kept our toilet. And even if the criminal had changed their ways, they'd still need to use the john. Aside from the silver dollars, my father's drawers were home to several pocket watches, a pair of cuff links shaped like dice, tie clips, fine cigarette lighters, and a deck of playing cards picturing an assortment of confident women wearing nothing but tool belts. Figuring the thief had good reason to return for more, I undertook a stakeout. My father's closet had shuttered, louvred doors which afforded a view of the entire room. I took my place, waiting a full hour before my mother entered the room, shouting, "I don't give a tinker's damn what they do on Mount Olympus. In this house, you don't boil a $7 steak." My intuition told me that she was talking to my grandmother. Slamming the door behind her, she took a seat on the edge of the unmade bed. She stared down at her bare feet and then, as if she expected them to apologize for some trouble they'd recently caused, said, "Well, what have you got to say for yourselves?" She picked at her toenail for a moment before crossing the room to fetch a bottle of glossy polish from the top of the dresser. This was a new shade, the color of putty. Rather than highlighting the nails, it caused them to disappear into the surrounding flesh, creating a look both freakish and popular. I'd never understood why anyone bothered painting their toenails, especially my mother, whose crusty, misshapen talons resembled the shattered, nugget-sized Fritos found huddled in the bottom of a bag. She stood before the mirror, shaking the bottle and frowning at the sight of her brittle, frosted hair, arranged into a listless style she referred to as "the devil's stomping grounds." I watched then as she rummaged through her closet, returning with a tall, plastic box secured with the sort of latches you might find on a suitcase. I'd been through my father's closet thousands of times, but never my mother's. "If I have something of value, this is the last place I'd put it," she'd say. "The goddamn moths don't even want what I've got." My father's closets offered clues to his inner life. I enjoyed uncovering what I thought to be his secrets, but felt it best to honor my mother's privacy, not out of respect so much as fear. I didn't want any possible handcuffs or hooded leather mask interfering with the notion that this woman was first and foremost my mother. She carried the box to her dresser and unfastened the latches, lifting the lid to reveal a pale Styrofoam head supporting a sandy blonde wig, the hair sculpted into a series of cresting waves. This was a magnificent crown of hair, so perfect it might have been styled by God himself on one of those off days he was feeling creative, rather than vengeful. After carefully removing the pins, my mother placed the wig upon her head and studied herself in the mirror. She nodded her head this way and that, but the curls, defying all laws of nature, held their position. I knew the feeling, except that my rigid hairstyle was by this time basically cemented to my scalp. Fumes from the shoe polish were making me nauseous, and I had begun to perspire, the inky sweat running down my forehead and staining my shirt. "What do you say to that, missy?" my mother asked herself. She applied a coat of lipstick and brought her face close to the mirror, cocking her had and arching her eyebrows in a series of expressions that conveyed everything from heartfelt concern to full-throttle rage. Then she stepped away from the mirror, re-introducing herself slowly, as if her reflection were a guest she were meeting for the first time. "What do you say we paint those toenails?" she asked. "Now?" she answered. "Sure," she said. "Have a seat. It won't take but a minute. What's you're hurry? Sit down, for christ's sake. They can get along without you for half an hour. Sit." My mother sat and opened the jar of polish. "This is a new shade we call strained chicken," she said. "All the girls are just crazy about it." I watched as she parted her toes and set to work, pausing every now and then to regard herself in the mirror. "Pretty, isn't it?" she said. "You'll probably want to wear it with a sandal. That's what I'd do, a sandal or an open-toed boot, whatever feels right for you. This is a good color for those quiet times when your weekend guests have finally passed out, and you've got the pup tent all to yourself. I'm assuming from the shape of these feet that you do a lot of hiking, am I right? No? My mistake. Ever walk over hot coals to earn yourself a little extra pocket money? I thought so. Well, you just sit back and relax. I'm not here to judge." She finished her right foot and held it out for inspection. "The good thing about this color is that it's forgiving. A little on the nail, a little on the toe, a little on the carpet, and everybody's happy." When the left foot was finished, she tossed the polish onto her dresser and fashioned a mound out of pillows, something so high that she could lie on her back without crushing her wig. It looked uncomfortable, but she seemed used to it. Spreading out her arms and legs, she closed her eyes and reclined as best she could. The unmade bed, the clothing and empty cigarette packets littering the floor, the room resembled a crime scene. Televised stake outs tend to condense the hours of monotonous waiting into a single moment of truth. The detective arrives just in time to overhear the ransom instructions or watch the jewel thief study blueprints to the bank. I stood for an hour with a headful of shoe polish, a fugitive, watching my chatty, harried nail stylist of a mother asleep in her wig. I waited and waited for something to reveal itself. After she'd and left the room, I crept downstairs and washed my hair three times, taking care to rinse the tub with Comet and destroy my soiled shirt. At the sound of my father's footsteps coming through the front door, I darted into my bedroom, slapping my face and examining the glow on the darkened window. I wanted to be apple-cheeked, fresh and innocent when he rounded up the usual suspects, gathering us together in the dining room to solve the most troubling mystery of all. Who smeared his shirts and jackets with shoe polish? I take my seat beside the same people who had stolen the coins and wiped themselves on the towels and say, "Did you say nail polish or shoe polish? On your suits? Today? No, sorry. I wouldn't know anything about that." David Sedaris. That story, "True Detective," is in his book, Naked. His latest book is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Coming up, speeding through a car chase, sitting through surveillance, that all happens during two days I spent with a real private eye. 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 stories on that theme. Today's program, Detectives, wannabe detectives, real detectives, and the difference between the two. Act Two, The Real World. You know, a reporters isn't supposed to go out on a story with big, preconceived ideas. And so I'm just going to admit up front that when I had the chance to go out with a real life private eye, this is what I expected. I expected that contrary to what you see on TV and in the movies, real detective work was going to turn out to be mundane, dull, long hours, not terribly glamorous. And in fact, the first day I spent with detective Jonathan Rosenberg of Tower Investigations here in Chicago, I was not disappointed. When I arrived at his office, he was statementizing. That was the word he used, statementizing, meaning typing up statements from witnesses he'd interviewed. Example. "OK. So the Mazda, the black Mazda had a green light?" That was the investigator. The witness answered, "A green light, correct." Investigator, "Do you know how fast the fire engine was traveling?" Witness, "Oh god, I have no idea, but it was 40 miles or maybe more." Investigator, "OK. Do you know how fast the black vehicle was traveling?" Not exactly The Rockford Files. Later, we drove out to an accident scene, where Jonathan took pictures and looked for witnesses, but didn't find anybody useful, which was unsurprising, really, because the accident had happened six weeks before. Also, Jonathan went to the federal courthouse to run background checks on the computers there. Jonathan says he wasn't one of those kids who read detective books and stories about g-men and dreamed of being a private eye. I find generally, those people, one, they're totally disappointed what the profession really entails. It's a lot more work. It's a lot less exciting as it's portrayed. In fact, Jonathan got into detective work by accident. His father was a lawyer. And from the time Jonathan was 19, he'd go out for his dad, take pictures to use as evidence, track people down so they could be served legal papers. And from there, it wasn't much of a leap to a real job as a detective. Now he's 29, dressed for work in a black T-shirt and jeans, his hair starting to thin, but just long enough to be pulled into a little ponytail. A steady supply of Newport Lights and Diet Cherry Cokes gets him through the day. And unlike the hard-boiled detectives that you see in the movies, Jonathan Rosenberg is strikingly uncynical. The main impression that you get when you meet him is a decent, level-headed guy, someone who'll talk straight with you, treat you fairly. It's an impression that comes in handy in his line of work. Day two. The first thing you have to do before you go on surveillance, Jonathan tells me, is fill up the gas tank. You don't know how far you're going to have to drive tailing people. About 40% of Jonathan's business is surveillance work on domestic cases, people who think their spouses are cheating on them. The rest of his work is accident investigations, tracking people down, serving them legal papers, and then various insurance and unemployment fraud cases. Today's client is a husband who's become suspicious of his wife and was willing to put up $50 an hour, plus expenses, to have her followed, 10 hours paid upfront. She's been going out a lot, with excuses that don't seem plausible. She's out on weekends. She leaves early on weekends. She started dressing a little bit sexier, you could say, when she's going to work. That's usually a signal. Also, if they start losing weight, if they had a weight problem, or if they start working out a lot. Today, she's supposed to be going out after work with her girlfriends from her job. We're going to wait by the store where she works and follow her to see if that's were she goes. This is what we're going to do. When I first get there is I'm going to look for the vehicle that the client described to me that his wife drives. Now, did he give you her picture or something? Do you know what she looks like? Yes, I have a photograph here. I have to admit here that when I saw the photo, I was completely floored. Somehow, based on a thousand detective stories, I'd assumed that these would be middle-aged people, mature people, in a marriage that had gone stale over years. But the woman in this photo was 25 years old, beamingly happy, a suburban girl on vacation in Disneyland or someplace like that. And suddenly, it hit me, looking at this picture, the human tragedy of what was about to happen. If she were cheating on her husband, and we caught her, one way or another, her life was about to turn completely upside down, starting tonight. OK, now the trick here is looking for the vehicle. We circle the store where she works. And we find her car easily enough. It's out back. But finding out where we should go turns out to be surprisingly tricky. We can't just park in the alley, because she'll see us. So we have to park at one end of the alley. But then which end? If we choose the south end and she drives north, she could lose us. And then there's the fact that we need to see her without her noticing us. Fortunately, the client chooses that moment to call on Jonathan's cellular phone. Uh-huh? OK, so you're saying that she'll probably be heading south is her normal-- OK. All right, sir. OK. You're welcome. Bye. We find one position. But then a truck blocks our view. We move two more times. Who ever thought that this would be this complicated? Also, it's boring. I smoke one of Jonathan's Newport Lights simply to stay awake. Jonathan watches in his rear view mirror for the woman. He takes notes on the case. I take notes on him. And sitting in a car like this, in a way, it's just like you've seen in those cop buddy movies. You really do start to talk about everything. Scarface, I didn't see Scarface. Was Scarface that good? Yeah, I liked it a lot. Wow. I like Al Pacino a lot, that's why. All I heard about Scarface was it's just real violent, right? That's all I heard was it was just real violent. Yeah, it's real violent, but the story was really good, I thought. And the acting was excellent. I just thought it was a really well-made movie. So you know what they call a Big Mac in France? Yes, I do. Le Big Mac. The Royale with cheese is what threw me. I ordered one just to see what it was. What was it? It's just a quarter-pounder. I was disappointed. I thought it was something different that's not in the States. A half hour passes, and another half hour. Someone who might have been the woman comes out, smokes a cigarette, goes back in, later, comes out again, goes back in again. If this woman was having an affair, she was in no hurry to get to the affair. Or possibly, the woman who we were waiting for left long ago through the front door of the shop, which we cannot see. Anyway, finally, after all the boredom, something happens. OK. That's our vehicle. And it looks like it's coming this way. We spin around to follow her car, and we tail her for 15 minutes. Often, we are driving directly behind her, sometimes on nearly deserted streets. And still, she does not seem to notice, which Jonathan says is typical. And if this sounds incredible to you, OK, try this test. If you are hearing the sound of my voice in an automobile right now, let me ask you-- now don't look in your rear view mirror-- let me just ask you, what kind of car is behind you? And how long has it been there? No one pays attention to stuff like this. Hello? OK. Your wife has just left about 10 minutes ago. We're in pursuit right now. Finally, she pulls into a strip mall. She parks. We park a little down the way. Jonathan opens up a map, so we don't look so suspicious sitting there, though of course, with cameras and tape recorders, we are the most suspicious-looking car imaginable. Then he pulls out binoculars, which only helps the whole effect. And sitting there, suddenly, I realize I have no idea what is about to happen. The woman is sitting in front of a store like the same kind of store she works for. So, I think, perhaps it is possible she is going to be meeting friends who she knows from her job. On the other hand, all the women back at her job left separately in separate cars at separate times. So could they really be going out together? Why were we at this strip mall? Where were we headed next? In most jobs, you know pretty much what is going to happen when you arrive at work that morning. And it occurred to me at that moment that for Jonathan, that is simply not true. I got to tell you, you're blowing the premise for my story. I was going to come out with you. I was going to say, well, this private investigative work, you think it's really glamorous and really interesting if you see it on TV and the movies. But really, if you hang around with the guys, it's kind of boring. But now, I'm out with you, and I think I'm wrong. It is actually pretty interesting. It is. But when you're comparing it to Magnum, P. I. or Simon & Simon, it really doesn't compare to that kind of excitement. And at that moment, the car we're following pulls out, and we pursue. And then she does something kind of strange, actually. She pulls into an alley. And she waits. She went straight down the alley, right? Yeah. Do you think she's trying to lose us? Well, actually I don't know. We can't follow her without her noticing. So we circle the block. She backs up, then drives back into the alley. Then she circles the block. And finally we solve the mystery of what she's doing. Jonathan, the trained detective, is the one who figures this out. She is not on to us. She's looking for a parking space. She gets out of the car, heads into a restaurant. It's a big, cheap, family-style restaurant. You know something, I don't think that she's having an affair. And I tell you why. It's because if you were having an affair with somebody, you would not go to this particular restaurant. It's just not romantic enough. Right. If you were out really for sex with somebody, and you've only got a couple hours, you're not going to go here. That's true. But looked at another way, maybe she is going to be meet a guy here, quickly, where no one would suspect them. I feel like I keep just going back and forth on whether I think that she's seeing somebody. Are you doing that, too, or are you-- Well, no. I'm just-- You're neutral. I'm just trying to find out the information and report it. Yeah, I know. But from moment to moment, don't you feel like you decide, "Yes, she must be. No, no, she can't be. Yes, she must be. No, she can't be"? Not 'til I see it. Come on. See, this is the clinch. This is the clinch right now. Because we know what we're here to find out is inside there. And I know the answer's inside, so why start guessing? I could just walk inside and tell you what the answer is. And so we head into the restaurant. Jonathan leaves his cameras and his notepads in the car. I leave my tape recorder. Jonathan says we'd be too conspicuous with that stuff. And when we walk in, we're pretty much convinced that she is meeting girlfriends from work, just like she told her husband. So we go in. And we spot her right away in a booth with a man. The way the restaurant is laid out, we can sit at the bar with our back to the couple and then watch everything they do in this big, plate glass mirror that's behind the bar. They don't serve Cherry Diet Coke at this bar. So Jonathan orders a regular Diet Coke. And we sit there. His cell phone rings. And it's the woman's husband. Jonathan gives him the news this way. He says, very quietly, "Apparently, your suspicions were correct." The husband gets angry, which Jonathan says is unusual. For some reason, men in this situation, when they get this news, usually cry. Women get angry, in Jonathan's experience. I watch the couple in the mirror. She's telling the guy a story, gesturing with her hands. He laughs. And I think, "You have no idea what's about to hit you." I watch. Someday, that woman's going to look back on this night. And she'll think, "So when I drove to the restaurant, when I was driving there, I was being followed. When we sat talking that night, we were being watched. And I didn't know." She'll try to picture it, put it together in her mind. Where was the detective? Where did he wait? Where did he sit? What did he see her do? In the mirror, Jonathan and I watch the woman get a call on her cellular phone. And she pulls back a little bit from the man who she's with and withdraw into herself a little bit, talks on the phone. And we wonder, is that her husband? Is he just messing with her? She talks and hangs up. 30 seconds later, Jonathan's cell phone rings. It was him. He was messing with her. He's like, "So, are you out with the girls? Uh-huh. Where are you guys. Yeah, who's there? What are you guys talking about?" "That lying bitch," he said to Jonathan. For some reason, it's hard at this moment to feel much sympathy for him. I have to tell you about the strangest thing about this entire scene. And that is that there's no sex vibe between these two people. In fact, the man is shoveling food in his mouth with a kind of circular motion of his hand that is the least sexy thing possible. It's just crude. You watch him, and you think, "She is not going to bed with you, if you're going to eat like that." And in fact, when they come out of the restaurant, they go their separate ways without even a kiss, without a hug. Jonathan snaps a few pictures of them outside. Is that him? Yeah. We follow the guy home, get his license plate numbers, get his address. It's an unusual case, because 90% of the time, Jonathan says, when somebody suspects the spouse of having an affair, the detective catches them the first time out. This case, he's not very sure what's going on. He follows the woman for five more days, over $1,000 worth of surveillance, before finally, he catches her actually going home with the guy. In the car, later, I ask him if his job ever gives him the creeps, following people around, secretly watching them in these vulnerable moments, photographing them and videotaping them, gathering evidence that will probably destroy their marriages. Well, that's always upsetting. You never really want to see that happen to people. But if it came to be that way, it did. It was through no fault of my own. And these people made their decision to partake in the activities they chose to partake. And if they're not being faithful to each other, then maybe they really shouldn't be married. It's that old saying. It's better to find out now than later. Hello? I should be home about 9:30, 10 o'clock. But if I'll be home later, I'll call you. OK. Love you, too. Bye. That's the wife. Jonathan's actually a newlywed. He's been married for only eight months. And he says, yes, having this job has affected his view of marriage. How can it not? You're more careful about it, because you see it. But it really hasn't affected me in a negative way with my relationship with my wife. You were saying when we were inside that you guys joke about it, in fact. Oh yeah, we do, we do. If I ask her, "What time are you going to be home?" And then she'll be like, "Well, I'm not going to tell you. I got to go meet my boyfriend." And we're like, "All right. That's all right. I'll find it out anyways. I know it anyways, you don't need to tell me." Like I have a surveillance or a tail on her at that minute anyways. But we have a really good relationship. As for me, for the next few days after the surveillance, I had this experience I have never had in my life. I was completely suspicious of everyone. At one point, I was waiting for somebody outside a McDonald's. And a guy in a black Corolla zooms in, just tears into the parking lot, tears around the curve, pulls into a space. And I don't know why, I felt like, "OK. I better start taking notes." I have them, right here. "Man wore sunglasses, has crew cut. Loud music blares from car. Jumps out, beefy guy, gives me suspicious look. I give him suspicious look." And then below here, on the notes, I have his license plate number, just in case. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself, Julie Snyder, Alix Spiegel, Peter Clowney, and Dolores Wilber. Our senior editor for this particular show, Paul Tough, with contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Shiow-Jiau Yung runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Jane Feltes, Seth Lind, and Vija Navarro. Original musical scoring for David Sedaris's story by Michael Zerang. He played that music with Fred Lonberg-Holm. Mary Gaffney recorded the music here in the WBEZ studios. Music help elsewhere in the program by Mr. John Connors and [? Terry West. We are informed that Donald Sobol is the guy who wrote Encyclopedia Brown. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can get all of our weekly action-packed shows in podcast form, or you can listen to old programs online. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by Mr. Torey Malatia, who has something he wants to say to the Sedaris family. He's been carrying this around for years. It's just been killing him. All right, it was me. You satisfied now? That's right, me. I did it, me. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK, here's a joke that US servicemen in Iraq just love. This brings down the house, according to Tom Irwin, a comedian who just spent over a month entertaining troops in the Sunni Triangle, in Fallujah, in Mosul, near the border with Iran, all over the place. He came into the studio and told me the joke. Black Hawk helicopters, I love them. I love the pilots. We've gotten to know many of the Black Hawk helicopter pilots. And I love Black Hawk helicopters. I do know a group of people who hate them. And those would be Iraqi sheep farmers. And that joke would kill. Yeah, no, it's yeah, it's very strong. Because that's how everybody gets around. Because you fly very low. So you can see the people. You can see them. So it has to do with-- and you watch all the animals scatter. So it's kind of, OK, Babu, OK, last one in the pen, OK, and then, tt-tt-tt-tt-tt-tt-tt-tt-tt. Ah! American! It's just this, I don't know, I'm sorry. I can't keep describing. It's so hard to leave that out there. Because it's just like, I am just so conditioned to have it have a different reaction. I'm sorry. I'm sitting in this studio, just like, oh my God. This is the greatest bad reaction I've ever heard. Listeners here in the United States may think we have some idea of what is going on among the American forces in Iraq. But really, we don't know their day-to-day lives. We don't know their habits. We don't know what annoys them most. We do not even understand their jokes. As Tom Irwin says-- You have to be in Iraq, sort of. And so today on our radio program, an attempt to bridge the gap between the 140,000 Americans stationed in Iraq and the 290 million of us back home. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, trying to find cigarettes in Fallujah. What US training tells you you should do if you hit a roadside bomb, versus what you should actually do, if you want to live. And what insurgents play over loudspeakers that freaks out Americans, and what Americans play to freak out Iraqis. We have two stories on our show today. Act One, we spend some time with some National Guardsmen a few miles from Baghdad. Act Two, our own Jack Hitt talks about what the Battle of Fallujah was really like with a marine lieutenant who commanded a platoon in Charlie Company, a lieutenant who also happens to be his nephew. Stay with us. The attendance was good. We had about 30-plus people there each Sunday evening at 3:00. And I think it was going along pretty good. We know that my unit, 239, has been called up to active duty. [INAUDIBLE] my strength in the Lord. I'm going through some hard times at this point in my life. It's a trying time. I need your prayers. I need your prayers. And I also would like to admonish the ones that have been attending services to continue to come. Continue to come. Don't stop. No matter what trials and tribulations come, he is telling us to press on. Hey, Joe, when you signed up for the Guard, did you ever think that you would be deployed? Yes. You did? I did. But for me to go, they had to reenlist me. Because my enlistment was actually about up. My 20 years would have been over with. My enlistment period actually was over before we were sent. And so they involuntarily gave me another year. And if they had asked you whether or not you wanted to do that, would you have said that you wanted to do it, or that you wouldn't have wanted to do it? At the time, I wouldn't have done it. I've had 20 years. And I felt like 20 years is enough to give to your country. I feel like I've done my duties. I don't feel like I owe anybody anything. And no, I don't think I would have went, if they'd have gave me that choice. Joe is one of the people in this new documentary series that's airing on a cable channel you probably don't catch too often, the Discovery Times channel. Two brothers from Arkansas, Brent and Craig Renaud, decided to follow one group of Arkansas National Guardsmen and their families from the announcement of their deployment to the day that the town holds a big rally to send them off, and into Kuwait and Iraq. Three episodes have aired already. The brothers are still out there filming. The unit is still there in Iraq. And because these guys have gotten to know these men and their families so well, living with them for months now, the brothers have witnessed and filmed all kinds of things that have never been documented anywhere else. 40% of the soldiers in Iraq are reservists, either from the Army Reserve or from the National Guard. What this means for Arkansas is the largest call-up of reservists since the Korean War, 2,800 soldiers. Craig and Brent followed the 57 guardsmen from the town of Clarksville, Arkansas. Here's Craig. Clarksville is a town of 7,000 people. One of the reasons we chose Clarksville is the majority of the National Guard that's in Iraq right now comes from small, rural towns like Clarksville. A lot of people that join the National Guard there do it for an extra paycheck. What do most of these guys think they were signing up for? When they initially signed up, like anyone else who joins the National Guard, they think they're signing up for one weekend a month, and two weeks a year. After 9/11, obviously, that changed everything. But no one thought they were signing up for a deployment. They were signing up to hang out with their buddies one weekend a month, get to shoot guns and drive trucks around, but definitely not go fight in a war. And in the early episodes of Off to War, you see how taken aback they are. We are out in the middle of the desert in Kuwait, eating a meal that came out of a brown plastic sack on probably the most expensive camping trip America has ever seen. This is my response to the National Guards. What happened to one weekend a month, two weeks a year? This is Matt Hertlein and his friend Tommy. Matt signed up for the Guard because he wanted free college and extra money on the weekends, and because Tommy made it sound like it would be a good time. The man I am today is because of that [BLEEP] right there. He is the one that I said, yeah, man, join the National Guard. Get drunk on the weekends and go to drills, and we can have all kinds of fun in college, partying. Yeah. Yeah. I see how much fun you're having in college. When's the last time you signed up for registration? Well, Matt Hertlein and Tommy Erp, the 19-year-olds who joined, coming out of high school, they've talked about there's not a whole lot of opportunities for them. Matt even made the comment that if I wasn't here with all of my buddies in Iraq, I don't know what else I'd be doing. Because one, everybody's in the National Guard that I know, and so they're here. And if I was back home, there's not a lot of opportunity for us. When we were at a party, their last party that they went to, just before they left, all of their friends were joking about how they couldn't wait for their friends to leave, because now there would be more jobs available that they could get, once they were in Iraq. At the very beginning of the documentary, before they're sent out, Matt and Tommy are the only ones who actually seem to kind of look forward to going to Iraq. They're younger than the other Guardsmen, didn't have responsibilities at home, and didn't know much about what was going on the war. Sitting on the couch in Matt's house with some family, they talked about it. It's an opportunity to me. We can go over there and get the job done. And I think it'll be fun. I'll try to make the most of it. I think I'll have fun. Friends are going. I've got family going. Going to be pretty fun. My mom's not too happy about it. She's-- yeah. Every time she even starts talking about it, she starts bawling, man. He's 19 years old. He just turned 19. We know what we're doing. It's not like we're going over there, and we're just going to be sandbags getting shot at. We know what we're doing. And we know how to control ourself. Those suicide bombers and stuff, they're willing to kill their self, and they don't care who they kill. If I got to shoot somebody, I want to shoot them. I don't want to. It's not like I just want to go over there just to shoot people. But if I have to shoot somebody, I'm going to do it. I just don't know if he realizes how dangerous it's going to be. The Renaud brothers helped arrange for me to talk with Matt Hertlein from Camp Cooke, where he and his unit are stationed, in Taji, just a few miles north of Baghdad. When you see that early footage of yourself saying, oh, it's going to be kind of fun. It'll be an adventure. Do you feel like, man, you don't even know what you're in for? Oh yeah. It doesn't even seem like me saying it anymore. Just have been here for nine months, and then you watch that scene from that episode, and doesn't even-- I don't know. It's like I'm not even watching myself. In the documentary, after the Arkansas Guardsmen are called up, but before they're shipped to Iraq, they're sent to training for six months at Fort Hood in Texas and Fort Polk in Louisiana. And seeing the footage of what they're like in training, the reality hits you, I think, of what it means that 40% of our forces in Iraq are reservists. Most of these are middle-aged guys who never thought that they would be deployed. In fact, some of them had served in the Army, and then switched to the Guard, specifically so they could get a pension without being deployed overseas. And so you notice something right away about their physical condition. I think like most people in America, a lot of these guys were out of shape. Filmmaker Brent Renaud. Remember, they were only doing one weekend a month, two weeks a year. They weren't expected to be in war shape, in combat shape. And like the rest of America, a lot of them were not in that shape. Here, get a shot of my big belly. Here you go. That'll be gone about the time I get home. Come on, blow the whistle. Imagine being sent back to junior high school gym class as an adult, and you get the picture of what's happening here, a bunch of homeowners and parents in gym shorts and t-shirts, jumping up and down in a row, most of them with these looks on the faces like they cannot believe this is happening to them. One soldier asks if he can smoke during calisthenics. When they do situps, another guy barely picks his shoulders up off the ground. Aw, [BLEEP], situps. Aw, [BLEEP]. Told to run in a circle, one soldier takes off in the wrong direction completely. Clockwise. Clockwise. Think of a clock, clockwise. And when they're put into formation and ordered to march, this is what happens. Mark time, march. Half of them just look around. One guy scratches his jock. It's momentary chaos. And then they start over. Lock and load. Even on the shooting range, there's a Bad News Bears quality to these early scenes. You fired three rounds. Three rounds. How many holes do you see? [BLEEP] This is going to be a lot different than just hunting back home. Sergeant Joe Betts, the minister who was re-enlisted against his will, who was in his 40s, remember, as he went through all this training, says he was overweight by official Army standards, but was still able to do all the pushups and situps and running required by the Army. In the film, Joe, early on, you say this, that a lot of the guys weren't taking the training seriously enough. Right. What did you see that made you say that? What was happening? The laughter. When we were training, you would see people just sitting around, saying, aw, man, this is not going to happen over there. This is not what's going to happen. Welcome to Fort Hood. This stuff is pretty simple from here on out. It's night. Dozens of Arkansas Guardsmen in formation, at attention, staring forward. They've just arrived at this base in Texas. All you have to do is be where you are supposed to be when you're supposed to be there. And everything else is a cakewalk. Hoo-ah? All right. That's all I got. Oh, and turn them stupid cell phones off when you're standing in formation. Got it? Thank you. That's Brian Mason. He was brought in from a different unit to bring leadership to the engineer unit. Again, filmmaker Craig Renaud. And when he did notice, maybe, some people being a little more lackadaisical than they could, I think the responsibility started weighing on him that he's got to get these guys home alive. He had been in Desert Storm. He didn't want anyone to die on his watch. He says a lot. You see him saying speeches. You guys got to get your game face on, you got to get your game face on. Company [? a-ten-tion. This is in their barracks, guys on benches, lockers, everywhere. They stand in a tired sort of way. One guy stands on his bed. I want to thank each and every one of you for embarrassing the [BLEEP] out of me with this sad display of disrespect. Get down off those bunks. Stand at ease. A colonel, lieutenant colonel just walked into this company, walked past 20, 30 people, probably. Not one of you called the room to attention. Not one of you said, sir. Who the hell do you people think you are? Hell, half of you don't even salute me when I'm outside, or the other platoon leaders, or the company commander. Who they are, of course, is grown men, mostly, not career military, not young recruits. And it's strange to watch them get chewed out like teenagers. They stare ahead, faces blank. You want to make life hard for yourself? Keep that [BLEEP] up. First Sergeant, they're all yours. Take care of them. The 39th Brigade went through three weeks of combat training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, part of a joint readiness program. This was the army's attempt to simulate, as best as it could, what operations would be like in Iraq. Again, filmmaker Craig Renaud. And the idea was, they brought in a lot of Iraqis, mostly Kurdish Iraqis who live in the United States, to do a lot of role-playing. And they would speak only in Arabic to the soldiers. And they would have to undergo things like you would do in a peace and stability operation. They did one training exercise where they had to go on a convoy through a town. And as they came into the town, there was a protest of Iraqis. And they had to come in and ask the Iraqis if they could pass their convoy through. And what it turned out is that the Iraqis were actually protesting a rise in the meat prices, but the soldiers assumed that they were protesting the American presidency. Anyway, the way they handled it escalated the situation. And the commander ended up getting killed. Take that two right there. [INAUDIBLE], stay where you're at. [INAUDIBLE], stay where you're at. Hold your weapons to your right. An industrial-sized smoke machine, who knew the Army owns an industrial-sized smoke machine, billows white smoke. People scatter everywhere. Civilians in headscarves wail over their fake dead. Officers and trainers stroll through the melee, observing and saying things like, well, I guess that'll teach them not to leave their vehicles unattended. Incoming! I wish we could have had a little more training, to be honest. Again, 19-year-old Matt Hertlein, talking with me from outside Baghdad. I don't think we got enough. How well-prepared were you for what you're doing now every day? Oh. Actually, we weren't really prepared it all. We were prepared for going up and down the road and things like that. But the kinds of missions that we've been doing over here, that's not the kind of thing that we trained for. It's not even close. They don't compare at all. The people that trained us, you've got to understand, even if they had been over here, it was for Desert Storm, which was a completely different war than what we're fighting here. Sergeant David Short is a policeman in civilian life. In Iraq, he commands a combat unit in the Arkansas National Guard. He's another person in the film who spoke with me from Taji, outside Baghdad. The people that did the training actually did the best that they knew to do. They were under the impression that the war was over, and that we would basically be doing security and stability operations, where we were just in the rebuilding phase of the country. Because they figured the major combat was over. And when we got here, that's not really what happened. We immediately started combat patrols. In fact, the second day that I was here, we were given a photocopy of a piece of a map and directions to a gate, and told to go out and start patrolling, looking for insurgents. Sergeant Short and Matt Hertlein both told me they wish that they'd had more regular combat training, how to patrol, how fire weapons from different positions, how to capture and detain people. Part of the problem is just a coincidence in timing. The 39th Battalion arrived in-country in April 2004. Here's Brent Renaud. And if you remember, April of last year is when the security situation really started to deteriorate in Iraq. That's when Fallujah really started to take place. And-- That's the month that they captured those private contractors and killed them and hung them from that bridge. That's when it really all changed. Exactly. That happened the day before we pulled out of Kuwait to convoy into Iraq. They started doing things like going on patrols, looking for roadside bombs, guarding prisoners. These sort of things that they weren't trained for, because nobody envisioned that they would actually be doing them in Iraq. One simple but important piece of training that they lacked: what to do if their vehicles rolled across an IED, an Improvised Explosive Device. Back before they arrived in Iraq, IED explosions were much less common than they are these days. Now they're so frequent that Sergeant Short's unit has been blown up two dozen times by IEDs. Three of those times, Sergeant Short himself was in the convoy. And the thing that a lot of people, that I didn't know, until I'd actually been in one and got hit, is your radio is no good to you for about 10 seconds. So you may be trying to talk to somebody, but the explosion creates blast waves that interfere with the radio waves. And your communication equipment is no good for approximately 10 to 15 seconds. So it's imperative that everybody pay attention to what everybody else is doing. If you hear the explosion, you need to be looking to make sure everybody that's supposed to be with you is with you. So if for any reason you need to turn around and go back and pick somebody up or recover their vehicle, you can. But these are things we learned ourselves. And so you didn't actually do drills on what to do if you're in a vehicle in a convoy and an IED goes off? That's not something you practiced for. No, no. We just learned the hard way on those. The first time we had an actual Improvised Explosive Device go off, it disabled the truck. They were ambushed. One of the guys was killed. They did train us. They did give us the standard procedure of what they wanted us to do. We followed those procedures. And basically, what happened is a truck got left by itself with no combat support, because they did what they were trained to do, push forward 300 meters, and then assess the situation. Well, they had a truck that was disabled, and they pushed out 300 meters and left it there. And so those guys are in a firefight, fighting for their lives, and then they guys say, oh, we got to go back and get them. And then we got back, and the leaders all sat together and said, we did what we were trained to do. But it doesn't work. And how could they have trained you to prepare for those? Well, to be honest, really, in their defense, it would be very difficult for them to train us for something that they had no personal experience with. By the time they finally do go to Iraq, the guys have lost weight. In-country, they lose even more, wearing 60-pound vests all day in a place that gets up to 120 degrees. And some of the most disturbing moments in the film have to do with the equipment that they take with them, vehicles that the Arkansas National Guard's had for years, decades. So these five ton dump trucks, the youngest one we have is 1956. The newest one we have is 1964. Only 4 of the unit's 42 vehicles were properly armored. Again, filmmaker Craig Renaud. And brigade-wide, I think this is pretty representative in terms of the armor situation that they had. The vehicle that I convoyed in into Iraq, I was in the a back of a vehicle that had a pine box around it with sandbags in the middle of it. And they said that they hoped that they might slow the bullets down. They didn't have any hopes that it would actually stop a bullet, but it might actually slow it down and reduce the damage that it would do to you. So it certainly wasn't comforting to be convoying into Iraq in those type of vehicles. We were promised up-armor kits. We didn't get them. And so we're going to go ahead and try to fabricate something. Thank you sir. You think we could use some of this stuff? Yeah, let's take that with us. What follows next is soldiers in the most powerful army in the history of man scrounging in scrap heaps for sheets of iron to weld to the doors and floorboards of their own vehicles. We're trying to use as much of the metal as we can, of the steel. But we only have a limited supply of it. So we have to resort to these old bulletproof vests. And honestly, I don't feel too comfortable with doing that. But we've got to do what we've got to do, man. We've got to use what we can. That's Matt Hertlein attaching the old armored vest to his truck door for protection. When I asked him about this moment in the documentary, he told me-- It was like a scene out of The A-Team. I think we're just on the bottom of the list. Priority goes to the regular Army, and the Marine Corps, and whoever else. We just get whatever's left over. It takes three months for the 3,000 person brigade to get armor and all the vehicles that need it. They still have some un-armored vehicles. But those usually don't leave the base. Other reservists who have been there less time are not as far along in getting the armor that they need. And the Army Times reported last month that it will be June before all the trucks and Humvees in Iraq all have proper armor. A third still lack it, 11,000 vehicles. Again, here's Sergeant Joe Betts, the 42-year-old minister that we started our story with. We wasn't armored the way we should have been armored going into Iraq. And did that make everybody mad? Were you mad? Of course that make people mad. Now over a half a year after all that, in December, National Guardsmen from Tennessee brought up this exact problem with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in this town meeting they held over there. Exactly. And I did see that. Now, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that they're getting out the armored vehicles as quickly as they can. And he said, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. What do you think of that? Well, actually, that is true. You do go to war with the army you have. But prior to us going to war, they knew we was going. They had already talked about us going. So why didn't they do something about the up-armament that we needed prior to going to war? But they didn't anticipate that there were going to be these insurgents at this level. They didn't necessarily know that there was going to be a need for it. Oh yeah. Any time you go to war, you need armor. So that's not something that even in World War I, II, they knew they needed armor. You don't go to war thinking that you're going to go out there with no armor on, and you're not going to get hurt. So to me, for them to just send us over there and say that you don't need this gear, you don't need this up-armor on your vehicles is saying that I don't care about the soldiers. That's what it says to me. The day they actually drive from Kuwait into Iraq, things change for the Arkansas brigade, in a number of ways. Today's the day. This is our first interaction with the Iraqis. Be polite, be professional, and be prepared to kill. We're in transition phase right now. We go from the training, the game, to the Super Bowl, to the war. This is Lieutenant Brian Mason, who you heard earlier yelling at guys. Now they're sitting on bunks, listening, attentive, worried-looking. So you guys need to put on your game face, right here, right now. These Iraqis, they know who we are. They know you're National Guardsmen. Yeah, they're going to target you, because they think you're just a bunch of lazy, fat National Guardsmen who don't know how to do their job. Welcome to Baghdad. Keep your eyes open. This is Joe, the minister, in a convoy into Iraq. I've been here for about 10 minutes, and I already know I hate Baghdad. I hate the country. I don't want to be here. I hear that. Hertlein, just got a mortar round fired. A mortar round was just fired. Welcome home, guys. Camp Cooke. 1 day down, 364 days to go. Filmmaker Craig Renaud. Well, the very first day that this brigade arrived to the base, there was an Arkansas National Guard soldier killed within the first 10 hours. A mortar came in. I would say as a whole, that's where you really saw people realize that this is for real. Of course, my unit, unfortunately, took the first National Guard casualty from the entire brigade. Again, Sergeant David Short, who commands a combat unit, talking to me from Iraq. And we had been here one day. We got hit with a rocket attack, and it killed Sergeant Labadie, and it seriously wounded Sergeant [? Leisure. The thing about a brigade like this with the Arkansas National Guard, all those guys that we were following knew that first soldier that was killed. And the minute he was killed, everybody's demeanor changed, and everybody knew this was for real. I don't know. At least in the unit we were with, it seemed like a lot of guys weren't taking it that seriously until that happened. Two days later, another soldier was killed. I happened to be at the motor pool when they brought that vehicle back in. I saw the medic get out, completely covered in blood. Right. He got killed in an ambush of a Humvee. Exactly, in an ambush. The windshield shattered when the IED went off. This was the last place that Sergeant Del Greco was. This is Sergeant Short in footage from the movie, standing in front of the shot-up vehicle with his men. Matt and Tommy are there, looking stunned, vulnerable. I hope it gets real for you guys, I really do. Because this is very difficult for me. Because I love every one of these guys in this troop. And everybody means something. And we're all here. And there's nothing that we can do to change it. It's not worth it. But we're here. And we got a mission to do. And we're going to keep doing it. I'm going to take it to them. I'm going to take the fight to them. And I'm going to try to eradicate every one of these people that I can off of the face of the earth, because they've taken people of mine away from me. And I'll see that justice is done for them, for nobody else but ourselves. I just hope that everybody's prepared for it, because it's ugly out there. This footage in the documentary of you talking to your troops about it, they all look pretty shaken up as you're saying this stuff to them. Did some of them come and talk to you about it later? Yeah. I had a lot of people come to me and say, look, what do I do? I'm terrified. I don't want to go outside here. I'm consumed with fear. I had one young man come to me and tell me that he had lost all his faith, that he was saved. His father was a pastor. He had been a Christian all his life. He said, I've lost my salvation. I can't deal with this. And so there was a lot of time spent talking to people, reassuring them, praying with them, praying for them. Yeah, what do you say to somebody when they tell you something like that? What can help them? Well, the main thing that I had to do, and it was something that I had to reach deep down inside, was to show them that regardless of what happens, I was going to be there. We're going to go out there. We're going to do this together. I was going to be there. What happens next is that the guys turn it around. They totally step up to the jobs they were sent to do. They work well together. They look out for each other. Matt turns out to be one of the best gunners in the group. In 10 months, no other Guardsmen from Clarksville have died. And people don't complain. There's barely any complaining anymore, unless something very unusual happens. Here's Craig and then Brent Renaud. As the deployment goes along, and as the film follows this deployment, they find out, just like the rest of the country did, things about 9/11 and the investigations that they were doing. There was actually a day when I was with them in Iraq, where the Stars and Stripes, which is the military newspaper that comes out, the front page was about the 9/11 panel commission, and the hearings, and there not being a link between Iraq and 9/11. And they were shocked when they read that. And what would they say? They're patriotic guys, so they're doing their duty and all that, want to support the President. But what's that do to them to see that? Since then, I think, maybe, they wished they had toned it down a little bit. But at that particular time, they said, we're angry. We were fooled. And we feel betrayed. And we're over here, risking our lives, and it's not what we thought it was, and that people were dying for something that they weren't sure if it was going to accomplish anything. Throughout this whole documentary, the Arkansas Guardsmen show this mix of doubts about their mission and a willingness to suspend those doubts and follow orders. When I asked Matt if he's hopeful about the way things work out in Iraq, he says, sure, they're definitely trying to help people there. Even Joe, who thinks there was no reason to go to war in the first place, is convinced that God must have some plan, some good reason of his own for putting Americans in Iraq. Here's what Sergeant Short thinks. I don't want to say that it's a lost cause, because I've lost good friends over here. And for me to say that would mean that they died for nothing. But it's very disheartening to me, because I work with the Iraqi National Guard. I've worked with the the new Iraqi Army. I've worked with the Iraqi police force. And you've got the three security forces for this country that are in no way on the same sheet of music. They do not like each other. They do not trust each other. And their heart's not in it. And a lot of times, it's just very frustrating, because they just don't seem to care, one way or another. Filmmaker Brent Renaud. I was out with the armed patrol the other day, and one of the Iraqi translators, as we were going up and down the road, we were talking to the local people and asking them, who was putting these roadside bombs out into the road. And the locals said, it's the Americans putting them out there, because they're trying to destabilize our country. As we went along the road, person after person was saying this same thing, which is very upsetting to the soldiers, because people in their unit had been killed by the roadside bombs. Joe Betts, the minister, says that being in Iraq has made him question his faith many times. He talks openly in the film about how the deployment is ruining his life, causing trouble in his marriage. Before he left for Iraq, he had some problems with neck, muscle spasms that were aggravated by all the weight that they were constantly carrying around in the military. Then a month into his deployment, he got this tingling and numbness in his arms and his fingers. It reached a point where he couldn't hold up his gun. And doctors said that a disc in his spine was out of place. They looked at me, did x-rays, said, hey, we need to get you out of here, sent me to Landstuhl in Germany. They looked at me and said, you're on your way home, bud. Is there a downside to coming home? The down side to me is coming home is I'm not in Iraq with my guys. That's my downside. And the downside again is that I have to hear all the bullcrap from people that don't understand what I'm going through. What are you talking about? There's "if you didn't get hit with a shrapnel, you shouldn't be at home," you understand? People say this to you? Yeah. If your arm isn't broke, you didn't get shot, so why are you at home? As they show in the film, he's actually quite hurt, in physical pain. Doctors locate the problems in MRIs and in x-rays. But in Iraq, Joe had been so vocal about how he didn't want to be there. He was more vocal than anybody we see. Some guys now think that he was just trying to get home early. Here's Matt Hertlein. A lot of people believe that that he faked the injury to go home because he was having problems with his wife. And what do you think? I don't know. I don't know for sure. Did you see him when you were home? No. It bothered me in the beginning that they looked at me as if I was a deserter. It's crazy. Basically, I try not to go anywhere that much, because I don't really like dealing with public. And basically, that's all they want to talk about. So I just, I try not to, but I can't keep from it, because I got two girls that plays basketball. And so I'm out there all the time. At their games. Right. Wow. So you're at their games in this small town, so all these people you'd rather not be having to deal with, you have to deal with. Right, exactly. And the guys in your unit, what kind of attitude are you getting from them? At first, I was given negative attitudes from them, very negative. Because they would come home on leave, and no one would call me. They wouldn't call to say, hi, or anything. To me, that bothered me. I didn't understand that. And then I had even my platoon sergeant, he came home, didn't call me. I called a few of them that I knew was in. They didn't return my call. It was frustrating for me. I didn't understand it. I thought that they was just faulting me for being home. And actually, I found out, some of them really was. The people signed up for the regular Army, or the Air Force, or the Navy, they and their families know that it's going to take over their lives. They're going to move from base to base. They might go to war and have to deal with that. The National Guard is different. And much of this documentary series ends up being about people, complete families, who never expected to go to war, and what war does to them. Matt's mother cries on the phone with him. He grows up amazingly fast. Sergeant Short ends up proud of the work he does in Iraq, keeping his men safe. And for Joe, who was re-endlisted against his will, after all, it's hurt his marriage, given him permanent injury, and he lost his church. When he was away, attendance dropped to seven people. And then, nobody was coming to services anymore. Until his unit's deployment is finished, and the rest of them come back from Iraq, his job every day is to go to the National Guard armory, where he and two other injured guys do some paperwork, when there's paperwork to do. They sit by the phone. They answer it when it rings. He reads the paper. He started reading some technical manuals to pass the time. The phone doesn't ring much. Coming up, the Battle of Fallujah. At the end of it, Marines wondered if this was one for the history books, if this is one that they would teach someday. When you hear one lieutenant describe what his men did, you'll understand why. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. Good morning, Fallujah. So, Jack, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], how are you doing? How are you? I'm doing pretty good. I'm trying to light a cigarette. Right when I went on emergency leave, I ended up smoking again. And then Fallujah's like, it doesn't deny of your nicotine habits. It's like a mandatory. So people who don't smoke, now smoke. People that used to dip now dip and smoke. I say, I was absolutely out of cigarettes. And we had Marines that were coming up with these little Iraqi cigarettes. Because we were paying the interpreters to get cigarettes for all the Marines. And lo and behold, my old buddy friggin' sent me a package. And then it was like six packs of cigarettes. And all he wrote was, I started smoking in Fallujah when I went. Here's some smokes for you. I'm like, oh my God. So what's been happening today? Today's pretty laid-back. All my guys are out in the old firm base. And we're still hardening the firm bases. It's pretty funny. We go to these places, and we harden these firm bases. And you fill, I don't know, 10,00, 15,000 sandbags. You lay 200 rolls of Concertina wire. You put out trip flares, fill the earthen berms. With Charlie Company, specifically, we do that for 7 to 10 days, and then they say, hey, you're moving. You're like, oh, you're kidding me. Then you turn it over to somebody else. And they're like, hey, nice firm base. You're welcome, bastard. So you were doing this house-to-house clearing stuff. This is what we're seeing on our TVs here. Oh yes. This is pretty crazy. We push from the north part of the city through the breach on foot, all the way to the center of the city. And anywhere you went, you'd look out a window, and a sniper would try to shoot you. Every time you moved, you don't just walk across. You don't walk anywhere. Everywhere you go, you're moving to get behind cover, even if it's a telephone pole. Telephone pole, if that's all you've got, that's good cover, if that's all you got. I saw tons of Marines hide behind gutters in the roads, shooting from underneath gutters. Four inches of cover, that's nothing. But if all you've got's four inches, four inches is beautiful. The whole first night, we went basically two blocks the whole first night. Can you describe what was it like? What did you do? Well they had the first day of the initial bombing. And it was actually really good. We sat all day. And we watched the city just being bombarded. They were hitting targets. They were hitting key fortifications. And people were moving around. They were hitting them. JDAMs, laser-guided bombs. And so we sat all day. There was this symphony of destruction. And it just played out until it got dark. And then when it got dark, it's like, all right. Now that it's dark, it's time for the grunts to go in. But yeah, the first night we went in, going through the breach, this was pretty weird. We had psy-ops behind us. And they're blaring music into the city. It's just huge speakers are screaming music into the city. What music? I don't know what the tune was, from Full Metal Jacket. At the very end of Full Metal Jacket, they're walking through Saigon, I think it is, or, it's one of the big battles at the end of the movie. And they're on patrol. And there's this funky '70s music going. And that's what they were blaring, as I crossed the breach. And all I could think of was Full Metal Jacket. And I was like, you got to be kidding me. You're playing that while I'm crossing this breach? That's not what I want to hear. Yeah, what music would you have chosen? "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor," that's a good one, really fast-paced. But yeah, they were just playing crazy stuff. And they've got some kind of method. I don't know how it works. It was definitely annoying me. I can't imagine what it was doing to the bad guys. Yeah, we were pushing into the city. Even on certain days, you push into the city. And as you progress further, the mosques would be screaming for people to rise up. And there was one, it was the middle of the night. And we were pushing through these alleys to push forward. And I just remember this mosque, the guy on the speaker was just screaming. He was just like yelling in Arabic, a-la-la-la-la. And he's like, ha-la-la-la jihad, ha-la-la-la jihad, jihad, jihad. Ha-la-la-la-la, jihad. And I was like, God, will somebody shoot those speakers. 10 minutes later, there was just this mass of gunfire, and all the speakers went silent, because they shot all the speakers. The fourth day into the fight, we went from the-- I was at the [? al-Hidra ?] mosque with my mortars. And we got the word we were pushing to the mayor's complex, which is right in the center of the city. And we pushed to the mayor's complex in tracks. And we were maybe less than 100 meters between where the tracks dropped us off and the building we had to go to. And our foot movement from there, it was basically a sprint, our sprint from the track all the way to the building. And we had snipers trying to peg us the whole way. Just rounds zinging by, hitting the dirt. And we got into this building, and that's when we found out that the entire mayor's complex was surrounded by snipers. And they were just pinging at anybody that could frickin' walk in the open. So we initially took all our extra mortar ammunition, and each mortar can probably weighs, I don't know, 30 to 40 pounds. We have our Marines divvy up. And they're carrying mortar rounds in their pack. And then we have an extra, probably, 8, 10 cans that we're taking into combat. So we tie these things onto these huge D9 tractors. And we cinch them down. And everything was good until we go through the breach and one of the D9s gets stuck in this huge mud bog. It sinks, because it's so heavy. And so we got to send people back into the breach to get our ammo. But the problem was, when they pulled it off the first D9, they cut the straps, instead of untying it. However they got it off, they cut it off and they brought it. We can't reattach it. So we had to use a casualty stretcher. So we use this casualty stretcher, and we heap all of our ammo on it. So when we move, I got two Marines lugging 200 pounds of ammo. You're not moving fast. You move across a road in a dead sprint carrying 200 pounds of ammo, the two of you, it's a shuffle. It's a shuffle. You're shuffling across the road, like, don't get shot. Don't get shot. Don't get shot. Oh, man. By the way, were you ever scared? Well, to a certain degree, yeah. You're definitely freaked out at certain times. The first night we were moving forward, and it's probably the only time I was ever scared for my company and my battalion, we were pushing forward. It's pitch black. There's no moon. And it's raining, and it's drizzling. And it's 40 degrees out. And everybody's freezing. And my unit's pushing forward. And it's just contact the whole way. And all of a sudden, we get the call over the radio, we got a Marine down. We got a Marine down. We got IEDs in this alley. An IED just went off. So two Marines, they went in to get this guy. Boom. Friggin', these two other guys go down. So now they got three guys in this alley that they think is-- the whole alley is IEDs. And that was the big fear, is that there were just going to be IEDs all across the city. I was like, oh my God. We're going to take so many casualties. It's going to take forever for us to move. Can we do it? Sure. But it's going to be absolutely horrible. At the same time, 3rd platoon had massive contact further down to the east. 1st platoon was actually held up, because they were in a massive engagement to our flank, far east. Bravo Company was just shooting all across their line. And I was like, how can they-- they wanted us to push all the way to the Hidra mosque that night. And I was like, how can they expect us to push to the Hidra mosque. It's totally non-feasible. We got three Marines that are down, and they are wounded. And it was two, three minutes later that the platoon commander came back on. He's like, it wasn't IEDs. It wasn't IEDs. There's a guy in a second story, and he's frickin' throwing hand grenades in this alley. And so they just light this guy up with everything they own. They're throwing the kitchen sink up at this guy. They finally kill this guy. And then the same time, our tanks that were attached to us, Panzer, these guys call us. And he's actually on the road facing east. And he's like, when he calls, you can hear his 240 Golf shooting, and his 50-cal shooting. And he's just like, oh my God. He's like, you need to get somebody else down here. He's like, there's 50 to 60 people retreating from the north to south. And they're just flowing across the road. He's like I can't kill them all. And he must have killed 30, 35 people. And he didn't, he couldn't even-- I don't even know if he made a dent. They were just flowing to the south away from us. This is your second time in Iraq, correct? Yeah. Yeah, and the first time, you didn't see combat, anything like this, right? No, no, no. It was pretty cool. My platoon was the first Marine unit on the deck in Mosul. And so we got there expecting to get off and get into a firefight. But it wasn't like that. It wasn't anything like Fallujah. It wasn't really out of control. As soon as we got there, CNN showed up. And they were like, the Marines are on the deck in Mosul. And then everything quieted down. Everybody was like, oh, US forces are here, good to go. Everything's good. Go home, relax. And I did a lot of missions where I would go and just stand on the road and wave at cars. And I really felt like I was trying to collect money. Money for the poor. And I'm out there with a gun. Now that you've seen combat, would you want to go into it again? Or do you feel like you're cured? Yeah. It's a good question. Some people definitely are, they're like, that's it, we're done. But I don't know. It's a tough thing. It's really tough. Well, now that you-- I will say that now that I've been in pretty intense combat, you could say, I'm like, that's good to go. We need to [UNINTELLIGIBLE] dragons, as we say. We're good. We need to get our job done and get home. Yeah. Right. Did you ever get the boxes we sent you, of food? Oh, I got them. Yeah, the artichoke hearts? Yeah, that was great. It was mostly junk food. Oh my God. And those artichoke hearts, I was laughing. I was laughing to tears. And a foreign observer came in, this lieutenant, and he's like, no way. I love artichoke hearts. And I was like, well you are in luck, Neville. And I was like, because I've got a whole jar of artichoke hearts that's got your name on it. And he was like, oh yeah. But we get a lot of good stuff. We get tons of stuff from kids in schools. And we get a lot of crayon drawings that are, you know. The marine is this huge person. And the Iraqis these little small people. And we're throwing hand grenades. And they're like, run away. We get some, though. Especially when you get into middle school and high school, then you get the political kids. The funniest one that comes to my mind was from some youth group out of New York or something. They sent us a bunch of stuff. A couple of them were like, I think President Bush is crazy, and you got to be kidding me, and what are we doing over there. So listen, I have a joke for you. I love Black Hawks. But you know who hates them? Iraqi sheep farmers. Iraqi sheep farmers? Yeah. Iraqi sheep farmers hate Black Hawks. I don't get it. OK so also on this program is this comic who's been touring in Fallujah. His name is Tom Irwin. Oh yeah, no, he was out here, and all the pogues got to watch him, because everybody else was in the field. That was pretty funny. Oh, you didn't see him. No. We were in Fallujah. I don't know. It burns up all my boys. And they always get ticked off at that kind of stuff. They're like, why are they doing a show for them? They're not getting shot at. Wow, well, we can't wait to see you here back home. I can't wait to get back, see my little boy. Yeah. All right, man. Well, listen, thanks again for all this-- --talking to you. --al this time, yeah. Be safe, as we say. That's all we can say from back here. But anyway, we can't wait to see you. Sounds good. All right, man. I'm going to talk to you later. Give everybody my love, OK? I will. All right, Rob. All right. Until then, bye-bye. Marine Lieutenant Rob Miller outside Fallujah, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, talking with his uncle, Jack Hitt, one of our regular contributors here at This American Life. Ha-la-la-la-la, jihad. Ha-la-la, jihad. Jihad, jihad. Ha-la-la, jihad. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Carl King has a spare bedroom in his house in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that's filled with court transcripts and police reports. There's a stack next to his bed, too, maybe 1,000 pages high. The case that he's working on right now is a murder, and the crime scene photos are kind of hard to look at-- a young woman, dead and bloody in the back of a store. The police think that she was murdered in a robbery, but Carl has his own theory. This murder occurred behind certain doors where the manager would be doing the operation, the daily operation, so this is certainly someone knew about this store and the full operation. It has to be an inside job. Carl King's not a detective. He's not a lawyer. He's just a guy who takes on cases that the police think they've already solved-- Cases where somebody has already been locked away in prison, but where Carl King thinks they got the wrong guy. Like this case. We got this case approximately two years ago. And we're actually reinvestigating the case, you know, to overturn this conviction to give this young man back his life, actually. I got involved looking into these type of cases where guys are wrongfully accused based on a friend of mine was actually in that type of situation where he was accused wrongfully. To save his friend, Carl taught himself how to read court records and find witnesses. He has a special gift for convincing people who normally wouldn't talk to the law that it's the right thing to testify. In fact, his lack of official training might be his biggest advantage in these cases. Today on our program, the story of how he got into this line of work, how he saved his friend, how a complete amateur cracked the case that the New York criminal justice system-- some of the most experienced detectives and lawyers in the world-- couldn't crack. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. The story you're about to hear today happens in two acts. The first act is tragedy. The second act is redemption. The first half of this story is like this slow motion train wreck. A teenager tells a lie that sets this process in motion where one bad thing happens after another after another, getting worse and worse until an innocent man-- a complete stranger to this teenager-- ends up incarcerated for years. In the second half, an unlikely group of people come together and simply decide that they're going to set things right and teach themselves how. It's really something. We'll get back to Carl King halfway through our story. Let's start with the crime. Our story begins in 1980 in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn among people Carl didn't even know back then. Anya Bourg investigated the story. On April 10, 1980, Martell Hamilton was standing outside his junior high school. He was yelling up at his girlfriend in a school window when a kid named Thomas Charlemagne came riding up on his bike. Thomas was 14 years old, and he was the kind of kid who tags around with older kids, trying to fit in, eager to be liked. Martell was a year older than Thomas and remembers it this way. He called me by my nickname, which was Johnny. So he said, Johnny, Johnny, your brother got shot. Your brother got shot. And I said, what? And he said, your brother Mario got shot. And he said, Johnny, I saw what happened. Remember those words, "I saw what happened." They start a chain reaction that in the end takes over 21 years to undo, and they're completely untrue. I think he only told me that so that maybe trying to make me feel better, and trying-- thinking that he's being helpful, you know? But he only-- you know, instead of being helpful, ended up creating a disaster. Martell followed Thomas Charlemagne, and they ran back to the scene of the crime. So as I got there, I saw my brother bleeding, you know, heavily. And I felt like I was outside of my body because I couldn't believe, you know, that my brother was really shot. He was bleeding so profusely from his eye and his nostrils, and they asked me, do you know who this is? And I told them, yes, that's my brother. And they asked me how old he was, and I told them how old he was. And then next question they asked me, you know, do you know would want to shoot your brother? And I said, no, I don't. And I said, but this guy-- my friend here said he saw what happened. And from that moment on, they held on to Thomas Charlemagne as a witness. The police put the boys in the back of a patrol car, and they took them to the station. They escorted Thomas Charlemagne to an interrogation room to question him, and they told Martell the news that his brother Mario had died. No one talked to him. No one asked how he was doing. No one told him where his family was. They simply sat him in a chair to wait outside the room where Thomas Charlemagne was being interviewed. Martell remembers Detective Wasser, the lead detective in the case, as a lumbering white guy who yelled a lot. And from where he was sitting, he could overhear Thomas's entire interrogation. What I heard was he raised his voice at Thomas. Did you see did you see this guy with a gun? And Thomas said, no, I don't-- I don't see him with a gun. So he was like, how do you mean you don't see him with a gun? If he shot him, you got to see a gun. Did you see a gun? Like-- and he-- you can hear Thomas's voice quivering, like, yeah, I-- I guess so. I guess so. Yeah, I did see-- I did see him with a gun. Yeah, I did see him with a gun. In the neighborhood, Martell says, Thomas had a reputation for lying. For instance, he told Martell's friends he was from Jamaica because they were from Jamaica, when in fact he was from Haiti. But the police didn't know any of that, and they kept 14-year-old Thomas in a room for hours on end, grilled him, showed him photo after photo, until at some point he did the only thing he knew how to do to end it. He pointed at a photo at random. The unlucky guy whose photo he picked was a man named Collin Warner. The next day, the police gave the same treatment to Martell. Detective Wasser came by his house and sat him at the kitchen table. Martell was 15. Then he laid out four photos on the table, like how you would lay cards out evenly across. And he said, take a look at these photos. Do you know any of these guys? And I said, no, I don't. So he said, you sure you don't know none of these guys? He said, look again. And I looked at the photo, and I said, no, I don't know any of these guys. Now mind you, I was still crying at the time when he was asking me these questions. And he said what about this guy right here? Then he took Collin Warner's photo and pushed it out of the lineup and let it stick above the other three photos. And he said, you don't know this guy? You don't-- you ever seen this guy before? And I said, I might have. I might have seen him before. And the only reason why I told him that was because, you know, he just kept badgering me. And I just wanted him to stop, so I told him what he wanted to hear. And he said, well, that's the guy that shot your brother. And then he took up the four photos, and then he walked out of the house. Thomas Charlemagne's original lie was rapidly becoming the truth. And remember, Thomas was just 14. Once he started lying to the cops, he acted like any kid caught in a lie. He elaborated on his story, which only made things worse. He told the cops that Mario talked to him as he lay dying, that the shooter waved the gun in his face before he ran away. It started sounding like something out of a bad cop movie, but the police believed it, and they rushed several miles down Flatbush Avenue to arrest the guy in a photo, Collin Warner. OK. This is the block I used to live on. I used to live 801 Prospect Place. So you were living here with your mom? Yeah. I was living there with my mom on the second floor. This is Collin Warner. That day, at the moment he was supposedly shooting Mario Hamilton, he'd been driving around with friends, enjoying one of the first nice days that spring. And later, he played basketball in the park. He got home at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. When I came home, though, my mother answered the door. And she's all red in the face, hysterical, asks me, where was you-- where were you that morning? And what did you do? And the police was at the house looking for me about half an hour ago and said they wanted to talk to me about a murder. You know, so she told me to call them. I call them, and I spoke to a Detective Wasser because he left his card. And he tells me all he wanted to do was to talk to me in connection with a homicide that day. And I tell him, what you want to talk to me about when I never kill nobody? I never saw no murder. He said, no, we just want to talk. So I hanged up the phone on him. Remember, Colin was 18, a Rastafarian teenager in army fatigues with dreadlocks down his back. His mom made him call back. They came, came up to the apartment, you know, and they want to take me down to the precinct. I said, for what? They said, just for questioning. And they led me-- they led me down the stairs, and when I came in the car, then they put on the handcuffs. And that was that. You never came back here? Never came back till 21 years later. The police took Collin to the same station where, hours earlier, Thomas Charlemagne had identified him out of a mug book as the murderer of Mario Hamilton. At the time, Collin had only been living in the states a couple of years. He immigrated from Trinidad with his family in 1978. He told the police where he'd been all day. They called his friends, who are now his alibis, to question them. But early the next morning, they booked him for murder and sent him to Rikers Island, just north of New York City. I don't know, man. It's just-- this just happened out of the blue, and a lot of people saying like, man, you have to have known something. You understand what I'm saying? I said, I don't know nothing. It just happened. One day I was free. The next day I was locked up. Every few weeks, Collin would be dragged in for court hearings he didn't understand. He'd come before the bench. The judge would say a few things in legalese that didn't make it any clearer, and then he'd go back to his cell. It all felt completely random. Meanwhile, back in Flatbush where the shooting took place, most of the neighborhood knew that Collin was innocent. The kid who died, Mario, was from Jamaica, and so was everybody that he and his brother hung around with. To them it seemed crazy that a Trinidadian like Collin-- a Trini, as they called him-- would have had anything to do with this murder. The groups didn't mix. Mario and his Jamaican friends didn't hang with Rastas like Collin. Collin wasn't even from the neighborhood. And word on the street was that the kid who died was shot by one of his friends, a guy named Norman Simmonds. Norman hadn't kept his plans much of a secret. The day of the shooting, he saw Mario's brother Martell and told him he was looking for Mario, that he was going to kill him as revenge for the murder of a kid named Spangler. When Martell was questioned by the police, he told the cops about it. It's in the police report. Here's Martell. That same night when he laid out those cards on the dining table and when I was crying and he was saying to me, take a look at these guys, see if you recognize-- I said, but you know, this guy Norman told me he was going to shoot my brother. And, forget about Norman. Norman has nothing to do with this. I want you take a look at these guys. Look at these guys and see if you recognize a face. And that was the attitude from there. I didn't want to know anything about Norman. Police reports show that over the next two weeks, two other teenagers also told the police about Norman and gave them the name of an eyewitness. But it took the police six months to act on the information. Then in late 1980, they finally arrested Norman Simmonds for Mario Hamilton's murder. You'd think this would have been good news for Collin, but here's how he heard about it. Some time in November I went to court. And when they call our case, it was not-- it was now Collin Warner and Norman Simmonds. So when he went back to the bullpen, I asked him, like, who are you? You know what I'm saying? He said, I'm Norman. You know, they have me for the-- for killing Mario. So I said, I'm here for killing Mario, too. And he said, but how is-- how is that? I said, listen, man. I don't know what the hell is going on. I'm here for six months now. You understand what I'm saying? And that was it. That was the whole beginning. Every day at every court date after that, we were together. Didn't see no difference between him or me. It took a year and a half more for the trial to begin. One of the reasons it took so long was that the only witness, Thomas Charlemagne, refused to testify. It wasn't until he was picked up on a robbery charge that he agreed. The trial went well for Collin. 11 jurors moved to acquit. One held out for a conviction. It was a hung jury, so the prosecution offered a plea bargain-- a two to six year sentence for Norman Simmonds, and if he accepted, Collin would walk. His story-- this story-- would end right here. It's a bizarre moment. Norman, who's only 18 and actually guilty, gets to decide both their futures-- the fate of the innocent in the hands of the guilty. They told Norman to think about it. So they sent us back to the bullpen area in the back. You know I mean-- And he asked me what should he do? I said, listen man, you shouldn't ask me that. That should be your decision. He asked you? Yeah. What should he do? I say, you're not supposed to ask me that. And years later, when I'm telling other people this story, they say, now you made a mistake. You should have told him what to do. But I'm saying, no, that's not my place. He knows what to do. I didn't-- Did you think you made a mistake? No. No not to this day I didn't believe I made a mistake. I mean, if you have the guts to take somebody's life, at least have the guts to take the penalty. But still, he was so young that he was still trying to, like, say, yo, I'm going to beat this. Norman turned down the plea bargain, and a second trial was set. But Collin was optimistic about his chances, as was his lawyer, Bruce Richenstrick. I remember opening to the jury and telling them that this case was a one witness case and that the one witness they were going to hear was a liar-- an unmitigated, pathological liar. In this kind of story, this is usually where you hear that Collin was represented by a drunk who fell asleep at his trial, or an overworked and inexperienced public defender, or someone who never handled a murder trial before. That wasn't the case here. Bruce Richenstrick, Collin's lawyer in both his first and second trial, was a former homicide DA with years of experience. He says he never thought the case would get very far because, as a former prosecutor, he knew the prosecution's evidence was lousy. In fact, there wasn't any evidence tying Collin to the crime except Thomas Charlemagne, that 14-year-old kid who told the cops he saw everything and later picked Collin out of a mug book. But his story kept changing. First, he said that Mario was shot in a drive-by shooting. Later, he said the car stopped and the shooter got out. First he said there was two people in the car. Later, it was four. And most importantly, he initially told the cops that Collin fired the gun that killed Mario. But then at trial, he surprised everyone and said Collin was just the driver. Norman did the shooting. All this lying was good news for Bruce Richenstrick, Collin's defense attorney. Here he reads from his cross-examination of Thomas Charlemagne at the trial. And I say to him, "Mr. Charlemagne, when you first spoke to Detective Wasser in this case, did you tell him that Collin Warner was the driver of this car? Answer, yes. And did you also tell him that the driver of the car was the very same person who shot Mario Hamilton? Answer, yes. So when you first spoke to Detective Wasser and you told him that Collin Warner shot Mario Hamilton, that wasn't true, was it? Answer, no. Question, and when you went before a grand jury in reference to this case, you knew in your mind, did you not, that Collin Warner never shot Mario Hamilton. Is that right? Answer, yes. Question, and then you proceeded to tell the grand jury in April of 1980 that Collin Warner shot Mario Hamilton. Answer, yes. Question, so you lied to the grand jury? Answer, yes." I mean, from reading this transcript, it looks like this is an open and shut, like Collin's going to walk out the door. Yeah. The best thing that could possibly happen for any defendant is to have the only witness agree in front of a jury that he lied. One thing I remember about Thomas's testimony was that he never looked me in my eye. Again, Collin Warner. Even when he pointed me out in court, he said-- he bent his head down and pointed his finger there. And the judge even had to say, listen, you look-- you sure he's the right guy? And he just glanced at me and, you know, said, yes, Collin Warner is right there. Because he knew he was lying. He know. He knew. Everybody knew. When he was giving his testimony, people were laughing. Even the court officers had bets that I was going to win. I was going to win my case. How did you know that? No, they told us, you know, because they see us coming to court every day. You know what I'm saying? And sometimes they talk to us and some would say, listen, man. You have a good shot, man. You know what I'm saying? That guy's lying. The trial lasted less than a week, and according to Collin, the jury deliberated just three hours. The day of the verdict, I think the verdict came in at 12 o'clock. They read my verdict first. You know, Collin Warner, you know, guilty of murder in the second degree. And Norman Simmonds, guilty of murder in the second degree. And after that, like it hit 12 o'clock. And there are some bells downtown Brooklyn. They started to ring, so the whole courtroom was quiet because you can't hear when the judge speaks. So everybody was quiet until the bells struck 12 times. And here, I'm telling you, when that foreperson said guilty, it's like my whole life flashed in front of my face. You know, and my knees just got weak-- you know what I'm saying-- because I sat down in the chair because I couldn't believe it. Even to this day, I'm saying, like, how could you say guilty listening to the evidence? If this doesn't seem to make much sense, remember that Collin and Norman were on trial together, and the police insisted Collin was involved. So even though Thomas's testimony didn't really add up, to the jury, Collin must have had something to do with it. And Bruce Richenstrick has another theory. He thinks the guilty verdict had more to do with what was going on outside the courtroom than in. The crime rate was soaring, and people were reacting in some pretty extreme ways. If you recall, within months of this particular case, the Avenue X murder of Willie Turks had taken place, where a mob beat a black transit worker to death. Within a year or two of that case, we had Bernhard Goetz shooting four blacks on a subway train and ending up getting a year in jail for possession of a weapon. There is-- there was a pervasive, overriding fear in the city, I believe, at that time. And I think that, to some degree, that might have had something to do with Collin Warner's conviction, that he was at that time a black man accused of murder. Well, that's all the jury needed. The judge perhaps needed a little more. Judge Albert Murray, who presided over Collin's trial, was one of the few African American judges in New York. During sentencing, he gave a sort of tortured apologetic speech to the courtroom. He said, quote, "With all my training, or at least what I've gone through, when it comes to a point like this, I realize how inadequate or how much I rely upon not pure guess, but upon hope, and how mysterious it is and how hard it is to understand why this situation exists right now. The system that we have, we put in process. Is it perfect? Is this verdict true? I don't pretend to know. I don't have the capacity to actually know." End quote. Bruce Richenstrick says he'd never heard anything like it. I think that Judge Murray was voicing what the overriding feeling was in the courtroom. How did the jury reach that verdict? And there wasn't even anything in the courtroom-- in an atmosphere in the courtroom-- to give us any kind of indication that this result was going to be reached. It was completely a surprise. It was a surprise to me. It was a surprise to Collin Warner. And by the judge's words, which I hadn't heard in a long time, I think it was probably a surprise to him. Judge Murray had no choice but to sentence Collin. He gave him the minimum allowed by law, 15 years to life. The sentence didn't hit me until I got to the reception center for the Department of Corrections. They deloused me. Had me-- had about 50 of us in a shower area, stripped butt naked, you know, sprayed delousing on our arms, you know, on our testicles and then bending over and spraying it in our anus and all that. You know what I mean? And it was so degrading. You know what I mean? And then I started to cry, you know what I mean, because I'm saying, like, you can't do nothing about it. You're here at these people's mercy. You know what I mean? And they lock you into a cell where there's a lot of prisoners. It's just like tiers upon tiers of prisoners, and everybody is shouting. And it's like-- it's like a mad house, you know? And I'm just trying to like-- you know, where the hell-- how did I get here? You know what I'm saying? It's like I was transported to another planet. This is where Carl King comes in, the guy you heard at the very beginning of the show. He was one of Collin Warner's oldest friends. They grew up together in a village in Trinidad, got even closer when they moved to Brooklyn. Carl took up Collin's case, partly because they were friends, and partly because he just couldn't help himself. He's the kind of guy who can devote his life to a cause, and Collin became his cause. He visited Collin regularly in jail, went to his court appearances. Here's Carl. It was a bad feeling. Talking about it now, you know, my pulse is just racing because I tell myself that, you know, it could have been me. And I felt like it's me because it was actually to see like there's a big whale come and just swallow you up, and nobody can just dig in that whale's stomach. It was-- I felt hopeless at that time. Carl and Collin had only just finished high school. Their families had no money. They didn't know any lawyers, and they weren't politically connected. So Carl made do, and he used the connections that he had. Even if you come pick up some garbage, I would really talk to you and tell you, listen, I have a friend in jail, and he's innocent. Actually, everybody I encountered, Collin's case was always the issue. Carl and Collin strategized about appeals. Carl raised money on the outside. Collin learned to use the prison law library. He put together the first appeal himself. It was denied. For the second appeal, Carl found a lawyer in the yellow pages-- also denied. The next was a real estate lawyer Carl met while he was closing on his house-- denied. And then they managed to get one of the most famous defense lawyers in the country, William Kunstler, defender of the Chicago Seven, Lenny Bruce, Martin Luther King. That appeal failed as well. As the years passed, Collin wasn't doing well in jail. He kept getting in fights, mostly with the guards. He spent four of his first 10 years in prison in the box-- solitary confinement. It was the fact that he shouldn't have been there at all, he says, that made him such a nightmare inmate. Because I'm saying, like, the rules don't apply to me then because I'm innocent. But that wasn't the case, you know? In their eyes, I was guilty. Eventually, Collin stopped rebelling. He enrolled in classes and work programs. Carl would visit often, bringing food, new clothes. One day he brought a friend with him. She and Collin hit it off and eventually got married. By 1993, Collin had been in prison for over a dozen years, and he and Carl took stock. All their appeals had failed. Maybe their strategy was wrong. They'd focused on legal technicalities at the trial. Had the rules of evidence been followed properly? Was there misconduct by the prosecution? That sort of thing. Carl wanted to take a new approach. He wanted to reinvestigate the crime, come up with new evidence and witnesses, do the detective work the detectives never did. At that point, money was exhausted. And we knew that we have to try to clear Collin's name, not based on legal, technical stuff, but actually what happened on that day. We were going to try to see how we can go about proving his innocence. But how do you go about investigating a crime over a decade after it's been committed? Carl had no experience. Up till then, he'd done a little construction, drove a cab. But he saw an opportunity when he bumped into his brother-in-law one day with a stack of court documents in his hands. His brother-in-law was working as a process server, hand-delivering legal papers, like eviction notices and subpoenas, and filing them at court. Carl thought a job like that would be a good way to learn how the system works and to meet attorneys who might help with the case, so he got his license to start serving papers. He learned how to track people down, how to order court files, and how to read legal motions. He took all the legal papers back from Collin's lawyer. And I started familiarizing with the reports as to the police reports, the grand jury minutes, the trial transcripts, and also the motions, the pretrial motions, started familiarizing with it. Then my clients were attorneys. I started asking them questions, you know? Some of the attorneys seemed sympathetic, but none were ready to jump in and help. Then one day, Carl was standing in front of a downtown Brooklyn courthouse trying to drum up some work, handing out business cards to anyone in a suit holding a briefcase. And he gave one to a lawyer named William Robedee. Robedee had recently left the DA's office and was starting his own private practice, mainly housing and divorce court. He needed help, so a few days later he called, and Carl arranged to stop by his office. He introduced himself to be William Robedee. And there was a lady sitting at the side of the desk, happened to be his wife. After a while, I saw a guy walk by in a towel, so I was thinking it's strange. Well, that happened to be his roommate. They were sharing. Well, at the time, the office was my apartment on 77th Street in Brooklyn. This is William Robedee. So I mean there was two bedrooms in the back, and then there was, like, a living room, and then the room that I used as an office, and the kitchen. And I'd say the first few times he came to pick up work from me-- papers that needed to be served-- we had a few conversations, and we kind of hit it off as friends fairly fast. We started working together. Immediately after, I was telling him, Saturday I'm going upstate to visit my friend. And I told him the story as to how my friend is in jail for something he did not do, and he was pretty much touched. And then the lady who always sits at his side, she came closer to hear the story. And we sat there for, like, about two, three hours that day when I first tell them about the story. So one day, he told me shortly after, why don't I bring, you know, some materials over? He brought it over in a box. It was about a foot and a half-- good 18 inches thick-- of paper. He had the trial transcripts, police paperwork, discovery materials that would have been in possession of Collin's defense attorney at the time of the trial in 1982. And myself and Shirley sat up probably till 3 o'clock in the morning that night just passing papers back and forth around the table and going through about four pots of coffee. And I would think before we went to bed that night, I was convinced he didn't do it. I mean, there was no murder weapon recovered. There were no forensics. And the bullet had a downward trajectory in their own autopsy report from 20 years ago. And the theory of the case was that it was a drive by shooting, which, unless you are sitting on top of a tank, it would be physically impossible for the murder to have happened the way that the witnesses testified to it at the trial. Carl and Robedee worked out a barter arrangement. Carl would deliver papers in exchange for Robedee's help with Collin's case. It was 1999. Collin had been in jail for almost 20 years, which might seem odd considering that he had a sentence of 15 years to life. But when you come up before the parole board, part of what they're looking for is that you accept responsibility for your crime and show remorse. But for Collin, accepting responsibility would have meant lying. Reading the minutes of his parole board hearing, you see the awful trap he's in. At one point in the transcript, Collin says he's innocent, but Commissioner Rafelli, who's conducting the meeting, responds like this. Quote, "As far as we're concerned, the parole board, you are guilty of murder. The parole board does not determine issues of guilt or innocence. If you want to continue to fight that issue, by all means, get yourself an attorney and appeal it. Take it to the Court of Appeals. Take it to the US Supreme Court, wherever you will. But until a court of higher jurisdiction tells us you are innocent, as far as we're concerned, you're guilty, and that's all there is to it. So I want you to be aware that your protestations of innocence, as far as we're concerned, fall on deaf ears." Unquote. After arguing his case for a couple of pages, Collin finally gives up, and he says, "Whatever I tell you, you're not going to believe me anyway." Needless to say, his parole was denied. And it was denied every time he went up for parole. Here's the catch. If he lied and said he committed the crime, he would have been released long ago. Coming up, getting a murderer to admit to murder and getting him to help the helpless. Our story continues in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today we're spending our entire program on the story of Carl King and how he managed to right a 20-year wrong against some pretty amazing odds. Today's show was first broadcast back in 2005. Again, here's reporter Anya Bourg. Carl King and attorney William Robedee took to meeting regularly. They'd gather in Robedee's apartment and discuss strategy. They both agreed they had to go back and uncover what actually happened on the day of the murder, so they poured over the police notes and paperwork from the trial. There were names that kept coming up-- Mario, the victim, his brother, Martell, the real shooter, Norman, and the main eyewitness, Thomas Charlemagne. They thought this group was a good place to start. Here's Robedee. I knew that they knew something. I mean, you know, there's Mario, Martell, Norman, Carlton, and all these guys were kind of bonded together in the way that kind of only teenage boys end up bonded together. I mean, the whole story just had that kind of flavor to it where you just knew that if there was a truth to this thing, then one of these kids knew it. So they decided to start with the most obvious suspect, the real shooter, Norman Simmonds, the guy Collin had been tried and convicted with. In a weird twist, because he was a minor and a model inmate, he'd only served nine years in prison, and he proved surprisingly easy for Robedee to track down. To be honest with you, I took a stab in the dark that an address that we found on the internet was him and sent him a letter. Believe it or not, that worked. He called. They arranged for Norman come over the next day to give a deposition. So the following afternoon, they were there waiting-- a court reporter at the kitchen table, Robedee's wife, Shirley, lying in the living room floor arranging the papers, and Robedee, preparing the questions. We had an appointment for him at 3 o'clock. The doorbell rang at 2:00. And I looked outside, and it was, at that time, a brand new S550 Mercedes sedan double parked in front of my house. And I said, I think that might be Norman. And he was coming up around the stairs, shouting up something to the effect of, yo, where's the lawyer? He was, like, you know, dressed like kind of, you know, a pop star. Shirley Robedee. You know, the Versace suit and laid out and perfect hair and, you know, with the hand inside the jacket pocket. Yeah I believe, you know-- and I kind of saw enough close enough evidence of that every time he's moved his jacket-- that he was sitting in my living room well armed. So Robedee, his wife, Shirley, and a now slightly freaked out court reporter all sat down and listened as Norman Simmonds walked them through what happened on the day of Mario's shooting. Since you can't be tried for the same crime twice, he told them the story candidly-- at times, too candidly. He actually demonstrated on me, physically. He asked me to stand up and play Mario Hamilton while he came up behind me with his finger and his thumb and showed me exactly how he shot him. Norman basically used me as his demonstration dummy and where he put his finger on my neck is exactly where that bullet went in on that autopsy report, which was utterly consistent, as opposed to the story that was told at the trial, which was utterly inconsistent. What Norman had given us was the actual story of how the murder actually happened. He stated to us that, to make a long story short, that himself and a person named Mossep-- who we later learned was named Dayton Morgan-- were walking basically behind Erasmus Hall High School, which is on Flatbush Avenue. And they spotted Mario Hamilton, and they walked up behind Mario Hamilton. Norman took a pistol from his waistband and basically almost at kind of a point blank range, shot Mario through the top of his neck. That sequence of events, we had never actually heard before. There was no car. There was no driver. And most importantly, there was no Collin Warner. Norman said he'd killed Mario in revenge for the death of a friend the week before, just like the neighborhood kids told the cops at the time. By the end of the deposition, Robedee had only one question left. So after we had stopped, I said to him again, you know, why, why did you let this happen? Why did it go on so long? And his answer to that question began with, I was only 15. And he got very, very emotional. He was physically crying. The only way I can explain it, it was like a dam bursting with Norman. It all just kind of rushed out of him. I believe I hugged him. The most important thing Carl and Robedee got from Norman wasn't his confession. That alone isn't enough to vacate a conviction. What Norman gave them was the names of all the people who'd seen him commit the crime, real eyewitnesses, people who were within feet when he fired the gun, but who'd never testified in court. There were two of them. Now Carl had to find them, to be a detective. One of the eyewitnesses had gone into the Marines, and Carl tracked him down through a guy in the neighborhood. The other was Dayton Morgan, also known as Mossep. He wasn't as easy to locate. Carl started with a process server trick. He ran a DMV search and found an address Mossep had given the court when he appeared for a traffic violation. The only problem was when Carl went up to the Bronx neighborhood to find the address, it didn't exist. The street sense came in there. I thought, if I gave you an address, and I said to you, I live at 915, and there's no 915 on this block, that means that I know this block that well to give you a wrong, you know, number. I knew at that time he had to know that block. Carl started casing the neighborhood. He talked to people at the deli, the guy selling odds and ends in the street, neighborhood folks. He tried not to look out of place, but sometimes he took it a little far. One day I was dressed up in a mechanic's suit. Wait. Wait. Wait. You're going up there and hanging around the neighborhood, figuring out where he is. Are you going in a costume? Well, a mechanic's suit because I can't really look like I'm just laying around in a strange neighborhood, so I mean people won't really look at you that direct if, you know, you're a tradesman or worker. So I had on this mechanic's suit, and my boots are all dirty. So I was, like, parked, like, two cars away. So I saw him coming across the street to approach the building, and I just wanted to verify the apartment and if he's staying in that building. So he's going to open the door-- open it like that-- so I just slide in. So I'm walking, like, ahead of him, and he's walking behind. And I'm whistling. So I'm walking up the steps. So it's four floors in that building. So I'm saying, I hope it's not the last floor that he's going to because I don't know who I'll be knocking because I want to see the apartment he's actually staying in. Fortunately, I heard the keys jingling on the third floor, so then I went up to the fourth floor, stood there for a minute, make sure he's inside, and I came back down, come out the building. Carl says in an investigation, there are all sorts of advantages that someone from the neighborhood has that an outsider doesn't. This seemed especially true in the case of Taheem Allen, one of the teenagers who'd lied to the police and the grand jury in the original investigation. Taheem was kind of a street character, not the type who'd open up to just anyone, and also a guy somebody official would have a hard time finding. But here, Norman Simmonds was a help. After he gave his tearful deposition to Carl and Robedee admitting he was the lone murderer, he told them he knew Taheem, knew where he hung out. So Carl got in Norman's Mercedes S550, the one with the tinted windows, and drove with him to see Taheem at a restaurant in a really tough Brooklyn neighborhood. When they walked in, it was dark, but Norman pointed Taheem out in the corner. Carl introduced himself, and it didn't take much more than that. The guy was eating some food, actually. And when he heard the name Collin Warner, he just actually rest down his food and tears came to his eyes. And then he said it's always, like, bothered him where, you know, he thinks he's going to get a nervous breakdown, you know, because he kept thinking about whatever happened to this guy. And he said, listen, is there any way I can help you, because I was part of sending an innocent man to jail. By this time, Carl was spending every spare moment working on Collin's case-- between 50 to 100 hours a week, he says. It was coming between him and his friends and family. It's one of the reasons he and his girlfriend, the mother of his kids, split up. By 1999, he and Robedee were making progress with the case, but there were still some problems. The key eyewitness, Thomas Charlemagne, the 15-year-old who first chose the photo of Collin at random, had been killed in Haiti years before. And Carl and Robedee knew the witnesses they had weren't enough to convince a judge. Norman was protected by double jeopardy, and Taheem had perjured himself before, so why wouldn't he do it again? Carl and Robedee knew that to really make their case, they needed someone from the victim's family, someone who'd have no reason to help Collin get out of prison. And it's at this point that a rather surprising person reappears in the story. Martell Hamilton, the brother of the kid who died, the one who ran to the scene of the crime and saw his brother bleeding on the sidewalk. Martell, remember, had been there when Thomas first identified Collin from the mug book, and he'd IDed Collin himself. Taheem knew where he lived, so they mailed a letter. It was a hard letter for Martell to read. He'd spent 20 years trying to put the murder out of his mind. The last thing he wanted to do was get back into it with some lawyer he didn't know. He tried to ignore it, but he found he couldn't. So a week later, he came up with a solution of sorts. It was more or less a cop out. I tried to call the attorney Robedee's office. I thought it was an actual office, like most attorneys would have, and I said, I'm going to call him late so he can't say I didn't return the call. So I figured I would get an answering machine, and then I said, OK, I did my part. Now I'm done with it. But came to my surprise, the answering machine came on, and I said, hello, my name is Martell Hamilton. I am the brother of Mario Hamilton, and I received this letter. I'm just only returning your call. Good bye. And then I heard something said, don't hang up! Don't hang up! Don't hang up! And then he said, Mr. Hamilton, you don't know how much this means to me that you called me, you know? And I would like for you to come down and just look at some of the documents and the evidence that we have to show that there's absolutely no way your brother could been killed by my client. I represent Collin Warner. And boy, that was-- that just drew me right back to 1980, April 10 of 1980. And it just felt like somebody just, you know, like stuck a knife in my stomach. And I keep remembering those who said, you know, this guy had nothing to do with it. Martell's family was against him talking to Robedee. They didn't see any reason to get involved. They didn't want to dredge up the past. But Martell hadn't admitted to them his doubts about Collin's guilt, how his friends always told him that Collin had nothing to do with it. Keep in mind, Martell's brother had been his hero. They were incredibly close. They'd shared a room. And he'd seen him bleed to death in front of his eyes. Even today, he carries Mario's picture in his wallet. So after a couple of days, he went over and looked at all the evidence Carl and Robedee had gathered. By the end, he was convinced enough to give a deposition, to tell them about how Detective Wasser bullied him into saying he'd seen Collin around the neighborhood. But it was really rough. Several times they had to tell the court reporter to stop typing so Martell could take a break, get a tissue. It took hours to get through. Why did you feel compelled to speak out for Collin, on Collin's behalf? I just-- I just couldn't let it rest. And I was trying to let it rest, but that-- because that doubt, you know, I have to do this. I have to do this. Plus for years, I searched for some type of relief from this because if you think I'm emotional now, before 2000, I couldn't mention anything about it. I didn't walk close to Lott Street where he was killed. I couldn't see blood without panicking. And I'm pretty sure that's what it was. It was my doubts within the case. Martell says he was amazed to learn that Collin didn't hate him. Everyone was just grateful that he came in. And after his deposition, Martell offered to help in any way he could and basically joined what by this point was a small and unlikely team of investigators-- Collin, the inmate, Carl, the process server, Robedee, the housing lawyer working out of his apartment, Taheem, occupation unknown, and now Martell. What's particularly unusual is that 20 years before, they'd been on the opposite sides of the courtroom. Carl was on the side of the accused, and Martell on the side of the victim. It's Martell who finally got Mossep, an eyewitness, to tell the story of what he saw. Martell drove with Carl up to the Bronx to the apartment building Carl had been staking out in his mechanic's uniform. Mossep walked past. Martell followed him inside. Then he turned around. And I said, Mossep? And he turned around and said, who are you? And I said-- I said, Mossep, do you not remember me? He said, no. I said, Mossep, look upon real good. Remember me. He said, brethren, tell me who you is, man. Tell me who you is, man. Do you not remember Mario? Do you remember Mario? So, cannot forget Mario, man. Mario my brethren. Mario the first [SPEAKING JAMAICAN PATOIS] when I come to New York and the first man to get killed in front of me. He said, how could I not remember Mario? Mario was the first friend I had when I came to New York. And he's the first friend I ever had to be killed in front of me. Throughout that conversation, you know, I really couldn't look at him. You know, it just felt like someone just socked me right in the stomach, and then I literally bowled over because my stomach was hurting and cringed so bad, you know? So then I asked him, so why couldn't you do something, you know? He said, brethren, how you expect me to do something? I live amongst them. You know, they was sending threatening notes. They threw bottles through my window. And you got to remember, Johnny, you know, now we're big. Now we're men. Well, we weren't men. We thought we were men, but we were still kids. By January of 2001, three years after starting their reinvestigation, Carl and Robedee were ready to go back to court. They had tracked down and interviewed two eyewitnesses who hadn't testified at trial, two other witnesses who recanted their trial testimony. They'd gotten a confession from the real killer and sworn affidavits from three alibis. They gathered the new depositions and all the paperwork together in a brief so big the court clerks laughed when Carl brought it in. Robedee gathered everyone in his office/apartment and told them not to expect anything to happen for a while. It would take months to get a response from the court. But just four days later, Robedee's phone rang. It was Judge Leventhal from the state Supreme Court asking him to come in immediately for a conference. A couple of minutes later, Barry Schreiber, the assistant district attorney, called to ask the same thing. And so I got to court about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and Justice Leventhal called us up to the bench and Barry Schreiber was there. And he said, look, judge, we're not going to oppose the motion. As far as we're concerned, he didn't do it. I mean, I had no idea. I certainly wasn't prepared to win four days after I filed the motion. So I said-- so the judge looked at me and said, do you have an order prepared? No, judge. I'm not even sure what one's supposed to look like. He's like, well, write one, you know? The next day Carl, Collin's wife, Robedee, and Shirley drove up to the prison and watched Collin emerge a free man. They took me to the gate. Everybody was like at each window, yo, Collin! Yo, good luck! That feeling was so incredible, Anya. It was incredible because my wife always tells me that she had a dream, and she dreamed that she was with me at the prison gates. And I told her, well, that dream is not going to come true. There she is, waiting at the prison gates for me. After 21 years, of course, it's not over when you walk out of the prison gates. It took Collin almost a year to leave the house alone. He says he still feels more comfortable in small places with the door locked behind him. To this day, all his dreams still take place in prison, and if not, they end up there. While he was locked up, his father died. His sister got married. Everyone had kids. He says he feels like he was born in prison. He literally has no memory of his life before. And he says that in prison, when he imagined life outside, everything was clean and beautiful, and it was a little startling to discover that the outside world can be pretty grimy. He spent a lot of time trying to understand why did this happen to him? Why did the universe choose him to suffer so arbitrarily? He still hasn't figured it out. Two days after Collin's release, his family planned a party for him. There was music, tables full of food, a lot of people Collin hadn't seen for over 20 years, and one person he'd never met, Martell Hamilton, whose brother's murder started this whole story and who told the cops what they wanted to hear and helped them build their case against Collin. When Martell walked in, a hush came over the room. Here's William Robedee. Collin was still within this religious period of purification where he was wearing white every day. So he had these big dreadlocks down and the white garment, the beard, a little moustache. I mean, looking everything in the world like Jesus off a stained glass window. And Martell literally broke down and started crying, and Collin went over to him and put his arm around him, and Collin was the one comforting him. Collin hugged me. And I hugged him back, and some tears-- some tears fell. And he said, brethren, oh, it feels so good seeing you. I hugged Martell because in the end, he did came forward and tried to rectify what he knew was wrong. Even though before his release we never spoke to each other, we somewhat had like a connection. And he said, I want to tell you, you know, I didn't know-- I didn't know your brother, but I knew him spiritually afterwards. He said, there was many nights in bed I said, I don't know why am I here and what did I do? But I used to pray to Mario and hope Mario was at peace. It was something I had never seen before other than, you know, certainly not in my real life with real people with real situations. It's something you hear about in books about saints doing it or something, that Collin was able to do what he did and that Martell actually had the courage to walk in there and ask him for the forgiveness. Carl King likes to tell you and anyone who'll listen that individuals can make a difference, that justice is the only thing worth fighting for, that the little man can fight the system and win. And in this case, he was right. It just took a long time. There was a lot to fix. The police, for whatever reason, ignored the witnesses who said Collin had nothing to do with the murder and rushed to make the arrest stick. The DA looked past the contradictions in Thomas Charlemagne's testimony and proposed a theory of the murder that didn't match the forensic evidence. Maybe everyone was overburdened. Maybe they just didn't care. There's nothing unusual about cases with so little evidence, says William Robedee. It's not that uncommon that you won't have a murder weapon. It's not that uncommon that there will be no forensic evidence. It's not that uncommon that the only witness you'll have will be a career crackhead. People watch CSI, for example, and they think that's what goes on every time there's a murder, that these amazing teams of scientists swoop down out of everywhere and spend every possible hour and expend every possible dollar to make sure they have the right guy. That doesn't happen. And it should. You can't have a situation where an assistant district attorney has 80 or 90 felony prosecutions to be responsible for at any given moment because they will not have the time to spend on doing their job right. The same thing could be said for a homicide detective. I mean, the last comment I'll make about this is that if Collin Warner had lived in Texas or Florida or Louisiana, he would have been dead a long time ago. And that would have been the end of it. So why did it take an amateur detective, a murderer, a housing lawyer working out of his apartment, and a bunch of grown-up kids from the old neighborhood to see that justice was done? In the end, perhaps the one thing Carl was willing to invest that police and lawyers and the overburdened criminal justice system weren't was time. Nobody wants to see an innocent man in prison, but only Carl King was willing to spend 21 years to get him out. Anya Bourg, she's a producer at Frontline. Collin now lives in Georgia with his wife and daughter. Carl's still in New York still working cases to exonerate the falsely imprisoned. A film was just released about their story. It's called Crown Heights, directed by Matt Ruskin, starring Lakeith Stanfield and Nnamdi Asomugha. [MUSIC - SINGLE MINDED PROS] Our program today was produced back in 2005 by Alex Blumberg and myself with Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Production help from BA Parker. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. The music with the bells in today's program was produced for our show by DJ Rude 1. Single Minded Pros. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Special thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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From WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. This is going to take a while because there's so many pictures. Yeah, he definitely defeated the system a little bit here. Laura Mayer's the editor in chief of her high school yearbook, and she's noticed that last year's book had a problem. In a lot of the club pictures, there's one kid who appears over and over and over, too many times to actually be in all the clubs. I think he probably did this all in one day. Let me take a look. I know he's in In the Mood for Food Club, which their slogan is we love to cook and eat. He's in Military History Club. He's in Lawn Sports Club. He's in Out of the Box Club, which is-- do you need to know what that club is? I don't need to know, but now I'm sort of wondering what that is. Sort of wondering. Well, they go on these excursions that are not inside the box, but out of the box. And the box, in this case, is the school building? Yeah, I guess. It was sort of like thinking, you know? They're thinking outside the box. Yeah, thinking outside of the box. I wonder what one of those excursions would be? Well, I know that they went to see a Led Zeppelin laser show, Turkish belly dancing, and they visited a corn maze. So it's actually a really popular club. He's in that picture. I would think the laser show would actually still be in the box. Yeah, I know. I'm pretty sure belly dancing and corn maze, I think nobody would dispute those are outside the box. Yeah. I guess that is sort of leaning towards being inside the box. He's in Photo Club. Now is he doing anything in these pictures? Does he look like he's somebody pulling a prank? In some of them, he does. In the two-- the ones I just looked at, the Lawn Sports and Military History Club, he looks like he's pulling a prank. A interesting grin on his face. But in the In the Mood for Food, it seems like he's being a little bit more smooth about being in the picture. What's he look like? He's got very curly hair. I actually know his name. What's his name? Sam Melnic. Sam Melnic? Yeah. I know of him, but I don't know him. I think my brother might know him actually. In the back of the yearbook is an index listing all of the students and then sending you to the pages with their pictures. And at Laura's school, if you have so many photos that your listing in the index takes three lines, people notice. You know you've made it when you've got three lines, I'd say. That's just like a known thing? Well, definitely. Because your name sticks out and it's like you've accomplished something, I think. I mean, it's a joke, but I think a lot of people take it a little more seriously than-- yeah, someone like Sam Melnic, he may-- You're flipping to the back now? Yeah, I'm flipping through the back. Melnic. Oh, he has three lines. Wow, he has a lot. He has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 entries, and that's huge. I mean, I have like nine, and I'm one of the editors. So I can respect that him getting 14 by like bucking the system. That might be the most, one of the most out of anyone in the book. It's got to be. I don't know, it just seemed funny at the time. You know, me and my friend decided to get in as many pictures as possible. America, meet Sam Melnic. He says it wasn't just the talking his way into all those photos that was satisfying. I felt more of a sense of accomplishment when I opened the yearbook and I saw the numbers. Did you actually go to your friends and say, check this out? Yeah. And I said, hey, look, I have-- like you have like a 10 number, or something, and I like the most in the yearbook. Did you actually have the most photos in the yearbook? Actually, I think there's actually two people with the same name who had more than me. But I think I had the most. Wow, that's a huge achievement. I mean, you just walk into photos. Anyone can do it if you put your mind to it. You guys have to meet. Yes. If this were a romantic comedy, if this were a movie right now, you guys would end up in love. I know. There'd be lots of music and-- But also, you'd be arch rivals for a while because you'd be trying to keep him out of the yearbook. Exactly. He'd be like the yearbook nemesis, but then something would happen. There'd be an epiphany or something, like over a template, and that's how it would work. Yeah, and then that would be the turning point in the story. I can see that. Now, of course, Sam Melnic doesn't give a damn if the yearbook is accurate. If it's actually a history of their senior class for decades to come. But what's interesting is that Laura isn't too bothered about his prank, either. Is this kind of thing got out of hand, she says, sure, that would be bad. But one or two kids jumping into some pictures and doing it so effectively? Yeah, I respect that. I think that type of thing adds to the charm of the yearbook. It tells a little story. Yeah, it has a story. It adds character to the book, I think. I think it was funny, personally. I don't know how the other editors would feel, but I appreciate it. Now I bring all this up because I have a thing or two that I need to say to you about Benjamin Franklin. One of our contributing editors, Jack Hitt, has a little obsession with Franklin. He reads all those Franklin biographies that keep coming out. And he's interested in how Franklin has this kind of cheerful disregard for the truth in certain situations. There are certain situations where Franklin-- one of the people who through his writing and his action defined what it is to be an American, after all-- where Franklin happily jumped into club photos where he didn't belong in the high school yearbook. If you know what I mean. Here's jack. Probably the most famous image we have of Franklin is him standing out in an oncoming thunderstorm flying a kite with a key on a string and I don't think it's true. In fact, a lot of people don't think it's true. A biographer named Tom Tucker tried to replicate the experiment for a book called Bolt of Fate, and he failed. A bolt of lightning hitting the kite could have actually killed Franklin. And most telling of all, in the 1750s, when all this was supposed to have happened, this experiment was supposed to have taken place, Franklin wrote that a kind of experiment sort of like this might be possible, but he never wrote anything saying that he'd actually done it. If you had actually proved your own theory, don't you think you might have run around and said, hey, it's true. I'm right. But in fact, he didn't do that at all? No, he didn't tell anybody. We only know about the kite story decades later. He didn't write about it at the time. And when he did write about it, it's really vague. He doesn't tell us where he was or who was there except that his son was there. So I think what happened was, many years later, when Franklin's looking back over his life, he's got your bifocals and the Franklin stove, and he's got the insurance company thing. But then his real great sort of scientific contribution to the world is electricity. But the problem with electricity is that it didn't make a great story. Franklin had had a theory that lightning was a kind of electricity, and he encouraged experimenters to stick metal rods in the air to get hit by lightning, which guys in various countries did and actually proved him right. Which, like I say, kind of prosaic. Not sexy. But he knew that creating an image like him flying a kite was going to last a lot longer in people's minds than guys standing next to steel rods sticking up in the air. Yeah. And it did. If you ask any child who Ben Franklin was, they will tell you the kite story. One thing that's so crazy that the idea that he made all of this up is that this was not somebody who needed to pad his resume for history. He was Benjamin Franklin. He edited Thomas Jefferson. He wrote the line, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." He created the postal system. He invented stuff. He created an American style of writing. He convinced France to fund the Revolutionary War, without which we would not be a country. If Benjamin Franklin felt the need to pretty things up a little bit for his legacy, why wouldn't Sam Melnic? Which brings us to the subject of today's program. Today on our radio show, we bring you stories of people trying to control how they're going to be remembered. People who invent their own kite and key stories. People who run into the club pictures for clubs that they're not part of. And in most of our stories, I have to say, it turns out it's not so easy to control how people are going to see you years from now. It doesn't go too well. Act one of our show, "Thinking Inside the Box," in which someone has a message for an audience of exactly one and plots carefully how to get her to receive that message. Act two, "Where's Walter?" Starlee Kine has the story of a haunted Ramada in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and the man who haunts it and how he's remembered. Act three, "Giving Up the Ghosts." Shalom Auslander explains why he decided to stop remembering the dead, even though his job actually required him to remember. Stay with us. Act one, "Thinking Inside the Box." David Wilcox has this story about what it is that people remember. My sister Jenny's five favorite songs are all looped, back to back to back, on a 90-minute cassette that has been dubbed so many times now most of the singing sounds like a chipmunk buried beneath a mud slide. It starts off with Jenny's favorites song, "The Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston. Jenny fell in love with it at the height of its popularity 20 years ago. And in the years since then, not a day has gone by when she hasn't listened to it. Billy Joel's, "The Longest Time" follows, along with two songs from the movie The Jungle Book recorded directly off the TV. It is, unequivocally, the worst mix tape of all time. And lest you think I'm exaggerating, please consider the most recent addition to the tape recorded by Carly Simon in 1986. I defy you to make it through this song in its entirety even once, let alone the thousands of times the members of my family have. This is the sort of music SWAT teams bring out as a last resort during a hostage standoff. And, strangely enough, it's also how my sister makes it from one day to the next. How could somebody listen to this every single day? You would have to be mentally retarded. Which, it turns out, my sister is. I know how that sounds. I know it's bad to use the R word. But in 1970 when Jenny was born, she was simply, as my parents were informed shortly after her birth, retarded. The official diagnosis was severe and profound, which meant she would never learn to walk, talk, feed, bathe, or dress herself. And the doctors recommended, as they often did back then, that she be sent to live in a state institution. But my parents kept her at home, and while my dad worked, my mom dedicated the rest of her life to teaching Jenny everything she'd never be able to do. Today, Jenny's capable of far more than anyone could have predicted. By that, I mean she can walk, talk, swim, use a fork, recognize colors, and recite the alphabet, if you help her along. She went to the same high school I did and even has a job doing light assembly at an assisted living facility. But at the same time, she's little more than a four-year-old. Life for Jenny is exactly like life for a toddler, filled with simple pleasures, structured around a set routine in which any day, like the day before, is a good day. Which brings me back to the mix tape. When you meet Jenny, it's one of the first things you find out about. When she's not listening to it, she's talking about it. She carries it around for hours in anticipation and she's sure you want to listen to it with her. She even used to follow people around the house with it blaring from a Fisher-Price cassette recorder. There have been other fixations throughout Jenny's life, though none as significant as the tape. There was the old Monkeys TV show, a British cartoon called Danger Mouse, videotapes of Cinderella, and, of course, The Jungle Book. And you wouldn't believe how excited this stuff makes her. She literally squeals every time it comes on. It's so genuine and sweet that you can't help but be excited for her. It makes you want to give her the next thing she feels this way about. At one time a few years ago, my mom actually made Jenny a video. My parents didn't have a camcorder, so she asked a neighbor to come over to the house and shoot it. And on the video, my mom gives a tour of Jenny's favorite things. This is the best thing we ever did. Because she can put the video in by herself. And it will start and play through and rewind and eject and turn off and she doesn't have to do anything. I haven't had to watch Jungle Book in a year and a half. Which, you have no idea. Two years before my mom made this, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. By the time they discovered it, it had spread to her lymph nodes, which meant all she could do was start chemotherapy and hope for the best. Remission came and went. The cancer spread to her brain, then to her bones. By the time this was recorded, she had begun hospice care and was coming to terms with the inevitable. I'll show you her costumes. I think I'm going to take a marker and mark stuff as to whether it's work, play, dress-up. Death isn't something you can explain to Jenny. All she knows is that you're gone, and once you're no longer a part of her day to day, her memory fades. My mom used to have this running joke that when she was finally gone, Jenny wouldn't even notice. But at the same time, it wasn't a joke. So she made this tape hoping it would be the sort of thing Jenny would watch every evening after dinner on the TV in her bedroom. The one that starts, plays through, rewinds, and ejects without her having to do anything. My mom spent a lot of time planning this tape, but you wouldn't know that from watching it. She seems nervous and unsure of what to say, like someone had just pulled a camera out on the spot and told her to start talking. Parts of it are completely inaudible. There are these choppy cuts where the tape starts and stops. And because of the chemo, she barely even looks like herself. She's wearing a wig, her body doesn't look healthy, her voice doesn't even sound that much like her. If you listen closely, you can hear her try to catch her breath, winded from just walking around the house. Her dress up stuff's in here. She's got a flapper. How about this for hotsy-totsy? She looks so cute in it. And her cheerleader stuff. She's all fixed up. Billy will have to figure out what to do with it. But he will. Most of it's just like this, shots of closets and bedrooms, a tape of my mom not saying what she's really feeling to someone who can't understand it anyway. Instead, she explains Jenny's daily routine to the neighbor who's behind the camera. Then at the end there's an edit and suddenly, she's sitting on my sister's bed, finally talking directly into the camera, directly to Jenny. It's one of those moments people go over in their heads a million times, the last thing you might ever say to someone you love. Where every word is supposed to be eloquent and moving and memorable. But, with someone like Jenny, you do exactly what my mom did. You keep it simple and you tell her what she can understand. This is your room. You know you're supposed to make your bed up here every morning. And that's not going to change. You can come up here and watch a video as long as you don't do it 24 hours a day. Maybe Daddy will get you a boombox all your very own if you'll be good and not want to listen to it all the time. But you have to do other things. You have to help Daddy around the house and that kind of thing. And that's the moment, the one moment where she says what she's feeling. "You have to help Daddy around the house." She's going to be gone and it's just going to be my sister and my dad, and she doesn't know what they're going to do without her. This was my mom's way of telling Jenny that she wasn't abandoning her. A way to be there on demand, whenever she was needed. A few weeks after the funeral, my dad put this video on. Jenny didn't even watch it through to the end. Soon, it wound up at the bottom of a drawer, sandwiched between The Muppets and Barney the dinosaur, who my sister also once loved, and now has forgotten. And while it's sad to think that she doesn't want to see it, it's a comfort to know she doesn't need to. She doesn't need to hear her voice or remember her face. She doesn't wonder where our mom is or when she's coming back. It's as though Mom never existed. And while I'm sure that would break my mom's heart, I'm also sure she would want, as she always did, whatever was best for Jenny. Even if that means she's forgotten. That's the weird advantage to being Jenny. The bigger the change, the less she understands it, and the more she concentrates on what stays the same. While the rest of us struggle with memories, she simply forgets. If only we were all so lucky. David Wilcox is a Texan living in Chicago. There's an organization that's recording people to preserve their voices and stories for their children and generations to come. It's called StoryCorps. They have an audio booth in Grand Central Station in New York City. They're building others around the country. From time to time, you can hear some of the stories and voices they've gathered on public radio. Here are two stories that they recorded in New York. The first one is this guy who has thought quite a bit about what he's going to be remembered for. The second is a bus driver who has never forgotten one of his customers. Everybody got something in their life that they're good at. This is what I do good, I eat. I was always a bigger eater than most people in my family. And about five years ago, there was an ad in the paper for a matzoh ball contest. I went down to the contest, I broke a record. I ate 10 matzoh balls, half-pounders the size of baseballs, in 2 minutes, 50 seconds. No one ever ate more than 10. And I went on to the finals and I won. And Mayor Giuliani gave me the trophy. And the announcer said, let's hear it for Don Lerman and Rudy Giuliani. And we're both shaking hands like the president and the vice president-elect. That was the first trophy, the matzoh ball trophy, ever in my life. I always wanted to be famous. I always wanted to be president, or a big lawyer, or a doctor or something, and it just never happened. I had a couple of day-old bread stores. That was my business. I worked 80 hours a week, 7 days a week. I just thought the parade would pass me by until eating. My father never lived to see me famous and he always thought I was a loser. I wish he was alive to see that I'm a somebody. I remember one woman, in particular, a senior, who had gotten on my bus and she seemed completely lost. I could see she was confused. I don't know whether it was an illness, but she looked so beautiful for a hot summer day to have her fur on. So I said, are you OK? She said, oh, I'm fine. I'm fine, but I don't know a restaurant. I'm meeting my friends. I said, you sit on the bus. I'll run in and I'll check each restaurant. The very, very last one on the left, I said, it's got to be this one. So I said stay here, sweetie, it's nice and cool in here. I went in and I said, there's a lady in the bus and she's not sure the restaurant. And I saw a whole bunch of other seniors there and they said, oh, it's probably her. So I ran back to the bus. I said, oh, sweetie, your restaurant is right here. And I said, no, no, don't move. And I grabbed her hand. I remember my right hand grabbed her right hand. I wanted to make her feel special, like it was a limousine. It's a bus. She said she felt like Cinderella. And she said, I've been diagnosed with cancer. And today is the best day of my life. Just because I helped her off the bus. And I never forgot that woman. Ronald Ruiz, a New York City bus driver on the City Island Line in the Bronx. Before him was Don "Moses" Lerman, who's a competitive eater. He attends big events on the International Federation of Competitive Eating Circuit. Act two, "Where's Walter?" Our next story is a story of a man trying to control his legacy using all the normal means that a person can, and pretty much failing pretty completely. It's a story that Starlee Kine kind of stumbled into by accident. Not long ago, I had to go to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, for work. So I went online and found one of those sites that booked hotels. This was a typical review for the Fond du Lac Holiday Inn. "If you want a nice vacation, but don't want to spend gobs of money, this is a place for you. Friendly staff, nice pool, great continental breakfast. The only problem was the elevator was a little slow. Oh well." And this was the typical review for the Fond du Lac Ramada Hotel. "Service was great. The good was good. They're redoing their bar and it looks awesome. Only problem was that something sat down on my bed while I was sleeping. And I was alone. I felt a hand resting on my chest. It felt like my mother used to do when she would try to calm me down at night. It brought back a pleasant memory, but if left me a bit on edge after that." How could I pass up a recommendation like that? So tell me about the ghost. He's Walter. He's Walter. He's Walter. He's the ghost that likes to haunt us. Have you seen Walter? I haven't seen Walter, but I've felt him around here. Yeah? What's that feel like? Scary. Yeah, it's like a tingle up your back. The Ramada Hotel is in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, right off of Highway 41. And Walter is the ghost of the hotel's original owner, Walter Schroeder. Almost all of the staff, most of them teenage girls, have had firsthand experiences with Walter. The staff keeps a log of every last door rattle or crashed drinking glass or glowing light attributed to him. The biggest entry by far is what happened in room 717. It's a classic. Here's Becky, the girl who works the weekend shift. What happened in room 717? Oh, that one. OK. I guess there's a guest that called down about a complaint coming from one of the rooms that they could hear screaming for help. And at the time, Emily, who was the desk manager, was working. And she followed procedure, had maintenance go up there and check. And maintenance went up there and they went to 717 and the door was shaking, like someone from the inside was kicking it and pounding it and screaming for help. And they keys would not work to get into the door. And then, all of a sudden, it stopped. And he went into the room and there was nothing there. He told Emily that the room was empty. There was nobody in the closets. He said from the force of the kicking on the doors, there should have been marks on the doors. But there was nothing. I'm getting the goosebumps. There are long lists on the internet of hotels that try to lure guests in with promises of paranormal activity. That talk more about their ghosts than they do their room rates. But the Ramada in Fond du Lac has a refreshingly non-exploitative relationship to its ghost. Its bar is not called the House of Spirits, its restaurant isn't called the Haunted Hamburger. They don't sell, "My grandmother went to Fond du Lac and lived to tell about it" t-shirts in the gift shop. In fact, it doesn't even have a gift shop. Nope. No, the only way you'll find out about Walter is if he chooses to make his presence known to you by say, pulling your hair, or switching the channels on your TV. The hotel says his favorite is C-SPAN. And according to the staff, as far as types of ghosts go, Walter's more of the annoying variety than the scary. His lot in the afterlife is to get blamed whenever anything goes wrong. He's basically a scape ghost. Well, one time me and a coworker were counting the money and all of a sudden it disappeared. And we counted it several times over and over repeatedly and it wasn't there anymore. And then all of a sudden it showed up. And that was Walter, you think? Yeah. I came on my shift and I opened the till. I put my money in. I made one transaction all night. When I went to cash out, it was short-- do you remember what it was? $5. Yeah, it was short like $5 and some odd change. And it was really strange because nobody else had gone in the till. And it was just simply gone. The computer, it beeps. It just beeps all the time and then I just tell it to shut up because I think it's Walter. I think he took a picture of me one time, me and another girl I was working with. We saw just a flash from the balcony. We didn't know what happened. What would Walter want to do with a picture of you? I don't know. I just tell him to go away because he bugs me. I spent a total of five nights at the Ramada and didn't really feel a presence, as much as I tried. I wandered the halls whispering Walter's name. I took Polaroids in hopes of capturing a spirit waving from inside the vending machine. I found the spookiest, most clearly hauntable place in the hotel, the locked ball room, and pressed my nose against its glass doors trying to spot the ghost inside. The closest I came was the night I fell asleep with the TV on. When I went to bed it was on one channel, and then when I awoke the next morning, it was on another. Not C-SPAN though, but the Bible channel. Other hotel ghosts usually stick around because they've been wronged in some way, or met an untimely death. At the Holiday Inn in Buffalo, a little girl ghost named Tonya burnt to death in a house that once stood there. Now she's always jumping on the hotel beds. In New Mexico, a beautiful young maid named Rebecca was killed by a jealous lumberjack. And now her ghost likes to talk on the telephone in the governor's suite. At the Golden North Hotel in Alabama, Mary lies waiting for eternity for a husband to return from his gold rushing expedition. And all the ghosts who haunt the Queen Mary Hotel in California were victims of accidental drownings. Except for the cook, whose food was so bad, he was murdered. But the odd thing about Walter is that he doesn't even have a motive. In fact, I was shocked that no one on staff was even the least bit curious about why Walter would have stuck around. So why do you think Walter would choose this hotel? I don't know. I have no idea. I have no idea. I really don't know. I don't know. What could a man have done in his life that was so horrible, so wrong, so unbearably tragic that he'd be condemned to wander for eternity the halls of a Ramada hotel? I decided to try to find out on my own, which meant doing some research. Before there was Walter the ghost, there was Walter the man. And before there was a Ramada, there was a Retlaw, which is what the hotel was called when Walter originally owned it. Retlaw is Walter backwards. Retlaw. It's just so ridiculously creepy, so redrum, that it's hard to not suspect that Walter had this whole ghost thing planned all along. The Retlaw Hotel opened in 1923. Apparently there wasn't a lot to write about those days because the town newspaper devoted 22 pages to the hotel's opening. One article took up a full page describing the cigar case in the lobby, the second longest cigar case in the entire state. The Retlaw was a class act. The rooms had chenille carpeting, velvet drapes, and furniture carved out of mahogany wood. There were even special rooms for traveling salesmen with panels that folded down from the wall to display their wares. There was a big party to celebrate the opening. In between all the dancing, 250 guests feasted on breast of milk-fed chicken, petit fours, and strangely, Saltines. Walter Schroeder made a toast: "Tonight I present the people of Fond du Lac with as fine a hotel as it is possible to build." Which, in itself, might be another clue. Whoever talks like that except at the ironic speech leading up to the big fire or the sinking of the sturdiest ship ever built? It's like the hotel version of, honey, I love you so much and there's something really special I've been meaning to ask you. Oh, never mind, you've got a flight to catch. It can wait. Walter Schroeder was a man of accomplishment. At 14, he got a job as a reporter for his local newspaper. At 16, he started his own paper. At 21, he formed what would become the largest insurance agency in the state. By 24, his name had already appeared in the book, Notable Men of Wisconsin. And by the time he was 30, he was considered one of the most successful hotel operators the state had ever known. The more I learned about Walter the man, the less Walter the ghost made sense. Especially after I spoke with Gary Simic, the head of the library named after Walter, at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Every morning for the last 17 years, Gary's been greeted by Walter's portrait opposite the front door. He says Walter looks like somebody's good-natured uncle. From what we know about Walter, he was very nice man. Very generous, very charitable man. He was a man that liked people. He was famous for his dinner parties that he held at the Schroeder Hotel, the old Schroeder Hotel in Milwaukee. I remember in the archives seeing a picture of him at one of these dinner parties. And, you know, people are laughing and he was a very gracious host. Seemed to enjoy people. When Walter died, a foundation was started to distribute his many millions of dollars throughout Wisconsin. So now there's all these places that have Walter's name on them. There's the Walter Schroeder Health Complex at Marquette University. There's the Walter Schroeder Intensive Care Unit at St. Mary's Hospital. There's even a Walter Schroeder student dormitory. In addition to that, four of Walter Schroeder's seven hotels are still standing. Besides the Ramada, there's The Astor, The Wisconsin, and The Hotel Schroeder, Walter's favorite. Which raises the question, why would Walter have chosen to spend his death tromping around a hotel that wasn't even his top choice in life? So I made some calls. I started with the Walter Schroeder wing of a YMCA in Brown Deer, Wisconsin. Front Desk, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] speaking. How may I help you? Hi, is this the Walter Schroeder Aquatic Center? I have a question to ask you. It might sound a little unusual. Are you aware that the ghost of Walter Schroeder is haunting the Ramada Inn in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin? Well, OK. Off the record, but whatever. You can use what you want. They say he haunts here. They do? They do not. I swear to you they say that. There's a guy who actually quit because he was freaked out. It's like an ongoing scary thing with the camp kids too. They're all like afraid of Walter? Yeah. Really? Yep. Next I called the Scottish Rite Masonic Lodge in Milwaukee. Walter was a proud mason for 30 years. When he died, they honored Walter's memory by naming a lounge after him, Walter's Lounge. Dick, the custodian, answered the phone. Hello, Scottish Rite. Is this the Mason's Lodge in Milwaukee? Yes. And you guys have a Walter Schroeder Lounge, right? Yes, we do. Walter Schroeder. Yes. Did you know that Walter Schroeder's ghost is actually haunting the Ramada Inn in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin? Is that right? Well, I'm custodial here and I'm the guy that can tell you the noises I hear at night, I don't know. What's the Walter Schroeder Lounge like? Well, the Walter Schroeder Lounge has got three large chandeliers in it. It has a baby grand piano in it. Wow. Did Walter play piano? Well, that's the thing. I'll tell you now, I've heard the piano play and no one's been in here. It's Walter? That's Walter. Part of him is here all the time. Poor Walter. Yeah, poor Walter. Poor Walter. In life, he was this great guy. He built empires and hosted grand parties and gave away tons of money to organizations he believed in. But in death, according to the people all up and down the state of Wisconsin, he spends his days knocking glasses off shelves, and scaring little children at the pool, playing the piano, and swiping small bills from cash registers, and taking flash photographs of unsuspecting teenage girls. Gary Simic at the Walter Schroeder Library has his work cut out for him, preserving Walter's memory. We try to keep it alive. When we do our teaching and our bibliographic and library instruction, we always mention who he was and why he was important. So how does it make you feel that for a lot of people in Fond du Lac, Walter Schroeder is nothing more than-- he's just a ghost? Well, I feel bad about that. I think they need to know a little bit more about Walter. He was a nice guy and this has been my place. And if not for him, we wouldn't be here. So this is how it goes. You live your life perfectly, and then you die. And no matter what, your fate is out of your hands. If you're lucky, your legacy will carry on. If you're like Walter, you'll get blamed for the mildly bad behavior of every ghost in the state of Wisconsin. What is so unfair about the whole thing is that every time Walter gets blamed, wrongly, for flushing a toilet in the middle of the night, or switching the TV to say, live coverage of the Senate Finance Committee, the real Walter is being remembered and forgotten at the same time. Starlee Kine. Coming up, whose heart doesn't break for a freezer full of Espteins? 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. Today on our program, stories of people and how they're remembered. Mostly how they're remembered incorrectly. Before we start act three of our program, we have two more little stories from the StoryCorps project, a project devoted to preserving people's memories. Both of these are reunions of a sort captured on tape. The first one is between two men who spent their childhoods together at a psychiatric hospital and recently united at the StoryCorps recording booth after 40 years. The second one is kind of self-explanatory. I'm seeing you after 40 years, and I'm seeing fear in you. And let me ask you a very important question, do you feel institutionalized? No. Because I'd like you to come out of that shell, man. Because you're not free in that shell. And I want you to be free. I'm free. I do what I want now. But the only thing is-- But you're still scared. No I'm not. Yes you are. And I want to tell you something else. Don't stop having interest in women. You're a free man and you should feel that maybe you could pick up a lady or meet a lady. I have one. That's great. Her name is Marion. And another thing. What you should do is make your home more comfortable to live in. Get yourself a CD player, listen to some music. Don't stay in that shell. Do you do a lot of reading? Yes. Dirty novels. Well, dirty novels is all right. That's not against the law. That's why they sell them, Donald. You're not allowing yourself to exercise your freedom, man, and that's what I want you to do, man. Because that'll make me real happy and you'll be able to come out of that shell, man. Because I really don't want you in that shell for the rest of your life. That's the way I feel about it, man. Go ahead, Donald, I want to hear you. I haven't seen you in 40 years. That fear in that darn, lousy hospital is still in my system. Yeah, well you're never going to get rid of that. But guess what? I might get rid of it. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] is gone. The memory is always going to be there. But guess what? You don't have to live it for the rest of your life. I used to bite my fingers about [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Donald, they don't have that many hospitals to put anybody in no more. I know. We're not living in that era anymore. That era is dead. It's dead. It's dead and buried. You're free, man. You don't have to take that. Am I right, Donald? Right. Say it loud and clear. Right, 100%. Can you tell me about the day I was born? The doctor took you away quickly because they had asked if I wanted to hold you. And I said, no, because I was afraid if I held you I wouldn't be able to give you up. So they took you away crying and that was all I saw. And they didn't put me in the maternity ward because they were afraid that would be too hard for me. They just put me in the women's ward. And I remember one of the nurses coming up after you were born and I was crying a lot. And she just came up and she just talked to me for a really long time. And she said, you know, it's going to be OK. It just takes time. And it took, I don't know, about five years before I stopped thinking about you every day and crying to just thinking about you every week. To the point where it only happened about once a month, but it still made me sad. So I have one more question, and it's the big one you've been waiting for. You now know having lived through it what the consequences of choosing to give me up are, so knowing what you know now, would you do it again? Well, of course knowing what I know now I wouldn't do it again. I remember I used to talk to you a lot when I was pregnant and explain the whole situation, why I had to do this. That I wasn't ready to be a mother. I didn't have a father for you. I was really sure of myself, I remember that. That this was the best decision. But now I wouldn't even think about it because the separation and the loss is just way too hard. I mean, we have a relationship now and it's great. You've sort of become part of the family, but I missed 20 years. And you can't ever get that back. Mary Lou Maher and her son Brad Skow. She was a college freshman, just 17, when she found out she was pregnant. Before her were Ralph Tremonte and Donald Weiss. Thanks to Sarah Kramer and the staff of StoryCorps. Their website, storycorps.net. Which brings us to act three, "Giving Up the Ghosts." We've been talking about how people are remembered all hour long, and of course, some people don't want to remember the dead at all. They turn their backs. Shalom Auslander has this story from the years after he left yeshiva, the Jewish religious school, where he was raised. ON a good week, you might get two or three dead bodies. Then there were the weeks where it seemed not a single goddamn person would die. Impatient, I would phone a man named Mati. Mati was the dispatcher. Anything, I would ask? Nothing, Mati would say. Did I beep you? No, I would say. Just checking. When somebody died, their family would call Mati. And Mati would call me. Can you work the weekend he would ask. Yeah, sure. I can work the weekend. I was a watcher, a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] in Hebrew. According to Jewish belief, the soul departs the body at the time of death but sort of hangs out until the body is buried. This can be a terribly distressing time for the soul, what with all the not having a body and that being invisible and the floating around. Therefore, the rabbis decreed, from the moment of death to the moment of burial, the body of the deceased must never be left alone. Traditionally, a member of the family would sit with the body. But if nobody in the family wanted to sit with a cold, dead body in the cold, dark basement of a cold, empty funeral home, the family called Mati. And Mati called me. Flushing Meadows Memorial, Jewel Avenue, Schwartz. Oceanside Memorial, 2111 Atlantic Avenue, Finkel. Riverdale Hebrew Home, Riverside and 268th Street, Dweck. The ancient rabbis tell us that being a watcher is a wonderful mitzvah, or good deed, for which the almighty blessed be he and the world to come will abundantly reward us. That was all well and good, but Mati paid $85 a night, cash, and that was all the reward I needed. I was 19 years old, living away from home for the first time. I had spent my entire life in yeshivas, raised like a veal in the orthodox skinner box of God. And though I certainly looked the part with my black pants, white button-down shirt, and black wide-brimmed fedora, lately I had been feeling less and less Jerusalem and more and more Gomorrah. In the beginning, I could count on two jobs a week. Three if I was lucky. Friday nights paid double, almost $200. But you had to show up Friday evening and stay until after Sabbath ended late on Saturday night. That was a long time to spend with a dead body, even for me. But $200 was $200 and I was no idiot. I was saving up for a 1982 Ford Mustang convertible. It was surprisingly pleasant work. The dead were my kind of people. Bring a pillow said Mati the first time he called, and a tehillim. Tehillim is Hebrew for the book of psalms. And a snack, he added. What kind of a snack? I asked. Whatever you want, said Mati. Like what, potato chips? Potato chips are fine. Can I bring a sandwich? What kind of sandwich, Mati asked? Tuna? There was a pause while Mati considered the theological implications. You can bring a sandwich, Mati decreed. Cue Gardens Funeral, Jewel Avenue, Bernstein. My first job. Mati told me to be there no later than 7 o'clock in the evening our I wouldn't be able to get in. The security guard would have an envelope for me with $85 and in it and he would show me to the body. I'd never been in a funeral home before. The main floor was lavishly decorated, Victorian style furniture, heavy, golden drapery, Italian marble. The guard led me across the lobby to a steel door in the back. We made our way down the bare wooden stairs to the basement where they kept the bodies, and I remember the old adage about never looking inside the kitchen of your favorite restaurant. There was no drapery and there was no marble. There were a lot of rusty pipes and a noisy boiler and a dangerously overloaded fuse box. The only furniture, aside from some spare hospital gurneys, was a battered old metal folding chair. There you go, said the guard. There's a toilet at the end of the hall. I'm here for Bernstein, I said. Is there a Bernstein here? He pointed to the large stainless steel door of a commercial refrigerator. Bernstein, he said. I'll be here another 15 minutes if you need anything. I opened my backpack and took out a bottle of purple Gatorade and my book of psalms. Blessed is he who goes in the path of their-- oh, brother. It seemed a bit to be given Bernstein that sort of advice. I don't know about you, Bernstein, I said, but I'm beat. I laid down on the gurney, put on my Walkman, smoked half a joint, and tried to sleep. I was pretty sure there was no such thing as a soul. And even if there were, I was pretty sure that a glassy-eyed teenage pothead munching his way through a bag of Doritos Cool Ranch tortilla chips wasn't going to offer it a whole heap of consolation. Business was good. I enjoyed the independence. I made my own hours. No meetings, no small talk. It was just me, my sandwich, a small bag of marijuana, a pack of smokes, Guns and Roses "Appetite for Destruction," and some dead guy in a big steel fridge. Unfortunately, Jewish law stated that a watcher is only permitted to watch one body at a time. If there was only one body in the funeral home, it was clear which body I was watching and there was no need for me to see it. Occasionally, though, the fridge was packed floor to ceiling, which meant I was required to open the door and make actual eye contact with the body I was meant to be watching. Like most things biblical, this was a less than foolproof method that led to a certain amount of confusion. One night I was told to watch an Epstein. Inside the fridge I found three of them, a David Epstein, a Gerald Epstein, and a Motia Epstein. I caught the funeral director just before he left for the night. Yep, he said, we got us a whole load of Epsteins. We stepped inside the fridge. Which Epstein is mine? I asked. Which Epstein in mine, he repeated as he checked their tags. As if it were some sort of deep, existential question mankind has pondered since time began. Which Epstein is mine? How will I find my Epstein? He suggested I cover my bases and take a good, solid look at each of the Epsteins. Can't go wrong that way, he said. Really? I asked. You sure that's kosher? Kosher with me, he said. A ghoulish economics developed. All that dying was making me a nice living. One dead paid my AmEx bill. Three deads covered my share of the rent. A weekend job covered me for weed and food, and soon I was done for the month. Every dead after that was just gravy. Two deads got me some new Air Jordans, three deads was a new TV. If Mati could have guaranteed me a solid extra dead a week, I would have ordered HBO. But I was no fool. I was saving up for a 1982 Ford Mustang convertible. Death didn't bother me. I'd never personally known anybody that died, but after 19 years in orthodox yeshiva, I was pretty familiar with death. The Jewish holidays all seemed to involve someone killing us, someone trying to kill us, or our praying to God so that he doesn't kill us himself. Jewish history was the same. If the Babylonians weren't trying to kill us, it was the Romans. If it wasn't the Romans, it was the Spanish. And if it wasn't the Spanish, it was the Germans. Every Holocaust Remembrance Day, we were led into the school auditorium to watch hours and hours of newsreel footage of concentration camps and gas chambers. So graphic was the footage that we needed special permission forms signed by our parents. This was never a problem for me. My mother lived for death. Nothing made her happier than sadness. Nothing made her more joyful than melancholy. She worked as a medical assistant for a local pediatrician and the tragedies she witnessed there were at least as much a perk as the dental coverage. A boy came into the office today, she would say at dinner. Hepatitis. She would pause to take a long, slow sip of her soup. C, she would add. My father would pound the table with his fist. Do we have to listen to this crap every goddamn meal, he would bark, taking his plate into the kitchen to finish eating. Indeed, we did. It's a death sentence, she would say once he'd left. Kid doesn't have a chance. Lung infections, genetic disease, spinal meningitis. I ate as quickly as I could hoping to get through dessert before the gastrointestinal disorders. I had a brother who died years before I was born. His name was Jeffy. Between Jeffy and my relatives who died in the Holocaust, my mother had more pictures of the dead on our walls than she had of the living. By the time I was nine years old, my father drank heavily and physically abused my older brother. My brother hated my mother and resented me. My mother loathed my brother and doted on me and my sister. My sister hated my brother and defended my mother. I envied my brother and pitied my mother. And my father hated us all. All of this, the family story goes, because Jeffy died. You should never know the pain of losing a child, my mother said to me. Between my mother and my rabbis, death wasn't the worst thing I could imagine. In fact, by the time I was 19, I couldn't care less about it. A few months after I started, Mati hired a second watcher. Business was good, Mati was branching out, expanding to meet customer demand. And I didn't like it. The new watcher's name was David. David was Mati's cousin, and I was convinced he was receiving preferential treatment. He was given nearly every weekend job, the $200 types. And I was pretty sure he getting first pick of the midweek gigs as well. Impatient, I phoned Mati. Anything? I would ask. Nothing, Mati would say. Did I beep you? No, I would say, just checking. I'll beep you, he would say. The third watcher Mati hired was named Schmoa. Schmoa was an ultra-orthodox yeshiva student who knew Mati from synagogue and cynically pretended that the money didn't matter to him. I need the mitzvahs, he would say to Mati, clapping his hands with righteous glee. Listen, rabbi, I thought, back of the line. You've got the rest of your life to earn rewards for the next world. I'm trying to buy a car in this one. Pretty soon I was down to one lousy dead every two or three weeks. Impatient, I phoned Mati. Anything? I asked. Nothing, Mati said. Did I beep you? Nothing? I asked. Nobody's died in the past three weeks in all of Brooklyn and Queens? Blessed is he who heals the sick, said Mati. Oh, bullshit, I said, and slammed down the phone. Goddamn death was all about who you know. Mati never beeped me again. And frankly, I didn't want him to. I'd had almost a whole month off from death. No funeral homes, no refrigerators. No suffering of any kind when my mother called to tell me that my grandmother had passed away. She's at the Zion Gate Memorial Home, she said. You know where it is. My mother had been proud of my watching career and had been said to hear of its sudden demise. She was like a Yankee fan that knew someone who worked for the team. She'd known someone on the inside of sorrow, her favorite sport. I know where it is, I said. She blew her nose into the phone and sighed deeply. So unexpected, she said. That's the hardest part. My grandmother had died from Alzheimer's, a disease she'd had for well over seven years. I got to Zion Gate, walked heavily down the stairs, threw my bag on a nearby gurney, and dropped into my old seat on the metal folding chair beside the fridge. I didn't know my grandmother well. The disease had killed her mind years before it finally came back for her body. But I had some fond memories of her from my childhood. Memories I desperately ran through my mind, trying for once to feel something, anything for the dead body inside that fridge. I remembered how when I was young she would bring us Rice Krispy treats that she made with real Fluffernutter, which everyone knows isn't kosher. They're just kids, she would say to my mother. And when my mother's back was turned, she'd put her finger over her lips to keep us quiet and silently hand us boxes of non-kosher Chiclets chewing gum. Don't tell your mother, she'd whisper. But it was no use. I didn't know her that well and I sat there fuming, picturing my mother upstairs, the belle of the misery ball. Should be sighing and hugging and reciting Yiddish aphorisms about the inescapable brutality of our wretched lives. I felt like Al Pacino in that mafia movie. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I opened my Gatorade, took a few hits off a joint, put on my Walkman and tried to get some sleep. It was already 11:00 PM and I had to be at my new job at the hardware store early the next morning. Let the rest of them mourn. I was saving up for a 1982 Ford Mustang convertible. Shalom Auslander. His book, Foreskin's Lament, was a 2007 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It has just come out in paperback. Our program was produced by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Our protection manager is Seth Lind. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Kevin Clark, Thea Chaloner, and Andy Dixon. StoryCorps funders include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute. Our website, where right now you can get tickets to our live movie event. That's right, we are doing our radio show in front of a live audience and beaming it to movie theaters all over the country. You can see us one night, April 23, one night only. For tickets, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss Mr. Torey Malatia, who describes what it is like for him running our radio station. It was just me, my sandwich, pack of smokes, Guns and Roses "Appetite for Destruction," and a small bag of marijuana. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with my stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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At first you don't really think about it, Bobby says. He got drafted to play professional baseball for the Cubs, was sent to the minor leagues like most players are. And for the first few years, he says, you don't wonder if you'll make it. You know you'll make it. For one thing, the evidence is everywhere. You see it all the time. You're in AA or even in A-ball and somebody does get the call. We had a shortstop when I was with the Reds. His name was Travis Dawkins. His nickname's Gookie Dawkins. And Barry Larkin got hurt in the big leagues, and the phone call came into the manager's office. And all of a sudden, this buzz started taking over the clubhouse. And it was about Gookie. Gookie's going to the show. And I remember him cleaning out his locker, getting ready to get on the next flight to Cincinnati. So he's your buddy, and you're watching him clean out his locker to go. Yeah, and that's happened quite a bit. Quite a bit. By his third year, out of the 52 guys Bobby was drafted with, only 15 were still playing ball. In his fourth year, he was traded. By his seventh year, he was sitting on the bench a lot. Then he broke his wrist and had a hard time finding a team who would pick him up. And I think I was pretty rusty, and I was pretty discouraged. I really thought that the time might be sooner than later that I was out of the game. There were quite a bit of people that said, is this it? Can you go back? And the questions started coming, and more regularly as I continued to play. How would people say it? Were they sheepish about it? Or they just didn't even know to be sheepish about it? I wish they were sheepish about it, frankly. It's frustrating when people would ask. I was always very uncomfortable when people would ask me those type of questions. But then his season improved. He actually wen on a kind of streak. And his whole vision of where he was heading came back to him. And that's what keeps somebody going in this situation. There had always been so much proof, you know. He'd been a high school star, an all-state and a college star, an all-Big Ten, and his brother Hal Morris was playing for the Reds. It's like what happens in a casino. You win enough at the time to keep you going, to keep you in the game. It feels like the big win is right around the corner. What got Bobby to finally quit was that that vision of his future was replaced with a different vision of who he might become. At the beginning of his 10th year, he couldn't get onto an affiliated team. He went to the independent leagues, a step down. And when he showed up for spring training and looked around at the other guys, he thought to himself, he was seeing a lot of guys who'd hung on for too long, and wondered if that's who he was becoming. And during one of their very first practice games, he suddenly found he'd decided. My last at-bat-- I know I've got three at-bats. I grounded out to second base, and I did know. I knew that was it, certainly. I think the moment the ball was off of my bat, I had a thought that this might be the last one. And I ran by, the throw beat me by a couple of steps, and I kept running as hard as I can through the bag. And I just kind of kept going out to the outfield a little bit. I remember thinking after, as I'm decelerating down the baseline, just thinking, well, if this is my last one, it's kind of apropos, because I gave it everything I had. I ran down to first with everything I had, and it just wasn't enough to get me there in time. For years, he'd been wrestling with this decision, and then that was that. He was past deciding. It was done, which I think is pretty much how these kinds of big decisions always go. He went to the batting cage, he hit for a while, for the last time, and then he told his coaches. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our radio program, "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" We have three stories of people with big decisions to make, usually, like Bobby, between the practical thing, the thing that everybody expects of them, and some vision of something that they just can't give up. Act One of our show, "The Karachi Kid," in which a college student has to decide whether to stay in America, where he's been going to school, or go back to Pakistan where his family is, because as everybody knows, you can't wipe on and wipe off your visa status. Act Two, "Not Far From the Tree." Two software engineers at Apple Computer get fired and then simply refuse to leave. Act Three, "Because I'm the Mommy, That's Why." A nine-year-old girl has to decide what to do when her mom runs away, runs away with her and her sister in tow. Stay with us. Act One. "The Karachi Kid." Muhammad Kamran is an IT student at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He worked and saved for two years to get the money to come to the States, where there are all sorts of difficulties to get a visa. He's a good student, an observant Muslim, doesn't drink. When he and his American friends go to bars, he sits there with his Diet Cokes. And after being here for school all these years, he's not so sure he wants to go home to Pakistan when he graduates. But he's the eldest son. He's expected to go home and care for his parents as they get older. It's not that I don't want to take care of them. It's just that I want to do both. And I'm trying to figure out, what am I going to do? So in the fall, when he went home for the first time in four years, he knew his family was going to do everything possible to convince him to move back to Pakistan after college-- introduce him to marriageable women, show him how modern Karachi has become. He took a tape recorder with him on the trip. His radio diary begins right before he's about to head home. The most prominent emotion that I have right now is like, oh, my God, it's been so, so long. I wonder how everything is, and how everyone is. My cousins and my brother-- my brother was 16 when I left and his voice was just breaking then. And now he's a man. He's taller than me. I'm just so excited to go there and see everything. I'm also scared. People say it's changed a lot. It's become modern and all that. A lot of multinationals have been investing. Restaurants have opened up and there are a lot of clubs and all that kind of stuff. So I'm just scared to see what's there for me now. When my parents sent me to college and stuff, it was understood that, once you finish college, you will come back. There are no two ways about it. And at the time, I was like, yeah, definitely. But now that I've been here, and I see so many opportunities, I want to stay here and explore what else is here. Because it's the US. The world comes here to study and work. I took so hard to get here. Why am I going back? But then-- why am I going back? Because my family, my parents. I just reached Karachi. Getting off the baggage claim and getting all my stuff now. The flight was great. I sat next to this guy, a Pakistani businessman who was just coming back from Germany. He was telling me that him and his cousin were debating going to college in the US, but at the last minute his dad stopped him and he did not go. But he has no regrets. He likes being in Pakistan, because of the religion and the culture and whatnot. So I'm in a rickshaw right now. I just bargained to get from Center City Karachi to my house for $1. For one dollar. You've got people honking. There's no concept of courtesy or braking. I must admit, I used to drive the same way before. But there's no concept of lanes. In a place where the US would have two lanes, we have about one, two, three, four-- six lanes made out of two lanes' equivalent in the US. Oh, [BLEEP], there are cows crossing in the middle of the road. This is no system of driving or anything. That's about it. The first three or four days, I was sick. My stomach was running. I was hot. I felt like an American. My God, I was complaining, I was bitching about it. I was like, what the hell is this? Who wants to live here? It was hot. I made it a point to have a yogurt drink every morning just to cool my body down. I was very cut back the fourth day, but the fifth day, I was like, OK, this is where I grew up, so I shouldn't complain. This is where I come from. How can I start thinking that I'm a foreigner, even though I felt like one. So I told my dad. He definitely wants me to stay in Pakistan or Dubai and work here. So you think I should stay in Pakistan, Abu? Well, after 9/11, you should consider staying back here. Why after 9/11? It's all in the press, you see. They're saying that there's discrimination against Muslims. I talked to my dad about this. And he kept switching reasons. He kept saying that, why I should come back to Pakistan, because of-- the first reason he gave was discrimination against Muslims and Arabs. And then he said that I should move home because everything's going to be set up for me. I don't have to worry about a house or a car or food and all that. You don't have to start fresh here. We can provide you everything. And then you just have to work. And then he said that there would be all these opportunities for me, because all these companies are investing in Pakistan. Companies like Halliburton. But you know who owns Halliburton. Well, that Dick Cheney. Oh, so you know he owns it. Even Bill Gates came and sent a message to our president. I will do some research on this and see if Microsoft is opening something in Pakistan. Not that it's funny, but the way he put it was so silly. He's just being a dad. So I'm on my way to pick up my friend Binti, who has been my friend for a long, long time. She now works for a multinational in Karachi. So, Kamran, how's Hani? Is she your girlfriend? No, actually, she's one of my school friends. Girls and boys can never be friends. So cut the crap. Is she your girlfriend? Would you want her to be your girlfriend? Uh, no. Why do you ask? [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] for the American citizens. You guys suck. Muslims rule, damn it. You guys just put on this act of freedom and stuff. But you guys are full of [BLEEP]. No, actually, Muslims are nice people. Give them a break. [SINGING] Give me a break. Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar. You think I should come back to Pakistan. Oh, yes, I think you should. Because it's your own country. How old are you? 25? OK. So at 25, you decide whether you're going to be an American for the rest of your life, away from your friends, away from your family, away from your food, away from me, yes. Or you want to be in Pakistan, maybe getting a little less salary. But then, who cares? You'll get used to that salary. If, once you go to the States, you're used to earning a high salary, you'll never come back to Pakistan and be happy. It's all about what you are used to in life. What you don't have, you don't miss. Right? So-- So the two aunts and my mother are just-- they're always together. So it's always very [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. It's never one of them alone. We cannot picture them alone, because both of them are bitter women. They're really, really funny. They're really, really cool, though, because they influence my mother a lot. And so my mother's aunt is trying to hook me up with one of her friend's daughters, whose name is [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. So I'm going to ask [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. She's saying she's from India, a rich family. She's saying that the girl is very well-behaved. So what are you trying to say, that I'm not well-behaved? She's like, she has knowledge of the world as well as the religions. So she's saying that-- very, very cute-looking. So I'm going to ask her right now if she can cook and stuff. [SPEAKING ARABIC] And she's giving me a menu of things that she can cook. [SPEAKING ARABIC] She wants me to marry my first cousin, who basically lives in California. This is the amount of pressure I get from her. So we never met [UNINTELLIGIBLE] daughter, who my aunts, [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE], were talking about, who was from India from a very, very rich family or something. And then they had set me up with another date. She had a British accent, and she came in a burqa and everything. And I never talked with her, because it was like a big group visiting together. But I wasn't interested. It's not that it doesn't appeal to me. It's just that I would have tried to have it on a mutual basis, that I would like the girl too. And of course I would want to know the girl more. OK, so we're going to this party right now, which I don't know how-- I'm here with my friend Hani. I can't even see anyone. Great, so this is the scene in Pakistan. The party scene. There was a party tonight that I went to. And it was in a massive house. The entrance lounge was turned into a dance floor. And one of the rooms had large, large pillows all over the place. And everyone was either smoking up or making out. And there was alcohol and there was actually a bar. And there was a person mixing drinks. I noticed there was a bottle of vodka and Pepsi and orange juice. And people were there, just looking all hip just with a glass. It was-- to be frank, it looked so artificial. I'm sure they must be having fun. Pakistan, being a very strict Muslim country-- alcohol is not sold publicly and stuff. And it's only a few shops that can sell it. But people do get around getting alcohol. It's unbelievable how liberal Pakistan has become, at least in this upscale party and stuff. Hi. You guys like the party? Yes. Are you from Karachi? Yes. I'm not scaring you. I'm just asking. So we're at the party, and I saw these two girls. And I went up to them. I said, hey, what's up? Nice party, or something. And they're like, do we know you? Like, what? Because you don't go and talk to any girl at a party, because it's disrespectful. I had forgotten that. I forget what was the norms for a party there. Hi, I'm Hani's single friend. I scared her away. So if I am to move back to Pakistan, I'll probably-- in relative terms, I'll have more money. And I'll have more disposable income, because I'll have a car which is paid for. I'll have a house which is already there. I'll live with my parents, because that's how it goes. And I'll have to do none of housekeeping, clean my own room at the most. And I have to do no cooking at all. At all. And there are no groceries. And the quality of life is probably going to be much, much better, compared to the quality of life to the US. Well, not probably. I'll probably make decent money. But it's always going to be like, I'll have to do my own laundry, I'll have to cook, I'll have to clean. I'm nowhere close to a decision, but I'm really surprised and confused, because it's just-- how do I choose? How do you make them talk the same language? How do you make your heart and head talk the same language? So I'm hanging out with my cousin, Yusef Harman. So, tell me, being the eldest son, do you have any pressures on you from your family? Oh, a lot. A lot. You get a lot of pressures. I mean, I can't do anything with asking my mother. All the time, she's after me. She's possessive about me. She doesn't want me to go for anyone else as yet, probably until the age of 27, or until all my sisters get married. So I just can't do anything I want to. That's how it is. And I could really identify with all that because I was pretty much in the same boat that he is right now. Of course, every single decision is run by your parents, and you consult them. Let's say, you know, buying a car. If I have to buy a car after I graduate, I'll just probably go and buy whatever I want, or whatever falls in my budget. But if I'm back home, I need everyone to consent. And then my aunt would come back home, and she would say, oh, don't get black, get white. Get this, get that. It's all this. Almost everyone in my family made some argument like this. I advise you to come to Pakistan and serve you country, to serve the country where you were born. Because America is already an advanced country, and they don't need any intellectual [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. But Pakistan requires many persons who are intellectual and highly educated. That did sort of strike me. It's like Pakistan having a brain drain, like people study and then they stay back. And it does make me feel guilty because I do have to think-- I still love my country, I still have some sense of patriotism towards it. And I was born there. I can never change that. I'm driving back home after dropping my friend. And I'm just so in thought right now. And I don't know what to say. I'm really-- I'm 80% percent convinced that I should come back to Pakistan and work here and work for my country and of course my parents. It's such a hard decision. I'm so torn. I'm so torn. I don't know what to do. So I left Karachi yesterday. And my mom was crying at the airport so much. And I was trying to hold back. I'm so homesick. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I feel queasy in my stomach for some reason. Maybe it's the plane ride. I'm right over the top of Frankfurt, but all I can think of is Karachi. Karachi, Karachi, Karachi, Karachi, Karachi. I got back today at 1:00. When I landed in Philadelphia, I felt so homesick for Karachi, because it's like, it's back to the grind, back to the routine life. I just kept thinking of my mom's cooking all of a sudden. The minute it touched down, the plane. So it's been about a week and two days since I've been back in Philadelphia. And feels kind of strange to be here, because I feel like I'm starting from scratch, everything over again. I don't hang out as much as I used to before, when I was here, before I left. I don't know why. It's just kind of strange. Maybe because it's Ramadan, but I don't know. But I haven't seen many friends as much. I just feel I should be to myself. I'm a little down, I think. I've spoken to my parents ever since I got back. And my mom was like, so have you decided anything? So I told her, I just got here a week ago. And they try to call me every other day now. Usually it was like, you know, I would call them once a week, and they would call the next week. So it's like, every time I'm not home, she's like, so how come you didn't pick up your phone? And how come you weren't home? And how come-- where were you? God, man. Give me a break. When I was leaving Karachi, when I was leaving the airport, she told me that, whatever you do, we'll be happy with it. But I really, really know that they really, really want me to come back. So it's 21 December, 2004. And I got done with finals last Friday. And I've just been chilling ever since. And I've made my decision to stay. After a couple months of being back here in Philadelphia, in the States, everything fell into perspective. My feelings about Karachi faded as time passed and I as I got more involved and busy with my everyday life here. Of course, I was almost convinced at the time, when I was in Pakistan in Karachi, to stay back, because I literally went back after almost four years. Four years of not seeing my friends, my family, my cousins, my grandmother. And I loved it. And if I was literally waking up every morning thinking of my family, I would have gone back the second day. But it's not like that. I do miss them. I miss them at a normal level. I don't terribly, terribly miss them. And once I got back here, I could picture my life back home when I went back. That scares me. I'll go back home, get a job, make a house, get married, have kids, have the in-laws over every Sunday for dinner. It'll just be the same monotonous routine over and over and over and over again. Maybe something else is going to happen. Maybe I'll go watch a movie in between somewhere. And I could picture my life-- well, I couldn't picture it, but I could almost imagine it over here, and what I could be doing. And I imagine a house with white picket fences. No, I'm just kidding. Over here, everything is so exciting and everything so result-oriented right away that I can't imagine it. That's the excitement of it. Muhammad Kamran in Philadelphia. Coming up, two guys who aren't even officially faced with the choice, should they stay or should they go? They're told to go, leave their jobs, and they decide to stay. 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, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, stories of people deciding, should they stay or should they go? And we've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, "Not Far From the Tree." There are some situations where it is pretty much taken for granted that you are not going to stay somewhere, like, for example, your boss tells you you no longer have a job. Sometimes, people were driven by a vision and they do not take that practical "no" to mean "no." Amy O'Leary reports. For Ron [UNINTELLIGIBLE], there was never any question. He wasn't going to leave. The project he'd been working on at Apple Computer had been cancelled. He was out of a job. But for Ron, it wasn't so simple. He was 27 and had been working on some version of the software for years, so he wasn't ready to just stop and go home. Having been totally embroiled in a project, working long hours and thinking about little else, to have it canceled and nothing come of it, it just seems like wasted effort. So I decided to stay and finish the part that I had been working on my own. And so I just kept showing up to work on it. The project that made him want to stay, to live off his savings and sneak into work every day for no money, probably won't sound very glamorous. It was a graphing calculator, a software program that would help math students make pictures of complicated equations. Now, to understand why this meant so much to Ron, you've got to understand two things. One, engineers are generally much more excited about advanced mathematics than the population at large. And two, this program wasn't just making little pencil lines on graph paper. It was generating gorgeous undulating three-dimensional pictures that changed as you altered the equations. If such a thing can be said, it made calculus sexy. I knew that Ron was working despite the end of the project he was working on. That's Greg Robbins. He would drop by Ron's desk and was impressed with what he saw, so impressed that when Greg's contract ended, he signed on for Ron's project, which wasn't a job really as much as an extended six-month favor. I don't remember if we discussed explicitly, but I knew there was no money in this. I mean, doing math software is sort of like writing poetry. You hope that if you do a great job, you may touch someone. But you don't expect to make money off of it. We just started literally sneaking into the building every day. We would show up in the parking lot, look around to see who was there, and as we were approaching the door we would time our walk so that we arrived at the entrance right behind someone. And they'd open the door and look at us and say, oh, hi, Ron. And we'd walk in with them, tailgating through the door, it's called. Their tactics was-- pretty much, as far as I saw-- when I showed up, I'd let them in. Tim Dereks was an engineer who was actually paid to come to the office. I don't know whether it's because I was one of the few guys they knew, or whether they just happened to come in about the same time I did, but I was probably letting them in at least a couple of times a week. The people in the adjacent offices knew we were there. Again, Greg. Frequently they knew what we were working on. If anyone ever came to us and asked, we were more than happy to talk about it. Sometimes we would leave out certain details like the fact that it wasn't a real project. Occasionally, people would ask me, do you work here? And I'd say, no. And then they would assume, oh, that means you're a contractor. And I'd explain, well, actually, no. And then they'd say, but then, who's paying you? And I'd tell them, no one. At which point, they'd get it. They'd look at me and say, how do you live? And I'd explain, I live simply. And then they'd get this really interesting look on her face, and say, but what are you doing here? What they were doing was very quietly, and very efficiently, building a perfect piece of software. There weren't any meetings, any office politics, or managers. They never compromised. They never fought. It was the fantasy version of how great work could be if management just evaporated. Occasionally, I would tell people-- I mean, it's true. I did tell people that I reported to Ron. Ron would tell people that he reported to me. In a corporate hierarchy, that's all someone wants to hear. If they know who you report to, then they can fit you into the big picture. I slipped up at one point when someone from Facilities came to explain to us that they were moving new engineers into our offices. I was naive. I told her the same story I told everyone else. She just explained, that's completely inappropriate. She had our badges canceled and expected us to just clear out the offices and leave the building. So we just moved to another set of offices that were empty. For a while, it was hard to find space. They kept getting displaced by real employees. But then big layoffs hit Apple. And suddenly there were entire hallways of empty offices for the taking. At the same time, news about the project was getting around. Among some engineers at Apple, Ron and Greg's graphing calculator was becoming a kind of underground cause celebre. Folks knew about us. And they would literally come to our office at midnight and slip a machine under the door and tell me, OK, Ron, officially this machine doesn't exist. Make sure no one opens the top to look inside. Whatever you do, don't take it out of the building. And if anyone asks, I don't know you. When an engineer slipped us not one but two hardware prototypes, that just amazed us. The hardware prototype was Apple's newest computer, still in development. We had something that was extremely hard to get for the employees at the company. That was extremely rare, because they were hand-built. It was hard to believe that something which wasn't a real project could have hardware that many real projects would die for. There was a practical reason that people were sneaking this equipment to them. Apple was about to unveil a brand-new machine, the Power PC. The future of the company was riding on it, and Apple's employees were so busy making sure that their old software would run on the new computer that nobody was creating new software-- nobody, that is, except Ron and Greg, whose flashy graphing calculator would be the company's only way to demonstrate the groundbreaking speed of their new machines. But Greg and Ron faced a problem, the problem, the obstacle that from the beginning seemed completely insurmountable. When we started undertaking this, we weren't thinking about, how are we going to get in the building? We're thinking about, how are we going to get it out on a million machines? You just don't get software built into the machine without the company's blessing. And then, in the dark of night, the solution to their problem walked right in the door. An engineer came into my office at two in the morning, and said to me, there's a factory out in Cork, Ireland. And one of the last steps in the production of the machines is to copy from what's called the golden master hard disk onto each hard disk in the factory before it gets put in the box. He said, I create the golden master hard disk. You get that? Picture, like, the wizard from Lord of the Rings standing there in a halo of light. I create the golden master hard disk. In a very real and pragmatic sense, I decide what does and doesn't ship. This is the date that I FedEx the disk. If you come to my office that evening, before anyone else notices, it will be boxed in 30,000 units in the factory. Perfect plan. Only, after those first 30,000 computers came off the assembly line, Apple execs would notice that something had been slipped onto their machines, and then there's no telling what would happen, or who they would go after. So Ron and Greg came up with a different plan. It was probably the gutsiest, most radical ideal of all. Schedule a meeting, bring in management, and admit everything. Ron [UNINTELLIGIBLE] showed up one day and said, hey, I have something neat to show you. Don Norman would soon become a VP at Apple. And Ron showed his fantastic graphing calculator, where you could just sort of plug in the equation. You could play with things. You could do things that were never possible before. And I said, wow, we've got to ship this in every Macintosh. And Ron said, well, that's just the problem. Because, well, it turned out that Ron didn't exist. Not in the company records, anyway. But here he was, demonstrating the calculator in front of 15 managers who watched, captivated, for more than an hour as Ron let the software speak for itself. They all nodded and they said, that's great. That's perfect. This exactly demonstrates everything we've been talking about for months. Why didn't we hear about this before? Who do you work for? Why didn't they tell us? At which point, I told them, well, actually the project was cancelled three months ago. I don't actually work here. And everyone laughed and I thought I was kidding and said, no, really, who do you work for? And then there was a moment of awkward silence until they realized I was serious. Then they told me, well, we really want to ship this. Don't repeat your story. We'll figure something out. And at that point, things got really weird. The folks in charge have adopted us. They do want to ship this. And they're assigning people to work on it. And at the same time that paid employees are working on it, I'm in the middle of managing all of this while Greg and I are still sneaking into the building. In the end, after six months of work, the software was so reliable, so uncrashable, that it became the software Apple used to test sick computers. If your machine wasn't working, but it wasn't clear how serious things were, Apple Technical Support would tell you to run the graphing calculator overnight. Then, if your computer crashed the uncrashable graphing calculator, you officially had a hardware problem. It was also so curious and impressive, with its shifting, spinning, multicolored shapes, that Apple used it in sales demonstrations and computer stores simply to draw people over to the machines. So after all this, the graphing calculator was installed on not just a million machines, but on more than 20 million Apple computers worldwide. Ron and Greg eventually got a modest check for their work and went on to other jobs elsewhere. For years, Ron only told the story at parties, but recently, he posted it on the internet, where he received a flood of responses from other software engineers. Some said Ron and Greg were losers, that they were taken advantage of. I was surprised when I first heard someone say that we had been used by the company, because for us, we were doing what we wanted to do, to have created something that people remember, that they can say, yeah, when I first saw that, I was blown away. You know, that's just an immense achievement. Again, Tim Dereks, who'd been letting them in the door for months. And so, true, from one perspective he did that for Apple for free. But on the other perspective, Apple did this for him, and it's something he couldn't have gotten otherwise. I think if you offered an independent filmmaker-- you know what, we're not going to give you any money. You're going to have to beg, borrow, or steal all the equipment, but you make a one-minute film and we'll air it during the Super Bowl. I don't know of any true artist filmmaker who wouldn't jump at that chance. This whole story appeals to our ideas about what a job can be, that if we do we want, if we do what we love, and do it our way, that eventually we'll be proven right and the whole company will be better for it. But not so fast. It's a fluke when it works out this well. Even Ron and Greg don't think it could happen to them again. They're still writing software, though. Ron works for himself, Greg for another company. These days, they both get paid. To be honest, Greg says, it's not quite as fun as it used to be. He swipes his badge in in the mornings, and he never stays nights. Amy O'Leary in New York City. Act Three, "Because I'm the Mommy, That's Why." Virginia Holman's mom became schizophrenic in the '70s, when understanding and diagnosis and treatment were not as forthcoming as they are today. We end our show with this story, how Virginia and her sister were dragged along on a "Should I Go" sort of mission. Actress Catherine Keener reads. Until my mother told us, my sister and I hadn't a clue we were being kidnapped. I simply came home from school one afternoon, and my mother told me we were going to our cottage in Kecatan for a couple of days. She said my father would join us there. There was nothing in her manner that made me uneasy. I do recall that she seemed especially happy. Though I didn't realize it at the time, the voices in her head were telling her that she had been chosen to help serve her country in a secret war. Her mission was to set up a field hospital at the cottage. Hundreds of orphaned children would travel to our cottage at night. We were to treat their injuries and evacuate them to safety. But right then, getting into the car, I knew none of that. I just sang along with the songs on the radio as we drove out of Virginia Beach. Our dog Ralph hung his huge gray head out of the passenger-side window. "Goodbye, Oyster Point Village," my mother called as we left our townhouse court. "Goodbye, pool. Goodbye, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Goodbye, Tammy Sugarman's house. Goodbye. Goodbye." She was ecstatic. When we hit the Hampton Roads tunnel, John Denver was singing "Thank God I'm a Country Boy," and my mother sang louder and harder than I'd ever seen, waving her head in the wind, laughing so hard tears squeezed out of the corners of her eyes. My sister Emma was in the back seat, clapping her hands and growling, her latest trick. She sounded like a puppy. "Here we go, Gingy," my mother announced as we descended into the mouth of the tunnel. I held my breath and began to count to see how long I could last. The car went dark. The radio signal disappeared. And we went under. The cottage is a tiny place, a 700-square-foot cabin constructed by my grandfather for short-term summer inhabitancy. Its foundation is two inches of poured cement that also serves as the floor. The metal shower stall was purchased at a battleship auction. "First," my mother declared, "we've been ordered to sanitize the premises." She opens the hood of the Volkswagen and pulls out buckets and bottles of ammonia. "What do you mean, we've been ordered? Who ordered us?" "That's for me to know, missy. You just do as you're told. You take orders, or they'll court martial you and put you in jail. And I am your superior." My mother has never spoken quite this way before. On any other day, I wouldn't hesitate to fight her, but today I do as I am told. Mother and I throw sitting covers over the sofa and chairs and set Emma down with a few toys. We haul the mattresses from the bunk beds into the sun to bleach out the mildew. Mom unpacks two small cans of paint and two new brushes, and we carefully paints the glass of each window in the cottage solid black. "Now," Mom says, "it's like our very own secret hideout. When we're here at night, we could have the lights on and no one will know." I wonder how much turpentine it's going to take to clean the windows again. My cousin Darby runs down from her house two acres over. My mother's brother, Chuck, built his house on his share of the family property, just to the north of us. To our south is the home of my dead grandmother's sister, Purlene. "Are you down for the weekend?" Darby asks me. Mom is in the bathroom, arranging the shelves. "Can you play?" Darby is 11. I toss my broom and dustpan in the corner and head out the door the way I always do when we're down at the cottage for a weekend, but Mom comes after us. "Darby, we've important work to do today, and Gingy must stay here to care for young Emma. I'm so sorry." My mother is speaking with a British accent all of a sudden. We think she's making a joke, and so Darby and I crack up and keep going. My mother grabs my arm and begins dragging me back to the house, pulling me backward through the pine needles. Darby starts crying and yells at my mother, and then flees for her house. Once we're inside the cottage, Mom bolts the door. "Can't you see what we have to do?" she says. "Other people will not understand. You cannot talk about the secret war. You have been called to help. This is very important. You will do what I say." I feel mother wrap her arms around me, and even though I struggle to get free, I can't. "I love you. You know that," she says. "I would never do this if I didn't love you. You must help. This is important. You will understand." My mother begins keeping notebooks, enormous five-subject spiral-bound books where she records the progress of the secret war. I sneak a look, but her notes are about as interesting as reading someone's old grocery list. What's exciting is that Mom is always on guard. We are always to be on the lookout for clues. They can be broadcast to her telepathically via the CIA, or they can appear in the environment. She takes pictures from art books and magazines, along with the things we've gathered on our walks, and glues them to nearly every surface in the house. Clues also come in other forms, and I discover the thing that every treasure hunter or private eye must know, that once you have a bit of code, a sign, a clue, it's impossible to stop looking for more. It's addictive. The world as you know it ceases to exist and is replaced with a universe bottomless with intrigue. For me, it is like being Nancy Drew, without the red sports car or any real case to crack. Mother, Emma, and I take long walks through the marsh, looking for signs. Mother picks up a dull aluminum can and tosses it back down, but a piece of yellow nylon rope tangled in a blackberry bush means something. I run through the sea grass, bringing her fragments of things to pass judgment on-- an old medicine bottle, boiled crab shell, a moldy corn husk doll. What do these things mean? "Get your pack. They're coming." I sit up and Mom is dressed in blue jeans and a dark jacket. The clocks read 3:33. It's weird to see all the numbers lined up like that, all the same. Mom says, "Tonight's a test run. Night maneuvers." "I don't want to do night maneuvers," I tell her and roll back under the covers. "Oh, no, you don't. We have to do this tonight. Get your clothes on." I pull on my brown Toughskins and a green t-shirt. The night air is soft and the half-moon lights up the sky. Mom carries Emma out to the car and lays her in the backseat with a blanket. "Leave her here. You'll just wake her," I say. "She'll be awake when the real thing happens, so she comes." We get in the car and Mom takes a scarf out of her pocket. "Now I'm going to blindfold you. No peeking. Promise." I pull it down around my neck. I find myself wondering how long you can breathe in the trunk of a Volkswagen. I push these thoughts aside. "Here's the deal, Gingy. You just don't know how any of this is going to happen, pumpkin. When the war starts, someone could be taking you out to see the children, someone who is to keep their arrival point a secret, even from you. There could also be a kidnapping, someone who takes you away because they don't want you to help the war children. The thing is, you never know who's who. That's why we never talk to anyone about the secret war. That's why you have to always pay attention." She pulls the scarf back over my eyes. I close my eyes under the blindfold and lay out a map in my head. Mom starts the car. I know that my starting point is our driveway and I pay attention to the turns the car makes, trying to anticipate where we're going, but making a list in my head. Left turn out of driveway, right turn soon after. We seem to drift to the left. I hear gravel and sand. Then we turn around, back onto the street to the right. Then another left. Uphill a bit, gear shift, turn around. We stop. Mom helps me out of the car. Frogs and cicadas, off the road, scrub grass and weeds against the legs of my jeans. Down a hill, and then we're next to the water. Mom has her hand on my shoulder and walks behind me. We're in the woods. The air is cool on my face, and then I could smell the pine needles. We stop, and I hear Mom rustle through her pack. "Your job is to get back to the duck blind. I'll be waiting for you there." She lights a match for her cigarette, a hiss and then the sharp sulfur smell. Her hand is back on my shoulder and we keep walking. I have to keep reminding myself to come back to the list in my head, to focus on this one thing. My mind wanders. Then Mom's gone. I realize it just like that. There's no hand on my shoulder, no one pushing me forward, just my own movement. I pull the blindfold down around my neck and wait for my eyes to adjust. From "How To Survive In the Woods," I remember the best way to look for tracks is to look for something irregular in the landscape. Pine needles have fallen here for years, animals come through, deer and dogs, birds. Once I start looking, it's easy enough to see the line of our path. I shuffle my feet all the way. I should remember to do that when the war really happens. I follow the trail to the road. Mom's dropped me off at the end of beach road. Home is a straight-shot half-mile walk. I stop at the cottage to get a glass of milk before I go to the duck blind. Mom's stretched out on the sofa. "The mosquitoes are awful out there," she yawns. "What time is it?" "4:30." "Not bad for your first time." "Thanks," I say. "Sit down with me?" I sit beside her on the sofa and she strokes my hair. Should I recall this time as horrifying? I don't. At the time, my mother's actions and behavior were incomprehensible. There was no context in which I could place the bizarre events that were occurring. If there was ever a moment when things changed, the move to Kecatan was it. At the time, I honestly believed that I could run away if I wanted. Like the war children my mother expected, I could be an orphan. Of course, I didn't run away. I stayed. And because I stayed, I thought it meant I wanted to stay. Even at the age of nine, staying with my mother felt like a choice. Once I had made that choice, I was with my mother in her mission to set up the hospital. I decided that I would believe in the secret war. My mother's delusion became my delusion, not so much a choice as a simple fact. It was a way not to lose her, yes, but I guess it was also more fun for a nine-year-old tomboy to believe she was chosen to aid in a secret war than to believe she was being held hostage by her mother. "Where were you, those early months we were down at the cottage?" I asked my father on the phone, 25 years later. "What were you thinking?" "I was in Virginia Beach, working." His voice halts. I don't budge. I refuse to fill the silence he has left on the other end of the line. "I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what I thought. Things were so bad, and your mother loved Kecatan. I thought maybe it might be the one thing that would help her. Of course," he says dryly, "that wasn't the case." Over the years, it's been easy for me to lose track of the fact of my father's loss of my mother. He loved her too. Now I can't speak, I can't find my way through the questions on my list. They all start to sound like one small cry of why, why, why? Why didn't you do something? My father recalls that at this time, he felt his options went like this. He could leave his wife, and us with her, and seek a divorce. Or he could move in with us, get a job in the area, and look after his family the way he had promised in his wedding vows. So Dad announced that he intended to find a job in the area and move in with us as soon as possible. Mom flung her arms around his neck as if she were welcoming home a soldier. That fall, the rains begin. The cottage has no gutters, and soon a drip line encircles our house like a moat. Each tide is higher than the last. I walked out at high tide and I am amazed to see the cove has spilled out of its banks and halfway toward the cottage. Minnows flick about the base of the holly tree and azalea bushes. When I return to the cottage, Mom is putting things up on blocks in anticipation of the flood. We turn the kitchen chairs upside down on the table like we do every Friday afternoon at school. Mom gets some bricks from the woodshed, and we hoist up the sofa several inches off the floor. In times of real crisis, Mom loves to rally to the occasion. Now that it's going to flood, Emma gets a bedtime story, and is changed into a sweet terrycloth gown with a cartoon duck sewn on each pocket. Mom sits on the edge of my bed and brushes my hair the way she did when I was very young, and my whole body tingles. Mom goes into the supply box, and out comes a box of candles and rose matches. Soon the cottage is aglow inside. This place is meant for just this sort of warmth and quiet. The soft light seems to calm all of us. We eat our hot dogs together at the kitchen table in silence, while the world around us gets small and snug as we wait for disaster to strike. Catherine Keener, reading an excerpt from Virginia Holman's memoir, Rescuing Patty Hearst. Once Virginia's dad finally convinced her mom to see a doctor, they learned that she'd been psychotic for five years. Our program produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Kevin Clark. [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS] You know you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife. They have public radio programs, best-selling books, even the New York Times, all at audible.com. This American Life is treated by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Mr. Torey Malatia, who reminds you: Muslims rule, damn it. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Sometimes the plan works out exactly like you wanted. Stetson Kennedy grew up in the South, always hated the Klan, back at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was still feared. And after the end of World War II, he decided to do something about it. And so his great idea was to go undercover in the Ku Klux Klan. And so he moved to Atlanta, which was the headquarters of the Klan. This is Stephen Dubner, co-author of a new book that, among other things, tells the story of Stetson Kennedy. Kennedy made up a fake name, started hanging around in bars filled with guys who had, Kennedy wrote, the frustrated cruel look of the Klan to them. He played a lot of pool, drank a lot of beers, until finally one afternoon he heard what he was waiting for from a guy he calls Slim, a cab driver. And Slim quickly revealed himself as a bigot, saying, what this country needs is a good Klux-ing. You've got too many of these Catholics, and Jews, et cetera, et cetera. And Stetson Kennedy said something to the effect of, yeah, but you know-- he said, my uncle Brady, he used to be a Klansman, which was true. But I hear the Klan is long gone, aren't they? And then this guy Slim whips out his Klan recruitment card and starts to put the hard sell on Stetson Kennedy. Stetson actually plays hard-to-get for a little while, and then he joins up. He gets a robe and a hood, starts going to weekly meetings, learns the secret passwords and the secret names that the Klan has for things, which turn out to follow an amazingly simple pattern. They would just add the letters K-L to the front of a lot of things. So, the Klan's meeting place was called the klavern-- like a cavern, but a klavern. And two Klansmen would hold a klonversation. And then the officers were known as the Klaliff, and the Klokard, and the Kludd, and the Kligrapp, and the Klabee, and the Kladd, and the Klarogo, and the Klexter, and all these ridiculous things. Did they have a Klandshake? They had a Klan handshake, which you would grip left hands in this limp-wristed way and wiggle like a fish a few times. And that was the Klan handshake. The other thing about the Klan that Stetson Kennedy found out was that they were a pretty smooth moneymaking operation. And so there were all kinds of dues. And you had to buy your robe from a certain place. And the robes were very expensive. And you could only have your robe cleaned at a certain place, because they didn't want everybody to find out about it. So it was this big racket. There were all kinds of rackets. I never thought to think that, actually, you had to buy your robe from them. I just somehow thought that they all made their own robes. Not only did you have to buy your robe, but they charged $15 for a robe, which at the time was a lot of money. And they really were just sheets with hoods. So Kennedy tried to use the information that he was discovering inside the Klan against the Klan. When his chapter was hired by local businesses to break up a union meeting or threaten organizers, he'd warn the union guys in advance. He passed along other information to an assistant attorney general in Georgia. He wrote editorials. He made speeches. At one point, he actually wanted to start a competing group that he also wanted to call the Ku Klux Klan, which in theory would have let him get injunctions against any real Klan group, on the grounds that they were violating the laws and charter of his Ku Klux Klan. He was having some successes, but it was kind of slow going. And then he harnessed the most powerful force known to man. I'm talking, of course, about radio. And that's when he came up with this unbelievable idea. He was one day walking down the street. And he saw some kids playing this game of cops and robbers, essentially. And they were exchanging secret passwords. And it reminded him of the Klan, because the Klan meetings that he went to-- they would change the password every day, they had this secret handshake. It was all this childlike stuff. And this was right as World War II was over. And one of the biggest figures in all the media and in all the public imagination at that point was Superman in the comic books. But also the Superman radio show was hugely, hugely, hugely popular. It was on every night. And he thought, huh, I wonder if I could somehow get the Superman radio show to do a show about the Ku Klux Klan, using this real information about the Ku Klux Klan that I have. And it could be like Superman takes on the Ku Klux Klan. Wouldn't that be cool? When Jimmy Olsen, as manager of the Unity House baseball team, selected a Chinese boy named Tommy Lee for his number one pitcher, he incurred the wrath of a band of intolerant bigots calling themselves The Clan of the Fiery Cross. So Stetson Kennedy started feeding them information. And they would end up doing four week's worth of nightly radio shows. In a glade-- casting weird shadows over the nearby hills and lighting the sky above-- burns a huge wooden cross. Before it kneel half a hundred men clothed in long robes. In this scene, a white school kid is brought to a Clan rally by his uncle. Gosh, who are all these guys, Uncle Matt? And why are you wearing the sheets and hoods? We're the Clan of the Fiery Cross, Chuck. We're a great secret society pledged to purify America. America for 100% Americans only-- one race, one religion, one color. I don't get it. America's got all kinds of religions and colors. When we get through, there will only be one. Only one? But the Constitution says all Americans have the same rights and privileges. The Constitution. Ha. We'll change that. Now be quiet. And Kennedy wrote about this in his own writing, correct? Yeah. At the first Klan meeting he went to after the show hit the air, the Grand Dragon, who was the leader of the local group-- he's trying to run the meeting. And then one regular rank-and-file Klansman gets up and starts shouting. He said, I came home from work the other night, and my kid and all these other kids had these towels tied around their necks like capes. And some of them had pillow cases over their heads. And the ones with the capes were chasing the ones with pillow cases. And when I asked them what they were doing, they said they were playing this new game of cops and robbers called Superman against the Clan. I never felt so ridiculous in all my life. Suppose my own kid finds my Klan robe someday? Stetson Kennedy was also feeding his information to big-time journalists and radio commentators-- like Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson-- who would quote things that had happened at that week's Klan meetings. And I don't want to exaggerate the effect of all this. From a Klan perspective, it wasn't klataclysmic. But it was pretty klupsetting. They didn't like being made fun of. The climax of the four weeks of Superman broadcasts comes in this scene that is pure poetic license on the part of the Superman writers. Basically, the racist uncle in the story evades capture by Superman and seeks refuge with the imperial head of the clan, who-- in this radio world Ku Klux Klan-- sees the Clan only as a money-making scheme, nothing more-- just a way to get suckers to pay dues and buy robes. Come now, Riggs. Is it possible that you really believe all that stuff about getting rid of the foreigners? That "one race, one religion, one color" hokum? Hokum? Why, it's the absolute truth. We've got to save America from foreign elements. Well, I'll be-- I thought you had brains, Riggs. But you've become drunk on the slop we put up for the suckers. Suckers? Who are you calling-- Our members, Riggs. The poor fish who want to hate and blame somebody else for their failures in life. The saps who believe drivel such as, a man is a dangerous enemy because he goes to a different church. The little nobodies who want to believe some other race is inferior so they can feel superior. The jerks who go for that "100% American" rot. Rot? You mean you don't believe? Of course not. You must know there is no such thing as what we call 100% American. Everyone here except the Indians is descended from foreigners. Why, blast you, Wilson. You sound like a dirty foreigner yourself. I'm running a business, Riggs. And so are you. We deal in one of the oldest and most profitable commodities on Earth. Hate. See, that's how you do it, right there. You get to know your enemy, and then you put it on the radio as forcefully as you can. We have three stories today on our radio show that do just that, with one big difference from Stetson Kennedy's story. In none of our other stories today do things work out so victoriously. In fact, in the other three stories in today's show, when people get to know their enemies, it just makes things way more complicated, and more confusing. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, Know Your Enemy. Act One, The Minister Meets the Martyr. We have the remarkable true story of a suicide bomber and her conversation with the head of the defense forces from the other side. Act Two, I Am Curious, Jello, in which two former adversaries-- punk star Jello Biafra and the government prosecutor who went after him-- sit down after two decades to talk. Act Three, Eight Percent of Nothing. How could we do an hour on knowing your enemy without at least one story about knowing the enemy who is your spouse, sometimes anyway. Stay with us. Act One, The Minister Meets the Martyr. I first heard about this first story a few years ago. And I was kind of stunned that it had happened at all. It's the kind of thing that you see in movies, but it's really hard to believe that it could happen in real life. Basically, the story is this. There's a country at war. And the head of its defense establishment decides that he wants to meet with foot soldiers from the other side-- the people at the very bottom of the military-- to understand better what's motivating them. Even more incredible than the fact that these meetings happened is the fact that a reporter is there to record exactly what they say to each other at one of these meetings. This happened back in 2002. Israel's defense minister-- their Donald Rumsfeld-- decided that he wanted to meet face-to-face with suicide bombers who, for one reason or another, had failed to carry out their plans. Israel's intelligence agency, the Shin-Bet, arranged for a meeting with two Palestinians who had set out to blow themselves up but didn't. The first at this meeting was a teenager named Rasan Stiti, who didn't seem remorseful, and who told the minister that he had wanted to die a martyr's death to help his people, to get rewards in Paradise. With the second bomber, it was much more complicated. What you're going to hear now is an excerpt from Vered Levy-Barzilai's story in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz from June 21, 2002, just a week after the meeting. Remember, she's writing for an Israeli audience about all this. The article was read for us by Enid Graham. The meeting took place last week on Sunday at 2:00 PM in the detention room in the Russian compound in Jerusalem. Defense Minister Ben-Eliezer was accompanied by his military secretary, Brigadier General Mike Herzog. He came straight from a cabinet meeting, dressed in a dark suit, light shirt, and tie. The two men entered the room where the Shin-Bet personnel were waiting. The little room was too narrow to comfortably accommodate all those present. They met Rasan Stiti, and then Arin Ahmed was brought in. She was very different from Stiti. He sat slouched in his seat and averted his gaze for most of the session, not daring to look Ben-Eliezer in the eye. Ahmed, in contrast, sat upright and looked straight ahead. Stiti was stiff. She was very expressive. He spoke only Arabic. She sometimes switched to fluent English, and occasionally used a few words of Hebrew. He spoke in a cold, monotonous tone as if he were reciting slogans. Ahmed, on the other hand, seemed much more sincere, and they tended to believe her. Ahmed impressed them as a young woman with a charismatic personality. Before she arrived here, Arin Ahmed was studying communications and computer programming at Bethlehem University. She's 20, born in Bait Zahur, outside of Bethlehem. Her father died when she was still a baby. For reasons that are not totally clear, her mother abandoned her and moved to Amman, Jordan, where she still is. Arin's aunts and uncles raised her and saw to her education. On March 8 of this year, she experienced another loss. Tanzim militant Jad Salem, her boyfriend of a year and a half, was killed. According to the Palestinians, he was killed by Israeli Defense Forces gunfire. Israeli Intelligence says, quote, he was apparently killed while attempting to prepare a car bomb. Arin decided to avenge the death of her beloved by carrying out a suicide bombing. She conveyed a message to this effect to a senior Tanzim militant. On May 22, Tanzim activists Ali Yusef Mughrabi and Mahmoud Salem picked her up and took her to prepare for a suicide bombing in Rishon Letzion. They introduced her to a 16-year-old boy, Issam Badir from Beit Jala. They were supposed to carry out the attack together. Mahmoud Salem instructed Badir to blow himself up amid the backgammon tables on the open plaza. Arin was supposed to wait on the other side of the street for the people who weren't killed or injured in the first explosion to run in a panic towards where she was standing. The expectation was that she would soon be surrounded by a large crowd. Then she was to choose the right moment and blow herself up. The explosives were packed into black knapsacks. Arin said that she had already written a farewell letter to her family. She purified herself and prayed. The men explained to her that she had to pass for a young Israeli woman. So she was asked to wear Western-style dress-- tight pants and a midriff top. She did as she was told. Then they met with Ibrahim Sarahne, Mahmoud's cousin, who explained how to get to the site chosen for the attack, and described the place for them in great detail. Sarahne transported them nearby. When they arrived, Sarahne gave Arin and Issam precise instructions, via cell phone, where exactly to stand so as to have the most lethal effect. They got out of the car with their knapsacks, and headed for opposite sides of the street as instructed. Arin stood in her position for about 10 minutes. Then she suddenly left the spot, returned to the parked car, and told Sarahne that she had changed her mind and didn't want to go through with the bombing. The Tanzim men were enraged that she had backed out. They reminded her of the lofty status she would achieve and the great honor awaiting her in Paradise. Arin watched as the teenager ran and blew himself up right before her eyes. She again told her handlers that she wouldn't go through with it. And they brought her back to Bethlehem. Arin Ahmed is not handcuffed when she is led in to meet the defense minister. She sits at the table dressed in long pants and a gray sweater, a tall, full-figured young woman with long black hair and dark eyes. Ben-Eliezer, "Explain to me why you wanted to commit a suicide bombing in Israel. Was it for religious reasons?" Ahmed, "No, it was something personal. I was in distress. I was depressed." Ben-Eliezer, "Why did you want to commit suicide?" Ahmed, "You killed my friend." Ben-Eliezer, "Was he a close friend of yours?" Ahmed, "Yes. We were friends for a year and a half." Ben-Eliezer, "Did you live together?" Ahmed, "No, of course not. There's no such thing in our society. But we were friends. And he was killed." Ben-Eliezer, "So what did you want to happen? Did you want to kill innocent Jews in order to avenge his death?" Ahmed, "I don't know what I wanted. I was very hurt and angry. I have friends from the university who are active in the Tanzim. We get together a lot and go out together. We were sitting together one evening. And they were talking about how they wanted to organize a reprisal action against all the military actions and everything that Israel had done to them in the last months. I sat and listened. I thought about Jad. And all of a sudden, I said to them, you know what? I'm going to do a suicide bombing. And that was it. A moment earlier, I hadn't thought of anything like that. This was on a Friday. Afterward, I went home. I spoke with someone in the Tanzim, and told them that I wanted to do it." Ben-Eliezer, "And what happened then?" Ahmed, "I thought they would take me to start preparing for it, that they would train me and teach me about weapons, something like that. I was sure it was a process that took several months. And then, suddenly, four days later, some Tanzim militants came and told me, we've chosen you. Congratulations. You're going to do a suicide bombing. And then some more senior people came. I was in shock. I never imagined it could happen so fast. "But they didn't let me think about it too much. They told me, you'll gain a very special status among the women suicide bombers. You'll be a real heroine. It's for Jad's memory. You'll be reunited with him in heaven. You'll be with him in Paradise. And I did whatever they told me. They explained everything to Issam and me. This all happened very fast and then we set out." Ben-Eliezer, "Did your family know?" Ahmed, "No. I left on the day I wrote my farewell letter." Ben-Eliezer, "And you didn't feel bad about what it would do to them?" Ahmed, "I was only thinking about my boyfriend." Ben-Eliezer, "And what happened then? Why did you change your mind?" Ahmed, "I got out of the car. The place wasn't exactly like I'd seen on the map. I saw a lot of people, mothers with children, teenage boys and girls. I remembered an Israeli girl my age whom I used to be in touch with. I suddenly understood what I was about to do. And I said to myself, how can I do such a thing? I changed my mind. Issam also had second thoughts, but they managed to convince him to go ahead. I saw him go and blow himself up. I decided that I wasn't going to do it. They were very angry at me. They yelled at me the whole way back. And they also tried to send me to carry out another attack in Jerusalem. But I had already changed my mind and given up the whole idea. I stayed at home, until your forces came and arrested me." Ben-Eliezer, "And now what?" Ahmed, "And now I'm here. It was a mistake. It's wrong to kill people and children. Doing something like that is forbidden. There's no way I would do it. And the fact is, I didn't do it." Ben-Eliezer, "If you're released, what will you do?" Ahmed, "I'd leave this place immediately. I'd go live in Jordan with my mother. I would draw a line across the past and never come back here. Yes, I faltered. But it was a momentary stumble. That's not me. I was swept up into this thing, but I came to my senses. In Jordan, with my mother and sisters, I would continue studying. I'd get a degree at the university. I'd never go near anything like this again." At this point, Ben-Eliezer says goodbye and signals that the conversation has ended. Ahmed bursts out crying. "Please, Mr. Minister, wait a minute. There's something else I want to tell you." Ben-Eliezer turns around to listen. Ahmed, "I'm finished with this. I swear it. Please let me out of here. I want to ask you to transfer me to my family in Jordan." He listens but doesn't say anything. She sighs. "What will become of me? I have no future. I don't want my whole life to be ruined because of this. I didn't do anything. Don't forget that. I didn't do it. I changed my mind. Please let me out." "To each his fate," Ben-Eliezer said. And then he left the room. Last Thursday afternoon, in his office at the defense ministry, Ben-Eliezer said that from now on he intends to keep interviewing other potential suicide bombers, because they're the main problem that the defense establishment has to contend with. "This is an efficient, quick, cheap, and highly lethal kind of weapon that is very hard to overcome," the defense minister said. "That's why I want to meet them face-to-face." There are professionals in the Shin-Bet whose job it is to do this. Why was it important for you to meet them yourself? "If I'm fighting against something, I need to get to know it personally. I know tanks and airplanes and artillery. But I don't know the person who turns himself into a bomb." Do you think you'll learn something that you didn't know before? "First of all, I wanted to have the contact. To look them in the eye. To see if they look me in the eye. To see how I would feel, to try to understand directly what causes a young man or woman in their teens to throw everything away, to go out and murder innocent people, to commit suicide. I had to sit down across from this thing." And what did you learn? "I felt different things in the meeting with him and the meeting with her. And I learned different things from both cases. The young man said he wouldn't do it again, but I didn't believe him. He recited the brainwashing they did to him, nothing more. It sounded more like someone with a weak character whom the surrounding system had homed in on, caught and trained for the assignment. He seemed like a spineless young man, nothing special." How did the meeting with her go? "It wasn't easy. She showed emotion. She spoke, she was quiet, she smiled, she cried. She's an intelligent young woman and took part in a flowing conversation." How did you feel when you were sitting there facing her? "To be honest, I felt sorry for her. I admit it. I thought she was pitiable. I found it hard to fathom how a girl like her, an educated young woman with her whole future ahead of her, could have ended up in such a situation, ready to commit such an inhuman act. On the other hand, the fact that she did not go through with it and the way she expressed remorse touched me. I admit that I felt compassion for her." What do you think ought to be done with her? "I don't know. And I'm not the one who has to decide. I tend to believe that if she's released she will get as far away from here as possible and try to start a new life." Isn't there something unseemly about a defense minister choosing to sit down with someone who almost killed innocent civilians and giving her a platform, and then even feeling such empathy towards her? "Listen well. This meeting was held in the context of know thine enemy. None of the rest interests me. To me, this is an important meeting that is supplying valuable information." She was just a hairbreadth away from blowing herself up and killing innocent Israeli civilians. "True, and you don't have to remind me of that. I haven't forgotten that for a moment. But then she tells you her life story, and smiles and cries, and you remember that this is a 20-year-old girl. And you also feel sorry for her. My gut feeling was that she was telling the truth. She almost did a monstrous thing, but in the end she didn't. Of course, I haven't changed my opinion about the severity of the phenomenon or the severity of the fact that she was a willing participant in it until the very last moment. And she also didn't prevent the terror attack. But she did manage to move me." What new and relevant information did this meeting provide? "There is an entire system that operates to produce human bombs. Here you can see how this machine works. As soon as she said she wanted to commit suicide, the whole thing took on a tremendous momentum and went totally out of her control. Here you have a girl who suddenly blurted something out. I'm almost certain that she, herself, didn't really mean it. But as soon as the words were said, they pounced on her. They came at her from every direction." And how does all this insight and analysis help us? The terror attacks are continuing all the time. "86% of terror attacks are foiled and prevented. Understanding the enemy is always helpful, knowing the behind-the-scenes mechanisms. We are interested in the moment that comes before. I have a lot of information on the table. My objective is to prevent suicide bombings. That's what Operation Defensive Shield was for. That's what all the other operations are for. But unfortunately, while the Israeli Defense Forces are carrying out these necessary actions, the operations themselves become a hothouse that produces more and more new suicide bombers. The military actions kindle the frustration, hatred, and despair, and are the incubator for the terror to come. The religious and political environment immediately exploits this effect and dispatches the new suicide bombers. And the pattern is repeated." You are the defense minister of the state of Israel, and you're basically saying that we're trapped in an endless, vicious circle, that there's no solution, that we have no horizon to look toward and no hope that this terrible situation will end. "It is a terribly vicious and evil circle, but I do see hope. With Yasser Arafat, it won't happen. It will happen with someone else. As soon as the Palestinians have a new dream of a truly better life, of a normal life, the whole bit about the virgins in Paradise and all the other nonsense they've sold them will lose its magic. I believe that then, young people like Arin Ahmed and even Rasan Stiti will say no to anyone who tries to convince them to choose death over life." Actress Enid Graham, reading a story from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz from June 2002. If you like this kind of coverage of the Mideast conflict, Ha'aretz's English-language website is haaretzdaily.com. In all, about a dozen suicide bombers met with the defense minister, according to the ministry. Coming up, Jello and a marshmallow sit down together and talk. That's going to make a lot more sense in about five minutes, OK? From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week, of course, on our program we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Know Your Enemy, the stories of people getting to know the people that they are fighting and how complicated that can be. We have arrived at Act Two of our program, another act in which two adversaries have a rare face-to-face meeting. Act Two, I Am Curious, Jello. This is the story of a guy who gets to understand his enemy, but way too late to do him any good at all. It starts in 1986, when Michael Guarino is the latest hire at something called the Special Operations Division of the LA District Attorney's office. It's a prestigious job, a chance to try high-profile cases about a fairly juicy subject, obscenity. Guarino is just 38-- young compared to the rest of his colleagues-- and he is about to file charges that are going to make headlines around the world. David Segal tells what happened. There's an old joke that sums up this whole story in a punch line. Be warned, it's a little off-color. It's about a guy complaining in a bar about how he is remembered. "I served in the House of Representatives for 10 years," he says, "but does anyone call me Mr. Congressman? No, sir. I ran a corner store for a decade, but does anyone call me Mr. Grocer? No, they don't. I owned a farm for a long, long time, and harvested wheat, raised cattle. Does anyone call me Mr. Farmer? Nope. You [BEEP] one sheep." Thank you. Enjoy your salads. I'll be here all week. OK, it's a little crude. But it gets us to this question you probably never thought you'd hear. How do you un-[BEEP] a sheep? What do you do if you're remembered for one of the worst moments in your life for years, even if that person is no longer really you? Michael Guarino has confronted this very matter-- minus the sheep, of course-- for a while. We start at the height of the Reagan era culture wars. Tipper Gore is pushing warning labels on albums by bands like Judas Priest and Twisted Sister. The punk rock band called Dead Kennedys has released an album called Frankenchrist. And included in every copy is a poster by a Swiss artist named H. R. Giger. You know Giger's work even if you don't recognize his name, because he designed the look of the great sci-fi monster movie, Alien, which earned him an Academy Award. But the Giger poster in this album would never earn a PG rating. I'd love to describe it, but current broadcasting standards make that risky. The title of the painting says everything you need to know-- Penis Landscape. Let's just move on. Guarino gets a copy of Penis Landscape, and he thinks he has the grounds for an obscenity charge. I remember looking at the piece of art and thinking, just on the basis of the insert, that we had a great case. It seemed to me that that is the kind of material that most adults wouldn't want to see distributed to kids. Dead Kennedys, for those who don't know, were a big deal in the world of punk rock, one of the most popular American acts the genre ever produced. The band's music ran, for the most part, at the speed of a blender on puree. And the lyrics-- written by singer and songwriter Jello Biafra-- were strongly anti-government, to the point of paranoia. They had a song called "Government Flu" about an imagined attempt by the US to poison its own citizens. Another tune called "California Uber Alles" compared former governor Jerry Brown to Hitler. Guarino ordered up an investigation, and soon after, nine cops were busting into the apartment of Jello Biafra. This was the sort of case that could make a young prosecutor's name, and Guarino made the most of it. During the year and a half it took to get this matter into court, he was quoted in places like the New York Times, and he was soon famous enough to be denounced by Frank Zappa. He wanted to set a precedent. And he was on a winning streak-- 30 victories in a row-- which made him a little cocky. He never bothered to research the Dead Kennedys. And when a colleague suggested he might want to listen to the Frankenchrist album, he ignored her. He believed in what he was doing. The law seemed utterly clear to him. And he was in love with the righteousness of his cause. At one point, he actually compared Jello Biafra to a serial murderer named Richard Ramirez, who was convicted of killing 13 people. But as soon as the trial began, Guarino realized that he would have to fight for the moral high ground. He was up against Phil Schnayerson, a very expensive and widely-admired defense lawyer who decided to take Jello's case for free. Schnayerson had a mastery of the arguments and a sense of humor. Even when Phil was interviewing prospective jurors, it seemed to Guarino he was charming the room. He seemed to be having a whole lot of fun with the trial, way more fun than I was having with it. And he seemed to feel like he was on the right side. And that's not usual, for a prosecutor to be involved in a case in which the defense attorney has this feeling of righteousness. That's supposed to be mine. That's supposed to be my territory. And so it was upsetting to see him so sure of himself, and so sure of the merits of his case. And I could start reading the jurors. I pride myself on being able to see what's on the jurors' minds, really almost within 10 seconds of their starting to answer questions. And I didn't like what I was seeing. I was seeing a lot of various degrees of hatred for me registering on faces. So I started getting the feeling that this was not a great case very early on in the trial. But Guarino had a Perry Mason moment in mind that he thought was a killer. You know, every prosecutor wants to present the critical evidence in a dramatic way. And I wanted the poster introduced by the mother of the child who had purchased the album. "Let's get Mary Sierra to the stand." And then she would lay the foundation for this poster. I'd ask her if this is similar to the poster that she saw in the album that her son had purchased. She would say, yes. And then at that point, I would have it marked as an exhibit, and I-- not Phil, but I-- would then show it to the jury. And it would be the moment that I chose, rather than the moment that Phil chose. And instead of that happening, Phil, on his first question-- I mean it was like his first question out of the box. All of a sudden, Phil is passing this poster out to the jurors. And they're looking at it. And they are getting used to it. And he said, this is a poster that's ugly and it's offensive. But you're going to have to decide whether or not it's obscene. The jury survived their peek at Penis Landscape, and then Schnayerson played them some Dead Kennedys songs. The band's lyrics, it was soon obvious, were blunt but surprisingly sophisticated. To the jury, and to Guarino-- who of course had never heard the band until he got to court-- the Giger poster now had some context to put it in a very different light. The defense called professors and music critics to the stand, and the trial became an art and history lesson instead of a discourse about protecting the children. There's the way you tell the story of your life, and if you're lucky, your version is the best known. If you're not so lucky, some opponent defines your legacy for you. And if you're really unlucky, that opponent is Jello Biafra. All right. Isn't this painting sick? Isn't this painting obscene? Isn't this painting sick? Don't you think Giger is obsessed with sex with the dead? Isn't this painting sexually explicit? Isn't this sick? Isn't this sick? This is Jello, from a spoken-word account of the trial on an album called The High Priest of Harmful Matter. He toured with this material, and got a lot of attention and press for it. If Guarino's mistake was that he didn't really know and understand his enemy, he was up against a foe who is an amazingly close observer of people. And throughout the 44-minute monologue, Jello does a withering impersonation of Guarino, who comes across in great detail as a moralizing bozo. I can't imitate Michael Guarino properly without a pen open and cocked between the index and middle finger, always kind of poking at you right at eye level when he talks to you, kind of like a little claw or something. Poking at you with his pen. And here's Jello doing Guarino talking to the jury. "Don't be fooled by the fact that Mr. Jello Biafra appears to be nicely dressed or smiling [? benignly ?] over here. And don't be fooled by the fact that their lawyers appear to be friendlier than I am." Finally, he couldn't restrain himself. He had to do it anyway. He whips out the Giger poster and flails it around the courtroom for all to see, thus exposing its contents to at least 15 minors in the courtroom gallery. By the time Guarino is waving that poster around, just about everything that could go wrong for him had gone wrong, so wrong that even he didn't believe his arguments anymore. Just as bad, the guy who was supposed to be cast as the villain, Jello, was coming across like the reasonable one. Remember, this was big news, the test case in the '80s culture wars. In the international coverage of the trial, and in reports in newspapers and on television, it was clear that Biafra wasn't the only one who found the whole thing a little ridiculous. Well, all throughout the trial we were seeing various anchors kind of smirking at the fact that we were doing this. That was unusual. That was different. I hadn't experienced that yet. But that was-- I did start to think that I was on, not the wrong side of the case so much, but more generally the wrong side of history. I just felt I was on the wrong side of history. He was right. In the end, the jury deadlocked, with the majority for acquittal. Guarino requested a retrial, but the judge would have none of it. Case dismissed. This trial was the start of a pretty radical transformation for Michael Guarino. After that case, and a few more like it, the priorities of the DA's office started to bug him. There were all these show trials that added up to nothing, and all sorts of crimes-- corporate crimes, political conflicts of interest-- that were just ignored. He feuded with his boss, James Hahn, then became so exasperated that he tried to throw the guy out of office by running against him for the district attorney's job. He lost that election. Hahn is now the mayor of Los Angeles by the way. Guarino left the city, and wound up as the dean of a small law school in northern California. The whole idea of being a prosecutor and doing anything to take an opponent down didn't appeal to him anymore. He was more interested in cases coming out fairly. And once a prosecutor is more interested in fairness than in winning, he's pretty much not doing his job. So in a sense, this trial kind of snapped you out of it, the substance of it began to matter more. Yeah, I hate to say yes to that, but that's actually a pretty accurate assessment. If I look back, I would say that that was a turning point for me. He was a different guy, but nobody knew it. He couldn't escape his most famous case. For one thing, his students remembered. From time to time, someone would come up to me and say, are you the Mike Guarino that prosecuted Jello Biafra? What were you thinking? And students were amazed that this person that they thought they knew had been involved in this thing. I think they were kind of hoping I'd say that was a different Michael Guarino. And if that wasn't bad enough, his son, for reasons we can only guess at, turned into a huge fan of Jello Biafra, and at home, he was forced to listen to Dead Kennedys music for years. The old version of Guarino, the one parodied by Jello, has pretty much vanished from the world. Jello has never met the new Guarino and, given the hand that Jello had in defining the old one, we decided it was time for an introduction. I hear ringing. Hello? Jello Biafra is on the line with me. Hello. Hello, Jello. Hi. How are you? Good. Did you guys ever get a chance to talk? I don't think-- I think our only conversation was right after the trial. When you handed me the album. I remember that. Yeah, I held up the insert from an extended-play recording by a band called Big Black, called Headache, that had a pathology photo of somebody's head was split open inside, thinking, if you think the Giger painting is offensive, wait till you see this. Yes, I thought that was really sweet of you to do. I remember-- I think you said, don't be a bad winner. I took that very seriously, and I thought you had a point on that. And then the elevator doors closed. And away I went. Years ago, Jello heard that Michael regretted the case. And Jello wasn't angry at him anymore. So this became a heart-to-heart conversation pretty quickly. --and she said, well, I think it was, you probably had a little bit-- maybe more than a little bit-- to do with my changing my mind about what the priorities ought to be at the City Attorney's Office. And I remember that you said in some interview, Jello, that I seemed so pure. I was trying to look out for-- I thought I was looking out for the youth of America. And I knew the exact degree of sarcasm-- Then I think I did a little soul-searching after that trial. So it was all for the good, really. Well, what I'm getting out of all of this today is Mr. Guarino crediting me with being, long-term, a positive influence on his life. And I never would have guessed that that could have happened. And that makes it all the more worthwhile to keep causing trouble the way I do. I mean it always-- After a few minutes, these two were talking like old war buddies. Then they were just talking. And then it was hard to get a word in edgewise. They reminisced about the trial. --I mean at the time, you came across quite zealous. Is that a compliment? They cleared up a few nagging questions. Why was it necessary for Detective Carter to lie on the witness stand about a point that didn't really even matter? They talked politics-- Al Gore, 2000 elections. Yeah, he did win. He did win. Yeah. Let me get us back to our subject. Sure. He didn't even question-- These two guys, who were at war for a year and a half, were actually bonding. Politically, they were on the same page. And it was a page where you don't find a lot of Americans these days. And I'm hoping that they'll see the similarities between Bush and Mussolini, frankly, because-- Well, the one who's the most like Mussolini is Schwarzenegger. Can I interrupt you and just say it's kind of hard to imagine that you guys ever were adversaries. I have a good feeling about Jello. I don't think you can fake fondness. And I know I can't. If I'm not fond of somebody, people can tell it pretty fast. Yep. But I'm fond of Jello. I think he's a good guy. Jello? Would you like to share? Well, thank you. I don't know what else to say on that. I think I said earlier, I forgave Mr. Guarino a long time ago for his role in the original prosecution. And I've learned over the years that people do change. And sometimes it can be very interesting to get to know people who in earlier times may have tormented you. They talked for over an hour. By the end, these two were exchanging phone numbers. They were planning to go to dinner together, along with Guarino's son. My son is probably one of your biggest fans. How old is he now? He's 22. Wow. Yeah, he's 22 years old. And he would play your stuff so loud that half the block could hear it. I think I did that with The Stooges, when I was a kid. Well, he was just a huge fan. When you know your enemy and your enemy knows you, it's sometimes hard to stay enemies. And yes, the ill-fated prosecution of Jello Biafra will probably make it into Michael Guarino's obituary, if it's not actually in the headline. But at this point, Guarino can't be bothered to care that much. The people who know him know he's changed, and most important, his adversary knows he's changed. To put this in sheep terms, the lamb can lie down with the lion if the lion has turned himself into a lamb. Or put another way-- one that doesn't appear in the Bible-- maybe you can un-[BEEP] a sheep. It just takes longer for word of that to get around. When he's not here on the radio trying to get predators and prey to sit down together and make nice, David Segal is a reporter for the Washington Post. Act Three, Eight Percent of Nothing. Well we end our program today with a story about what it means to know your enemy in a more domestic setting, namely within a marriage. The story is by Etgar Keret, read for us by Matt Malloy. Benny Brokerage had been waiting for them in the doorway for almost half an hour. And when they arrived he tried to act as if it didn't make him mad. "It's all her fault," the old man sniggered, and held out his hand for a firm, no-nonsense shake. "Don't believe Butchie," the peroxide urged him. She looked at least 15 years younger than her man. "We got here earlier, except we couldn't find any parking." And Benny Brokerage gave her his foxy smile, like he really gave a damn why she and Butchie were late. He showed them the apartment, which was almost completely furnished with a high ceiling and a kitchen window that almost gave you a view of the sea. He had barely gotten through half the usual round when Butchie pulled out his checkbook and said he'd take it, and that he was even OK with paying a year's rent upfront, except that he wanted a bit off the top, just to feel like he wasn't being taken for a ride. Benny Brokerage explained that the owner was living abroad, so he wasn't at liberty to lower the price. Butchie insisted it was small change. "As far as I'm concerned," he said, "you can take it off your commission. What's your cut?" "Eight," Benny Brokerage said after a moment's pause, preferring not to risk a lie. "So you'll still be left with five," Butchie announced, and finished writing out the check. When he saw that the broker wasn't holding out his hand to take it, he added, "Look at it this way. The market's in the cellar. And 5% of something's a lot more than 8% of nothing." Butchie, or Tuvia Minster, which was the name that appeared on the check, said the peroxide would drop by the next morning to pick up an extra key. Benny Brokerage said, no problem, except that it had to be before 11:00, because he had some appointments after that. The next day, she didn't show. It was 11:20 already, and Benny Brokerage, who was aching to leave but didn't really want to stand her up, pulled the check out of the drawer. It had the office phone numbers, but he preferred to avoid another tedious conversation with Butchie and went for the home number instead. It wasn't until she answered that he remembered that he didn't even know her name, so he opted for Mrs. Minster. She somehow sounded a little less dumb on the phone, but she still couldn't remember who he was or that they'd made an appointment for that morning. Benny Brokerage kept his cool and reminded her slowly-- the way you do when you're talking to a child-- how he had met with her and her husband the day before and how they had signed for the apartment. There was no response at the other end. And when she finally asked him to describe what she looked like, he realized he'd really blown it. "The truth is," he crooned, "that I must have the wrong number. What did you say your husband's name is? That's it, then. I was looking for Nissim and Dalia. Those 411 people messed me up again. I'm really sorry. Goodbye." And he slammed the receiver down before she had a chance to answer. The peroxide arrived at the office 15 minutes later, eyes at half-mast and a face that hadn't been washed yet. "I'm sorry," she yawned. "It took me a half an hour to find a cab." The following morning, when he arrived at the office, there was a woman waiting outside on the sidewalk. She looked about 40, and something about the way she was dressed, about her fragrance, was so not-from-around-here that when he spoke, he instinctively went for his most genteel pronunciation. It turned out she was looking for a two or three room place. She'd prefer to buy. But she didn't rule out a rental as long as it was available right away. Benny Brokerage said he did happen to have a few nice apartments for sale, and that because the market was in a slump, they would be reasonably priced, too. He asked her how she'd found him, and she said she had looked in the Yellow Pages. "Are you Benny?" she asked. He said no, that there hadn't been a Benny for ages. "I kept the name in order not to lose the good will. I'm Michael." He smiled. "The truth is, when I'm on the job even I forget sometimes." "I'm Leah." The woman smiled back. "Leah Minster. We spoke on the phone yesterday." "This is a little uncomfortable," Leah Minster said all of a sudden, out of nowhere. The first apartment had been too dark. And they were walking through the second one. Benny Brokerage tried to play dumb, and started talking about how simple it would be to renovate and stuff like that, as if she'd been referring to the apartment. "After you phoned me," Leah Minster ignored his reply, "I tried to talk it over with him. At first he lied, but then he got tired of it and confessed. That's what the apartment is for. I'm leaving him." Benny Brokerage continued showing her around, thinking to himself that it was none of his business, that there was no reason for him to get uptight. "Is she young?" Leah Minster persisted. And he nodded and said, "She's not nearly as pretty as you. I hate having to say a thing like this about a client, but he's an idiot." The third apartment had better light. And when he showed her the view of the park from the bedroom window, he felt her moving closer-- not touching him exactly, but close enough. And even though she liked the apartment, she wanted him to show her another one. In the car, she kept asking him all sorts of questions about the peroxide. And Benny Brokerage tried to put her down but stay kind of vague at the same time. He didn't really feel comfortable with it, but he went on because he saw it was making her happy. Whenever they stopped talking, there was a kind of tension, especially at the stoplights. And somehow he couldn't think of anything to say the way he usually could, a little story that would take their minds off of being stuck. All he could do was stare at the traffic light and wait for it to change. At one of the intersections, even when the light changed, the car in front of them, a Mercedes, didn't move. Benny Brokerage slammed the horn twice and cursed the driver through the window. And when the guy in the Mercedes didn't seem to give a damn, he stormed out of the car. Turned out, there was nobody to pick a fight with, though, because the driver, who seemed at first to be dozing, didn't wake up even when Benny Brokerage nudged him. Then the ambulance crew arrived and said it was a stroke. They searched the driver's pockets and the car, but they couldn't find any ID. And Benny Brokerage felt kind of rotten for cursing the guy without a name, and he was sorry for the mean things he had said about the peroxide too, even though that really had nothing to do with it. Leah Minster sat beside him in the car looking pale. He drove her back to the office and made them both some coffee. "The truth is that I didn't tell him anything," she said, and took a sip of the instant. "I was lying, actually, just so you'd tell me about her. I'm sorry, but I just had to find out." Benny Brokerage smiled and told himself and her that there was no harm done, really, that all they had done was see a couple of apartments and some poor guy who'd dropped dead. She finished her coffee, said sorry again, and left. And Michael, who still had a few sips to go, looked around his office, a two-by-three cubicle with a window overlooking the main drag. Suddenly the place seemed so small and transparent, like the ant colony he got for his bar mitzvah a million years ago. And all the good will he had boasted about so solemnly just two hours earlier also sounded like crap. Lately it had begun bothering him that people called him Benny. Matt Malloy, reading a short story by Etgar Keret which will be published here next year in a collection called The Nimrod Flipout from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Etgar Keret is also the author of the book, The Bus Driver Who Thought That He Was God. Our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Sarah Koenig and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Kevin Clark. Stephen Dubner's book, where we first learned about Stetson Kennedy and Superman, is called Freakonomics. It comes out in June. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our shows for absolutely free. Or you know you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife. They have public radio programs, best-selling 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 Torey Malatia, who has a message today for everyone. What this country needs is a good Klux-ing. 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. Hi, Dad, how are you doing? I'm doing fine. When Aric was a kid, his dad would leave for six months at a time. He was in the Merchant Marines. He'd be in Guam or Scotland or God knows where, and Aric would record these cassettes and send them off to him. Have you been in the desert? Did the Easter Bunny send you an Easter basket? If he did, you better make sure there's no lizards in it. Dad, when are you going to be coming back up to stay? I'm anxious to see you or at least hear your voice. Yeah, send me a tape, Dad. His request that his father record a tape for him is repeated over and over again on these tapes. Here's Aric, probably four years later, on another tape, in seventh grade. His hope that his dad would respond was so great that every cassette that he sent, he would only record on one side. The other side was blank for his dad to fill in and send back. Never did, though. You can use this tape to send me-- I want a tape back, bubba. And I really hope you can get your hands on a tape recorder. Well, I guess you did, or else you wouldn't be listening to it right now, but-- I just got my hair cut yesterday. I don't know if you'd like it or not. It's-- These recordings are filled with so much yearning that, even when Aric tells his dad about his haircut, you can hear it. Aric reads his dad a poem he's written about the environment. He talks about the weather, two feet of snow. He plays his clarinet, though even this gets a nervous preamble. I don't know. I'll play my piece for you that I'm going to play tomorrow. But my reed is-- it's a new reed and it's not fully soaked yet. So there'll be squeaking. It'll be OK tomorrow because it's soaking right now. So I'll be squeaking. OK, I'm going to play it now. I know this is the saddest tape in the world that we're starting the show with this week, and I'm just doing it so I can talk about this choice. As adults, we have this funny choice. Are we going to sit down with our parents and talk about the stuff that hurt us and didn't make sense to us when we were kids? And it's hard to know if it's worth it sometimes, if it's just going to make your parents feel bad. And what are they going to say, anyway? But Aric's never understood why his father, in all those years, never sent him a tape back. Not once. So, not long ago, he got together with his father. Those tapes ripped the guts right out of me. They're from an era of my life that was so sad. This is Aric's dad. Back when those tapes were sent, during the months when he wasn't away at sea, he was often just living out of his car, scraping by. He and Aric's mom split up pretty early. And I've got to say, this little encounter did not start so well. Aric played his father a bit at the old tape, and his dad cried and said it was killing him. It was just too sad, too hard to listen to, knowing all the ways he'd let Aric down back then. And then, finally, Aric asked him the question that he brought him there to ask him-- why he never sent a tape back. And his dad was as honest as he could be. I don't know. I can't answer that. I was a failure, a total failure in that. I guess I figured I'd get home and talk to you. I should have had the strength to do it. I didn't have the strength to do it. That's my only answer. I didn't have the strength to do that. And why didn't you? I don't know. I believe you. It's my only answer. Sorry. You know that? You know how sorry I am about that? Yeah. That ain't worth much, I guess, but-- No, it is. It's all I can do. Was that satisfying? No. No, I don't know. No, it wasn't satisfying. But yes, I think I did believe him. I talked to Aric about all this on the phone. I have two completely different understandings of my dad in my head. One is that dad I knew and missed and was really mad at as a kid, and one is the dad I know now. And I don't know. I feel like maybe asking him those questions, I wanted to conjure up that younger version and see what a total jerk he was so that I could really be mad at him. It didn't happen. And I just saw the dad that I've known for the past few years. And I'm not really mad at him. Right. You're still mad at that young dad. But he's gone. And there's this sweet, kind of sad, loving, older guy there now. But how unsatisfying for you and for everyone who wants to confront their parents, given the fact that the people who they're mad at are sort of gone and have been replaced by these kinder, gentler, more sensitive people. Totally unsatisfying. And I think probably then confronting your parents never works. Confronting your parents never works because by the time you get around to doing it, your parents are totally different people. Yeah. They're gone, and there are these different beings sitting in front of you when you confront them. The problem, of course, is that we still have our questions about the past, whether or not those people we've got beef with are still around to answer the questions. Today on our radio show, we have stories of two people who head off bravely for answers, despite these odds. Act One is about a man who's handed a mystery that he could really use his father's help in unraveling. But unfortunately, his father is dead. In Act Two, we have a son, a father, and questions so unusual that their answers may require an army of Russian lumberjacks, a giant circular trench in the Sahara Desert, and possibly-- just possibly-- a website. Stay with us. Act One, Make Him Say Uncle. This is the story of a family. And every family has a black sheep. In Lenny's family growing up, it was Uncle Abie. Uncle Abie was the person in my family that I was always told, don't be like Abie. Don't be like Abie. You know, there was like-- he was like a model of what not to be. My father would always say to me, don't read in bed at night. Uncle Abie reads in bed. And what was bad about that was that you need a book as a crutch to go to sleep at night. Or Uncle Abie read on the toilet. Now, don't read on the toilet. That's bad. It's not clean. Uncle Abie was always an hour late for everything. Uncle Abie went out with a string of women when he was single, in a way that seemed unsavory to Lenny's parents. Uncle Abie couldn't be trusted. There are all kinds of things about Uncle Abie to avoid. So Uncle Abie didn't come around much, even though he lived right in the neighborhood. This was in the Bronx in the 1950s. Lenny's dad operated a sewing machine at a factory in the garment district. His mom did alterations in a department store. There wasn't much money. Lenny and his older brother and his parents lived in a one-bedroom apartment. So fast forward several decades. Lenny grows up, moves out. And by the time he's 31, his mom had passed away. His father was in the hospital with cancer. And Lenny's visiting his dad there. And Abie comes in and he pulls me aside and he says, I have a secret to tell you, but I can't tell you until your father dies. So I just was like, OK, leave me alone, you know? And I just didn't-- I said, fine. So then my father did die. And it was about a week after my father died, just a little bit after the funeral. And Abie called up, and we were talking about some pieces of furniture that he-- actually, he had gone to my father's apartment and taken furniture without asking us. Wow. And we're talking about the furniture. And then I said to him, so what's the secret? And there's this long pause, and then he says, no, no, forget it. No, never mind. And I go, come on. You said there was a secret. I mean, you said this. What is it? And he said, I really don't want to talk about it. I kind of nudged him and finally he said, OK, I'll tell you the secret. And I said, what is it? And he said, I'm your father. And there was just this-- this was just completely out of the blue. There was no clues in my upbringing. There was nothing. And my father had just died, and I'm in the process of mourning him and thinking about my connection to him. So I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, your parents tried to have you for a long time-- and there's 10 years between me and my brother. Then your father came to me at my workshop, and he had a jar. And he came over and he gave it to me and explained that he needed some semen. So he said he went in the bathroom and he produced the semen and came back. And then he said, nine months later, you were born. Again, it just seemed completely preposterous-- I mean the whole idea. Then Abie, kind of sensing that I was probably fairly freaked out, said, don't worry, though, because your father told me that they mixed the sperm together. They mixed the two brothers? His sperm and your dad's sperm? Right. So there's a chance-- there's some statistical chance, I guess. And the other thing that he said on the phone was he said, you know, you're a smart fella. And I've watched you at school and all of your accomplishments and I've always thought it's because of me. And is that like the most horrible thing you can imagine, when he says that? Is that very much like a Darth Vader-- Absolutely. I was in a complete, total state of shock. And I just thought, wow, whose movie am I in? The whole thing was completely bizarre. Did it seem believable to you at all? It felt like someone had spun me around like 100 times and I was just standing there, reeling and trying to put the details together. And it seemed kind of crazy. And especially the details, like when he told me it was about artificial insemination. I thought, that's got to be really early for artificial insemination. So I went up to the medical library at Columbia and I just started looking it up. And sure enough, I found these documents that said that in the early-- actually, I probably would be one of the early artificial insemination babies in the United States. But in the early days, they asked for a family member, which of course they never do now, and they also did mix the sperm. I found that detail. And that was the detail that seemed to me the craziest. The mixing the sperm? Yeah. And they don't do it anymore because obviously it doesn't do anything, other than make the person who wants to be-- who has been trying to be the father feel better. It's such a beautiful idea, though. It's like a firing squad, but in reverse. That is absolutely true. Like in a firing squad, each person would choose to believe they weren't the one who hit the prisoner. And in this, everybody would choose to believe they were the one. Right. So I did that research. And then the other thing that was interesting was that my father was this amazing cheapskate, and he never had a checkbook because he wanted to deal straight in cash. So he had kept these meticulous notebooks of everything he spent, and particularly medical things. And I found this notebook with all of his expenses going back to the year I was born. Going back to the year you were born, but not before? Not before, yeah. Oh. So was it helpful? Well, yeah, because it listed the name of the gynecologist. So I figured, OK, I'm going to track him down. So I called up. He was dead. But his wife answered the phone and she said that his records all went to some other guy. So I tried to find that guy. Called him for two weeks, I remember, and his line was constantly busy. And then when I reached him, it turned out he had just died, like, that week. Part of that time, what I was wondering about was-- I went back and thought, is there any clues? If this was true, why were there no clues? And the only clue I could up with-- the only clues I could come up with was this idea that I just never felt part of that family. Though everybody has that feeling at one point or another when they're a kid. Right, absolutely. Only everybody doesn't have the opportunity to find out that the feeling is true. My brother, by his own admission, he said, we never felt like you were one of us. "You're really different from us," is the way he put it. And what were the differences? My father and my brother very much are very controlled people. Everything had to be in its place. Everything was orderly. And I was like this little spark. I was going around trying to have a good time. I was very-- the way they described me as a kid is overly sensitive. And you mean overly sensitive like, literally, you were just an emotional kid, like a normal emotional kid? Yeah, like I cried a lot. I now, after having children, realized I wasn't particularly oversensitive. I was just normal. I lived in a kind of imaginative, fantasy world that, to them, I seemed like I was different. And because he seemed different, Lenny got a lot of-- not punishments, exactly. It was more like a steady stream of never-ending reminders to simmer down, settle down, be a nice boy, be more like them. And of course, in there somewhere, don't be like Uncle Abie. Any burst of enthusiasm, any odd thoughts expressed out loud, any impulsive deed or comment could be cut short by his parents, sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently. So 1985, my Uncle Abie died. It was four years after my dad died. And I went to the funeral with my wife. And nobody was there. My Uncle Abie was the kind of guy that, I don't know, everyone hated him? He was obnoxious. There was literally no one there. I've never been to a funeral with nobody there. It was somewhere way out in Long Island. It was me and my wife, his son and his family, and, like, one neighbor from the old neighborhood in the Bronx. And after the funeral was over, I go and talk to the Les, who is Abie's son, and I said, look, I don't know if you ever heard the story. And I told him the story about this. About the jar and the whole thing? About the jar and the whole thing. And Les says, I'm sure that's not true. And I said, really? Why? He said, well, I've got to tell you. At around that time, my father was delusional. In fact, we had to lock him up. We had to put him away in an institution because he was hearing voices. So he said, I don't think that anything he said would have been too accurate. So he was like, nah, nah. It's probably not true. So that was the thing that completely put the whole thing to rest in my mind for a long time. At that point, my wife said, look, what difference does it make? You grew up with your father. You thought he was your father. That's really the thing that's important. So you'll never know, and just leave it at that. It seemed like, yeah, that's true. Just get on with your life. And Lenny does get on with his life. For over 15 years, he pretty much let the question rest right there. Can I ask you a couple of really basic questions before we go into what happens next? Sure, absolutely. Who do you look like? Hm. I don't-- I look like my mother. Yeah. But I've always felt that I have my father's body type. He was stringy, his stringy muscles. I look like I'm a runner. And Uncle Abie? What did Uncle Abie's body look like? He was kind of squarer, solid, chunkier. The other detail about Abie, which wasn't a genetic thing, was that he had this huge cleft in his skull from some childhood accident. I always thought he got hit in the head with an ax or something and he had, like, this dent in his skull. The whole thing about Abie was kind of like repulsion toward him. As years passed, for Lenny, this question about his father and Uncle Abie is like a cut that never quite heals right. It's a hard question to have sitting in the back of your mind. What if your parents were lying to you your entire childhood about something so basic? And finally, a couple of years ago, the miracle that is American science conspired with the miracle that is online shopping to make DNA tests ubiquitous enough and cheap enough for anybody. And Lenny decided to see if it would be possible to settle the question of who his father was once and for all with a DNA test. So he looked for envelopes that his dad might have licked to get a remnant of DNA. And he found some. Excited by this, he moved to the next step. So I called my cousin, Lesley, up. And I said to him, look, I'm thinking about trying to do this in a more serious way. How do you feel about it? He was OK about it. At the end of the conversation, which I had basically called to ask him if he could find some letters for me, there was a pause on the phone. And then he says, by the way, I've got to tell you. You remember the last time you asked me about did I know about this? And I said I didn't know. He said, I lied to you. And I said, what? He said, I lied to you. And he said, well, when I was 12 years old, Abie took me aside and told me that same story he told you, way before my father died. And he said, don't ever tell Lenny. That's what Abie said to him? Abie said to him, don't tell Lenny. Swear you'll never tell him. So-- wow. When he said that, then I thought, this has got to be true because here's Abie telling Lesley, like 30, 40 years before my father died, that this story happened, that this thing happened. So that was really a turning point. Yeah. Suddenly, it seems like it's probably true. Exactly. Then I tilt over to thinking like, wow, then it must be true. But I don't know. There's just, I don't know-- there's something fishy about the story. There's something that I don't quite believe or I just find it hard to believe that there isn't-- that I could have grown up and nobody would-- you know how like, in a movie, someone would take you aside and whisper to you, (WHISPERING) hey, there's something you don't know about yourself. There was just nothing of that. But somebody did do that. They did it in 1981, when your dad died. That's true. That's true. But there's something about Abie-- I guess I still feel there's something unreliable about him, that there's something, I don't know, self-interested. In a funny kind of way, for the story to work, for it to point to Abie, it all depends on whether you trust Abie or not. Do I trust Abie? Because if I trust Abie, then what he told me and what he told his son is true. But if I don't trust Abie, if I doubt Abie, then the story's not true. So it goes back to that whole-- it takes me back to that whole conflict with me and Abie as a child. Abie's not trustworthy. Don't believe him. And the circumstantial evidence that might make you feel, "yeah, the story points that way" isn't enough for me. But I don't know. There's a joke. I've got to tell you this joke. So there's this guy, and he thinks his wife is cheating on him, so he hires a detective. And he says to the detective, I've got to tell you that I think my wife is cheating on me, but I just have this element of doubt, and I want to clear it up. So the detective says, OK, I'll follow her and I'll give you a report. So he comes back, like, two weeks later and he's got all these photographs. And he says, well, here you see there's a photograph. You're leaving home. Then there's a photograph of this man ringing the doorbell. Then your wife and he go out. And then they go to this hotel, and I was able to photograph them, see them embracing in front of the hotel. Then they go in the hotel, and I telephoto lens up to the room. They go in the room. They take off all their clothes. And then they close the shades. And the guy goes, see? That's what I mean-- that element of doubt. And I sort of feel like that in this story. Every time I come to a place, I have this element of doubt. And then it seems to clear up, and it seems not to. And so I am like the guy in the joke. I want to have it more certain. The thing people always say is, well, you don't get a choice about your parents. And in a weird way, I have a choice. There's parts of me that wants my father to win and there's parts of me that wants Abie to win. Oh, really? Yeah. Which part what's your dad to win and which part wants Abie to win? What's the advantage of each? I guess the part that wants my father to win is the part that just wants to have that kind of consoling structure of you know your past. If you looked at home movies and you reran them and you saw yourself and your parents and you said, "Oh look, there's me and there are my parents and here is my father doing this or my mother doing that," as opposed to, if you reran them and you saw a person who wasn't your father, who knew on some level that he wasn't your father, trying to be your father-- it just complicates the whole issue. There's something about the continuity and the way you thought of yourself your whole life that you want to keep going. The other side of that is I don't particularly like my father. He was a difficult man. He had an explosive temper. Like, if I cried, my father would laugh at me. He'd make fun of me for crying. He could be very intolerant. He would ridicule me and shame me. And that's a part that I wouldn't mind saying goodbye to or distancing myself from. Not that Abie was better, but it would allow me to detach myself from something that's sort of complicated and painful. Of course, at Lenny's age, what does detaching himself mean? He's already detached himself when he moved out at age 16. He detached himself when he went to college, when he made his own friends, when he found a wife, when he turned himself into an adult who's very different from either his dad or his uncle. If you're 55, and you're fully formed, and your parents are long dead, and your own kids are actually completely grown, how much hold do your parents really have on you at that point? How much more independence from them can you possibly need? And yet somehow, even at that age, Lenny says it's still possible to daydream about the parents who you'd rather have had. So if you got to choose-- if you got to imagine your dad going around and collecting other samples besides from your Uncle Abie, who would you want to choose? Oh. Hm. He can roam all of New York City in the year 1948. Who do you want him to stop by? That's a good question. You know, two people are coming to mind. One was this guy who lived across the hall who was a-- he was a podiatrist and his name was Nathan Zuckerman. And he had an office a couple blocks away from where we lived. And in the office was the one room that was, like, the podiatrist room, and then there was the waiting room. And then there was what felt like 100 rooms back behind there with all kinds of electronic equipment. He was just an electronics hobbyist, like an old radio hobbyist? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I would just turn everything on and turn knobs and hear all kinds of whoa-oh-whoa-oh sounds. And I used to go there every day after school and just go in there. And there would be all these old ladies waiting for their bunions to be removed. Then I'd just go in the back and work on my science projects. He would come back and he would help me. It was really a nice relationship. And so if he were the guy, that would be good. If he were the guy, yeah. Like the whole thing actually gives you solace in a way that it doesn't with Uncle Abie. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if we only got to pick our parents. Do you feel bad at all for thinking that it's possible that your dad isn't your dad? Yeah, I really do. I mean, in a weird way, it feels like I'm doing the act of dis-parenting my father. All right, I'll show you. I'm no longer going to be your son. Right. Right. That feels definitely bad. That feels kind of mean. Back in 2005, when we first broadcast today's show, Lenny met a guy named Wayne Grody, who was the doctor who ran the molecular diagnostic laboratory, the DNA lab, at UCLA. Grody told him that, for paternity tests, you want more DNA than is usually found on an envelope or a stamp. But Wayne also told him that there's often a really reliable source of DNA from people who have already died, and that's that, in most hospitals, when they take a biopsy or a tissue sample of any kind, they'll preserve a scrap of it in paraffin wax, just in case it'll be handy someday in reconfirming a diagnosis or in an epidemiological study or as part of a legal case. Wayne told Lenny to check with all the hospitals that his dad was ever in. So Lenny did. And he found a fragment of his dad's tissue from the 1970s at the Columbia Medical Center in New York. And then, before he knew it, Lenny was standing in Wayne Grody's DNA lab in California, talking to a lab technician named JJ. Your DNA actually is here. Can I have a look? Yeah. Actually, it's very-- it's supposed to be clear. It's just a tiny little bit. It looks like maybe, if I were crying, it would be about five tears. A technician named Dawn shows him another sample, which she insists is less like tears and more like a floating piece of lint. Then he's shown a little slice of wax the size of a fingernail with a little black line embedded in it. The line is tissue. Let's see. That's the paraffin block? They cut it in slices, and this is one slice that I saved. That's one slice? So that little piece of paraffin that you have there is where my father resides. So Dawn just kind of put that back in a little drawer under a desk. And that's where my dad is now-- in the drawer. He's in the drawer. Dr. Grody warns Lenny that it could take weeks to get accurate results. And there's no guarantee, with tissue so old, they'll be able to salvage enough DNA to make a real determination if his dad is Uncle Abie or if his dad is Morris, the man he thought was his dad. Lenny goes home to wait. We give him a tape recorder to have on hand in case he gets any news. A month passes. Then a letter arrives. OK, let's put this in context here. The envelope arrived today. It's sitting right over here. And I'm looking at it, and I know that inside this envelope is the answer. I'm going to find out who my father is, or if my father is my father. The answer is sitting right there in the envelope. And I am really nervous right now. I'm kind of excited about it. I'm kind of dreading it. OK. Let's see. Whoa, this is scary. It says, "I'm writing to tell you--" it's from Wayne. He says, "I'm writing to tell you that we have now concluded--" I almost can't read this. This is really weird. I'm getting very scared about this. "We have now concluded paternity testing." Blah, blah, blah. "The results indicate that Mr-- Morris is excluded as a possible father of yours." There's all the rest that I'm not going to even read that. So my father is not my father. Morris is not my father. It makes me feel really sad. My father is not my father. There's a part of me that's going like, I knew it. But there it is. It's just in definitive print. "Results indicate that Mr. Morris," it says, "is excluded as a possible father of yours by mismatches we have observed." And it says that, "We find a DNA pattern in the child which is not present in that of the alleged father, meaning that it must have been contributed by another man." Wow. I guess I feel abandoned. I know that doesn't make any sense. But I feel like I was abandoned by my father. Then there's this next wave of feeling that's coming up, and it's like, aha, see? That was right. I was right. The feelings I had of not being part of my family, of being the one who was just bad for being the other is true. That really is true. That was going through their heads. And my father had this really tough row to hoe. And I'm sort of feeling sorry for him, really, knowing what he went through, how difficult that was, and all the pretense and trying to rise above it and be noble. I feel like he did a great job on that. He really did, in the sense that he never let me know. He just kept the secret, both of them. They went to their graves without even letting me know. And they must have thought, there's no way he's ever going to know. And now I know. Now, at 55 years old, I know that Morris is not my father. In a weird way, I almost feel better about him for that. A week after he opened the letter, Lenny came back into the studio. And he told me that the DNA test showed something else that was completely unexpected. There are six genetic markers that would have indicated paternity. Lenny's dad only had a match on one of those. If he were Lenny's uncle, you'd expect he'd have three matches, since brothers share half their DNA. And this raises a whole new question. I had been operating on the assumption that, if my father wasn't my father, then my uncle was my father, and that, if my uncle was my father, my father was my uncle-- which, of course, sounds like some kind of camp song. It's still statistically possible that my uncle could be my father, but, in fact, it's probably more likely that there was another donor. And who might that have been? Just somebody who worked at the hospital? It could have been anybody. I mean, if this was done in a hospital-- it probably wasn't. It was probably done in a doctor's office. And one of the standard things that happened back in 1949, '48, was that the doctor himself sometimes was the donor, or sometimes it could have been a medical student. Lenny, both your parents have been dead for decades, but if what you're saying is right, you might have a living parent, like, in New York right now. Yeah. Knowing that he could be out there and alive, your actual dad, doesn't that make you want to find him? No. In a way, I'd just like him to kind of wander along in his life and let me wander along in mine. I think I've had enough parents. I think I know enough now. I don't think I need to know more. Which is to say, in the end, it doesn't matter as much to Lenny who his father is as who his father isn't. From the day that Lenny's Uncle Abie first told him on the phone about his father to the day that Lenny got the letter where the other shoe dropped, it was 24 years. And in the recording that he made that day, Lenny talked about how one of the strangest things about the whole experience was that now he couldn't go and talk to the people who he most needs to talk to about the whole thing. This is even made so much stranger by the fact that my mother and father are dead. And I should be able to go over and see them and say, so what was this all about? And I would say, it's OK. I think I'd actually end up comforting them, in a weird way. You did all right. You did what you had to do. You did what the doctors told you to do. You thought that keeping the secret forever-- that it would be devastating for me to find out. But I would say, I'm not devastated. I still love you. I love you very much. And I guess, if I were really being honest, then I would say, but you didn't have to. You could have let me just grow up the way I would have. You didn't have to try to shape me and change me so I wouldn't be like Abie. And you didn't have to fear the difference that you would see in me. And then I think I would just say thank you. Thank you for doing the impossible and for having me. And then probably we'd just get into a fight with each other or something. Or just go have some really bad food that my mother made. Lenny Davis is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Illinois in Chicago. In the years since we first broadcast this story, he's had additional genetic testing that shows that, indeed, Uncle Abie is most likely his dad. He wrote a book about his experience. It's called Go Ask Your Father. Coming up, a dad in one of the most misunderstood, maligned professions in the world. And no, I'm not talking about insurance salesman, car salesman, lawyer, telephone solicitor, or member of the United States Congress. That's in a minute, from 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 some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, which we first broadcast years ago, back in 2005, Go Ask Your Father, stories in which grown people seek answers from their own parents. And there definitely are certain answers that they would prefer to hear, and only sometimes do they get them. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, My Favorite Martian. Paul Tough tells the story. This is a story about fathers and sons. And it is a story about communication with alien beings. It begins in the 1820s in Germany, where an astronomer and mathematician named Carl Friedrich Gauss was working as the director of the observatory in the town of Gottingen. After the death of, first, one wife, and then a second, he began to spend every evening at the observatory, staring up through his telescope at the moon and the stars. Could it be, he wondered on those lonely nights, that, far away in those distant specks of light, there was life? That people just like him were staring back through their own telescopes? Since the first moment that humans began dreaming of communicating with beings from other worlds, there have been two schools of thought on how best to go about it. One strategy is simply to observe, to look through telescopes, to listen to radio waves beaming down at us from space. The second is the active approach, to try to make contact ourselves. Gauss was the first person to suggest this latter approach, to say that it was we who should make contact with them. But how? This question is hard enough to answer today, when we've got rocket ships and lasers and transistor radios. Gauss lived in an era of sextants and quill pens and leeches, none of which were very useful when it came to sending messages into space. So remember those limitations when I describe Gauss' two proposals, which might sound a little crude. Idea one, deploy an army of Russian lumberjacks to clear cut thousands of square miles of Siberian forest in the precise shape of a right triangle, with huge markings along each side demonstrating the Pythagorean theorem. Idea two, dig a giant, circular trench in the Sahara Desert hundreds of miles in diameter, a perfect circle. Fill the trench with millions of gallons of kerosene. Wait until nightfall, and then set it on fire. But no one would spring for the kerosene, and so Gauss turned his attention back to non-Euclidean geometry. And for 150 years, no one had a single good idea. Then rocketry was invented, and Alan Shepard played golf on the moon. And all of a sudden, the stars seemed closer than ever. Over at NASA, somebody had a brainstorm. Let's send the aliens a plaque. So in April 1973, Pioneer 11 was launched into space, and bolted onto it was a gold plaque. Maybe you've seen it. It's got a diagram of the solar system, some mathematical notations, and a drawing of a naked Caucasian woman and man, the man with his right hand raised at a 90 degree angle. 32 years later, this calling card is more than 4 billion miles from Earth, at the outer regions of our solar system. At some point, maybe tomorrow, maybe in 100 million years, someone will find Pioneer 11, or so the theory goes. And when they see the plaque, they will get the message. Greetings from planet Earth. This is what we look like. We are waving hello to you, and we are nude. In 1974, a year after the launch of Pioneer 11, an American astronomer named Frank Drake took the next step and sent a radio message into space, beamed from a giant radio telescope in Puerto Rico and aimed at a star cluster 21,000 light years away. The message was a series of ones and zeros that could be rearranged to form a diagram that showed a stick figure of a human. Innocuous enough, it would seem. And yet, Drake's message drove the astronomy establishment completely crazy. International rules were drawn up, and since that day, no official radio message has ever been sent into space. But that doesn't mean that freelancers have quit trying to make contact on their own. They have not. And I can tell you this because one of them is my father. In the mid-1970s, my father, a mild-mannered university professor, concluded that there had to be more to life than commuting to work every day in his red Toyota Corolla and coming home every night to the quiet house on the sleepy street where his family was waiting for him. When he was about the age I am today, he started looking for something new, experimenting with LSD and open marriage and extrasensory perception and listening over and over to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, until finally, at about the time that Frank Drake was beaming his lonely message out into space, my father left his family behind and set off onto uncharted waters. From this description, my father might sound like a real Peter Fonda type. But in fact, he is anything but. He is a lover of office products, a man who thinks there is no decision, no matter how intimate and emotional, that cannot be made more effectively by drawing up a few lists and charts. At one point, a couple of years into his relationship with the woman he lived with after moving out of our house, he explained to me that he had come up with a system to eliminate the arguments that had begun to crop up between the two of them. If they had a disagreement-- let's say about what they wanted to eat for dinner-- they would each simply assign a number out of 10 to how strongly they felt about their preference. So their conversations included sentences like, "I'm a seven on chicken." If his number was higher than hers, they'd have chicken. It might seem a little strange that a man who often has trouble making contact with the human beings around him has focused his energies on attempts to make contact with extraterrestrials. Strange, and at the same time, entirely fitting. Over the last few years, my father has been building his own giant flaming moat of kerosene. It is a page on the world wide web, and it is titled, "An Invitation to ETI," which stands for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This is how the page reads. "Hello, ETI. We assume you are a highly advanced form of alien intelligence that originally came to Earth from some other place in the universe. We welcome you here. With respect and a spirit of friendship, we invite you to make contact. Feel free to use whatever form of communication you prefer-- email, fax, telephone, or a face-to-face conversation." It's easy to make fun of my father's project, but there is a logic to it, as unlikely as it sounds. A series of premises, each of which, taken alone, makes a certain sense. My father is right that there probably is life somewhere else in the universe. If other civilizations have developed, they probably are a lot more advanced than we are. He has a point when he says that there's no particular reason to assume that extraterrestrials would choose to communicate via radio signals. He can even be convincing when he says that these alien civilizations might instead have sent probes to our planet to monitor us and our communication media, including the internet. It's only when you put it all together, when you're actually sitting there, staring at the fax machine, waiting for the alien message to arrive, that the project suddenly seems a little dubious. In five years, my father has received about 60 messages through his website, and they were all pranks-- emails from smart alecks who thought it might be a good chuckle to impersonate an alien for a while. My father wrote back to all 60 of them, asking them for proof that they were really aliens. A couple of them kept the charade going for a few rounds, but eventually they all gave up and admitted they were only human. And then, late last year, a breakthrough. In November, my father received an email from a man named Harold, who seemed different than the jokers he usually heard from. Harold didn't claim to be an extraterrestrial. Instead, he said, he had obtained physical evidence of alien life and he was offering to submit it to rigorous scientific testing. This evidence, he explained, was an alien probe, an energy field embedded in his body. He said that it emitted radio waves that could be detected by conventional instruments. My father was skeptical, but intrigued. He talked it over by email with the board of advisors he had assembled when he set up his website, and they decided that, for the first time in the history of this project, they should put an alien claim to the test. Which is how I wound up driving out to a warehouse in New Jersey one winter morning to meet my father, who had flown down from Toronto for the day. I went because I wanted to see my father at work, because I thought it might give me a chance to connect to a part of his life that meant a lot to him, even if I didn't really understand just why. It also crossed my mind that, if evidence of alien life was going to be found in suburban New Jersey, it wouldn't hurt to be the one guy there with a tape recorder. Hey, Dad. Hi. How's it going? Good. When I first spotted my father, he looked a little weak and off balance. A couple of years ago, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. And although it hasn't incapacitated him yet, he gets tired easily these days. It affects the way he talks, too. Sometimes he has to start a word three times before he finishes it once. But he seemed glad to be there, catching up with two members of his advisory board who were also there for the test. One, named Paul, was an aerospace engineer, a bearded, energetic man who laughed a lot. The other, Richard, was tall and laconic, with long, gray hair. He owned his own electronics firm, and it was his warehouse where we were going to run the test. It was nice to watch these guys interact with my dad. They looked up to him, in a way. There was no sign of Harold, and for a while, we thought maybe he wouldn't show up. But then he walked in and launched right into what sounded like a prepared speech. But I have a little presentation. Do we have a chalkboard? Or paper? Harold is wearing baggy khaki pants and a white Oxford shirt that looked like it had been packed inside a duffel bag for a few days and then unfolded that morning. He had a kind of '40s hat on-- not a fedora, but a round hat, more casual, almost a fishing hat. He was clean-shaven and olive-skinned and animated. We all followed him into the library for his presentation. And I'm going to do a demonstration with an RF detector to show that I am emitting radio frequencies. And exactly how, why, and where they're going, we will determine in the lab. What he was saying-- that he himself was emitting radio signals that were being monitored by an alien spaceship-- didn't make a whole lot of sense. But there was something about the way he was talking. He acted just like a scientist. He had the lingo down, saying things like "gigahertz" and "RF" instead of "radio frequency." And when he drew diagrams on the whiteboard, they looked convincing, full of vectors and arrows and numbers. Then he started unpacking his equipment. At this point, I'll demonstrate the radio frequency. He removed a Tupperware container from his knapsack and revealed a little device that looked like a computer circuit board, about 2 inches long. Then he put it into his mouth. It started to make noise. What you have just seen is the activation of an RF detector by transmission from an electric field anomaly placed next to my vocal cords that it transmits back to the extraterrestrials. I looked over at my father to try to figure out what he made of all this, but it was hard to tell just what he was thinking. And then it was time for the test. We all went downstairs to the lab, which was equipped with a huge radio wave detector. The idea was that it would measure the waves coming out of Harold's head. Richard talked him through it. I guess the next step is for you to go in the room. Would you care to remove your hat first, please? Oh, sure. You can't hear it on the tape, but this was a really awkward moment. When Harold took off his hat, we could see that he had lined the inside with tinfoil-- a tinfoil hat. It's like a cliche, right? A shorthand term for crazy people who believe in aliens. I'd seen tinfoil hats in movies, but I didn't know they existed in real life. I use that because sometimes the radio signals really affect me. I can imagine. Do you have anything with you? Any devices, anything made of metal? Yes, I have some foil on my chest. OK. Just plain aluminum foil? Yes. Yeah. Is that all right to bring in there? If that's all it is. Yeah, that's all it is. You don't have any artifacts-- After the tinfoil thing, it wasn't such a big surprise when the lab's equipment failed to detect any radio waves being emitted from the probe in Harold's head. Harold was clearly upset that the experiment hadn't worked, and he made excuses and explained how maybe we needed more sensitive equipment. Paul and Richard, the scientists, seemed a bit ticked off by the whole experience. But my dad wasn't worked up at all. He thanked Harold, shook his hand, and gave him some money for his bus trip home. I wasn't quite sure what to feel. I was a little disappointed, despite myself. I did feel like I had shared some history with my father, even if it wasn't the Pulitzer Prize-winning kind. But I still didn't really understand just what it was that had brought us here. So after Harold left, I sat down with my father on an office couch just off the library. And I finally got a chance to ask him about some things I had never really understood about his quest, including what seemed like an unavoidable question for anyone in the field of SETI, which is what insiders call the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Do you think people think of SETI as a joke sometimes? Yeah, we called it the "giggle factor" in SETI. Sure. And why do you think that is? Haven't figured it out. I feel it myself, you know? I can't always keep a straight face when I tell people what I do. Really? Sure. Well, how come? It just is funny to be trying to make contact with another culture, when we don't even know whether it exists or not. Is there any other scientific field that is like that? I can't think of one where the field hasn't even proved that its central phenomenon exists. That's true. When you look at it that way, it's pretty dramatic. It's the thing I sometimes forget about my dad. He doesn't have a lot of illusions about how likely it is that aliens will get in touch anytime soon. I think it's the reason why he didn't seem all that disappointed when Harold struck out in the lab. He's prepared to keep waiting. But I can't help feeling that there is something a little sad about any search for extraterrestrial intelligence, whether it's Carl Friedrich Gauss' or my father's. It seems like a quest born out of a great loneliness, out of the feeling that the life we see around us is not enough. It is a feeling-- a longing, really-- not that different than the way a frustrated husband and father might feel coming back to the same predictable home night after night. It is the feeling that there must be more than this. If I thought that this was all-- that what's on Earth is all that there is in the universe, I'd be-- I would feel that the universe was diminished somehow. I sometimes get accused of expecting a savior. I don't think I'm doing that. But it certainly comes close to religious belief because you're dealing with something that's just so big, so overarching, so transcendent, that it's pretty close to what a lot of people call God. For me, the difference is that ET could exist. I don't see how God could exist. It just sounds too fantastic. Do you think this project is the most meaningful thing you've ever done? Yes, I think it is. Yep. In fact, my shorthand nickname for it is "The Ultimate Project" because it's probably my ultimate project. I've called it that from the start. If I'm going to be honest with you, I should probably say that that's not the answer I wanted him to give. I wanted him to say, sure, maybe it's the most meaningful thing I've done professionally. But it doesn't compare to raising my family, to being a father. I think any child of an eccentric father feels two opposing things simultaneously. Mostly, you want him to stop embarrassing you. When he sends you an email, you want the subject header to be something normal like, "Thanksgiving plans." You don't want subject headers like the one I received from my father the other day-- "What if our galaxy is populated by super-smart machines?" But at the same time, the thought of my dad dismantling his website and giving up his dream feels like a terrible loss. Even if my father's project doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, even if it sometimes feels more like prayer than like science, I want him to keep looking. It makes him seem a little less alien, oddly enough, and a little more human. Paul Tough is one of the original contributing editors to This American Life. Since this story first aired in 2005, his father found out that he suffered from multiple system atrophy, not Parkinson's disease. In 2012, he died from complications related to that disorder. Before he died, he asked that Paul and Paul's sister keep his website going, and they plan to do that indefinitely, even though neither of them are as hopeful about it as Paul's dad was. As of today, they have yet to receive any messages from extraterrestrials. But, you know, if you're hearing my voice right now and you come from another planet, or you know somebody who does, you can make contact at www.ieti-- that's invitation to extraterrestrial intelligence-- ieti.org. Paul's latest book is Helping Children Succeed, What Works and Why. He first read a version of today's story at the Little Gray Books lecture series in New York City. Well, today's program was originally produced by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer for this show was Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Laura Bellows, Kevin Clark, Sativa January, Andy Dixon, and Alvin Melathe. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who explains his theory on how to run a radio station this way. But I would just turn everything on and turn knobs and hear all kinds of whoa-oh-whoa-oh sounds, you know? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Mr. Presumptive Republican Nominee, Happy birthday to you. Everybody, happy birthday. See, this is the kind of event the Bob Dole campaign should have staged when he turned 73 this past week. They should have surrounded him with lively, young people, a big, happy event celebrating his vigor. A few of you may not know that particular piece of tape. It's a pretty famous piece of tape. It's Marilyn Monroe singing to John Kennedy in 1963, which in my view, makes it even more appropriate for Bob Dole to use. Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy are his contemporaries, after all. Bob Dole is 73. If Marilyn Monroe were alive, she would be 70. John Kennedy would be 79. But instead of a big, lively event, a hall full of boisterous young people, where did the Dole for President campaign stage its big birthday photo op? In an old age home. There in the paper, you could see the pictures, Bob Dole with some senior citizens. You really had to wonder, what were they thinking? What message are they trying to get across to us? Does this campaign have the will to live? Well, each week here on This American Life, we choose a theme, invite a wide variety of writers and performers to take a whack at that theme with documentaries, radio monologues, reportage, found tape, occasional radio dramas, basically, anything they can think of. And today, we bring you perspectives on Bob Dole. Because at this point, there's something oddly mesmerizing about what's going on in that campaign. Barely a day goes by without some odd quote or strange gaffe. Just at the end of this past week, there was a thing in the news how the Republicans have booked themself into a convention hall for the Republican Convention. And it's like 14 feet tall. And TV Guide was quoted in there saying that he doesn't want to make them look bad or anything, but there is literally no way to film them, to shoot them for TV, which is the entire point of a modern political convention. There's no way to shoot them without them looking like ants on a postage stamp. And I see this stuff. And really, my heart just goes out to the man. Something deep and codependent in me wants to step in and help him out. Anyway, our program today in three acts. Act One, Campaign Diaries. Act Two, Instructions on How You Can Become Bob Dole. Act Three, a writer who we've been trying to get on our program for a while, actually, a guy named Danny Drennan. Usually, he writes about things like the TV show Beverly Hills, 90210. And we gave him a little assignment. Anyway, stay with us. Act One, Campaign Diaries. Well, before on this program, once before, we've featured the campaign diaries of Michael Lewis. And he is covering the political campaigns. He's one of the people writing for The New Republic. And his writing is really some of the most remarkable writing anybody is doing about the campaigns, because basically, he's this really funny, smart guy who writes like a novelist, more than like a political reporter, though there's a lot of political analysis in it. The political analysis gets encased in these scenes, in these little stories. And it's just a complete pleasure to read. And then he's just got a really great eye, a really great eye for the telling moment. And he's been following around all the different candidates. We're going to play you now a set of stuff that he's written about Dole, just because, among other things, he captures all these moments nobody else gets. And they reveal all these things about Dole and his campaign. I'm going to start with this. Let me get some music going here again. There we go. This first little diary entry is from back during the primaries. This is February 15. This is after the final New Hampshire debate. And this is this debate where there was this one moment where Dole kind of got into a little shouting match with Steve Forbes. Remember him? And Dole basically said to Forbes-- Forbes was running all these negative ads. And Dole's staff or Dole came up with this stunt where Dole would say "Those ads are really inaccurate. And plus, if you're going to be talking about me, you could at least use a decent picture." And then Dole hands him these pictures, which Forbes snaps back at him, this and that. OK. So all that gets covered in the press. But after the debate, people leave. The stage is empty. And our little Michael Lewis heads out onto the stage. And he's looking at all the detritus left over, the notes the candidates write themselves, all this stuff that nobody else really bothers with writing about. And then he sees the photographs. I'm going to read from this campaign diary, and then we'll go to Michael reading. He says, "I noticed the photographs. They lay on the shelf beneath Forbes's podium. They were not prints but originals, curled and soiled, as if they'd been sitting in some shoebox for years, until Dole stumbled across them late one night while he was worrying about how to retaliate against Steve Forbes in the big debate. Two are color, a bad one of Liddy, Dole's wife, who's stunning in the flesh, looking here tired and plain. A better one of dole's dog, Leader, rubbing noses with a yellow lab. The third is a black and white, of Dole smiling broadly, holding a baby. He looks 20 years younger. The black pen he clutches to keep his right arm in place juts up and is set off by the baby's white gown. Dole is looking at the camera. The baby is looking at Dole's gnarled, wounded hand." Here's Michael Lewis. I asked five different Dole aides the identity of the baby held by Dole in the photograph he gave to Forbes. It seems an innocent enough query. After all, this was the picture Dole had selected for publication. I get no answer. The basic pose of the Dole campaign is the less anyone finds out about their candidate, the better. You can spot the Dole office in the row of glass boxes on the ground floor of the New Hampshire Holiday Inn. It's the one with the newspaper taped up on the glass to prevent people from outside looking in. Dole himself remains largely out of sight. He makes two or three very brief appearances each day and is otherwise unavailable for interviews. Dole's speeches add nothing to the general blank picture. A dozen times I listened to his talk, pen poised idly over paper. Nothing, not a thought, not an image, not a quote. It took me a while to figure out why this was, but then it struck me. Bob Dole wasn't running for president. The concept of Bob Dole was running. The man himself had subcontracted out all the dirty work to people who make their careers out of this sort of thing. That was why he was referring to himself in the third person. He wasn't there, at least not in any meaningful way. It turns out that everything I will discover about Bob Dole, I will discover by stealth. My first discovery? He's embarrassed by his own vanity. I catch him in a back room at one event, just before he's about to go onstage. He thinks no one is looking. He checks out his reflection furtively. His hair is sprayed and dyed. And then he whips out of his pocket a tiny canister and squirts two quick blasts of breath spray into his mouth. Also, his wit is genuine. It's not just an act. I stalk him through the snow at the world dog sledding championships and watch him meet and greet the pooches. A schoolgirl approaches as he's about to leave and after nabbing a photo, asks him if he's having fun. "You learn a lot out here campaigning," Dole says, motioning to a sled of 20 dogs. "They're all nice dogs, too, not like the Congress." He thinks no one is listening. He's said it just for the fun of it. All other data about Bob Dole must be inferred from the world he has created around himself. The Dole campaign consists of slick young men in blue suits, forever whispering to each other in dark corners. The campaign pays top dollar for everything. And I get the feeling that most who work for it have some personal financial stake in Dole soldiering on, and that they'll be the last to tell him that he really shouldn't be doing this again. You also get the feeling that there is very little the campaign would not do. One of their favorite techniques has been to hire telemarketing firms to call Buchanan supporters and, in the guise of pollsters, relate damning untruths. In response to Buchanan's complaints, the Dole people tell reporters that Buchanan is doing the calling to a few of his supporters to tar Dole. It takes a special sort of credulity to believe them. I stopped half a dozen people carrying Buchanan signs who told the same stories of strange phone calls in the night. One afternoon, I abandoned the Dole campaign for the steam room at the Manchester YMCA to purge myself of the dreadful feeling coming over me. A few minutes later, an extremely fat old man waddles in, spies me, drops his towel, and sits on a plastic stool right next to me. "You're a new face," he says. "I always notice a new face." I say, "That's nice," grab for a towel, and tell him I came for the campaign. He shifts on his stool and says, "I'm a Buchanan man, myself." Buchanan men are the kind of guys who can sidle up to other guys in steam rooms without the slightest fear of being thought gay. Moments later, he's complaining about the calls he's getting at home. Here, roughly, is what he said. "A guy calls. He says, 'Hi. My name is William, and I'm calling from the Dole campaign. Are you aware that Pat Buchanan is an extremist?' And I say, 'What do you mean?' And he says, 'Pat wants to give nuclear weapons to South Korea and Japan.' So I ask him, 'Where does this information come from.' He says he doesn't know. So I ask him, 'What does Bob Dole think about that?' And this kid doesn't know that, either. He knows absolutely nothing about Bob Dole. So I ask, 'Who are you, anyway?' And he says he's with an organization called the National Research Institute in Houston. So I ask him for his phone number. And he says he can't give it to me. Then he hangs up. There is, of course, no listing in Houston for the National Research Institute." In short, the Dole campaign is a lot like what a lot of people probably suspect the Buchanan campaign is, closed, secretive, smug, a bit nasty. Maybe that's what happens when you lose once too often. You stop trusting the voters. And yet I still want badly to like Dole. I'll bet he's the guy in the race that people most badly want to like, but can't quite figure out how to do it. Every night after a day with Dole, I return home and recall to my mind a pair of mental images that the day has badly blemished. The first is the one of Dole recuperating from his war wounds, as described by Richard Ben Cramer, hanging by his bad right arm and trying to straighten it out until he was sweating and crying from pain. The second is a windy afternoon last June in a graveyard on the French coast, when, Dole now says, he realized he had to run for president one last time. I traveled there on Clinton's plane to witness the D-Day celebrations. But about halfway through, I lost interest in writing about it and just started watching. You gaze down the cliff onto the beach and just marvel. How did these men do this? Just before Clinton addressed the veterans of the Normandy invasion, I found myself walking alone through the rows of white crosses, until I reached a place where there was no one else but a pair of veterans. They seemed ancient, though of course, they could not have been much older than Bob Dole. They were trembling and leaning on each other as they looked down on a cross. And at first, I thought it was just from the strains of age. Then I saw the name and place on the cross, Stenson, I'll say, from Mississippi. The boy had died at the age of 19 on the first day of the invasion. The old men wore name tags, too. Stenson, from Mississippi. Two of three brothers had survived that day. They were crying without tears. That's a bit like Dole, I would like to believe. He's crying without tears. He has the emotions, or at least, you can sense them lurking inside them. But he has no idea how to give them proper expression. Michael Lewis. We'll continue with his campaign diaries in a bit. It's This American Life. That's The Handsome Family, a Chicago band. We'll have more campaign diaries from Michael Lewis in a second. First, I wanted to read a little bit from this piece written by Andrew Sullivan, also in The New Republic. Figured we're doing one, might as well do the other. It's this lovely little piece of writing from a couple weeks ago. He begins this thing by talking about this sketch that apparently, they're doing on Saturday Night Live. It's a spoof of MTV's show, The Real World. And in the real show, The Real World it's a bunch of young people in their 20s, Generation X-ers, living in a home somewhere. And they locate the home in different places. In the spoof, it's the same setup, except apparently, Bob Dole is living there with them. And then that's the big joke, that this gruff, 70-something person is living with the 20-somethings. And Andrew Sullivan makes the case, no, no, there's actually something to be learned from this. There's actually a deeper truth that we can find in this. He writes the following. "Bob Dole, very unlike his rival for the presidency, is actually, I think, a natural Gen X-er, someone whose ironic detachment, bleak humor, and occasional bursts of dark sentiment make him far more intelligible to the under-35 crowd than most politicians. At 72, he is in some ways the ultimate 20-something candidate. To wit, his remarkable, revealing, and insistent use of that quintessential Generation X mantra, 'whatever.'" And then he's got a whole bunch of examples of Bob Dole using the word whatever, whoever, wherever, the various permutations. Here are some. Let's see. "Well, I think Lowell Weicker probably did more in the Congress of the United States for disabled people in this country, children, adults, whatever." Or, "That's one way to address it for some people. But you're right, all economic classes, whether you're white, black, whatever." The hint here, Andrew Sullivan writes, is that Bob Dole knows he's reciting a list of groups that he should feel deeply sincere about. But he can't at that moment feel completely sincere about them. So he gently undercuts the blather he's required to express by adding the W word. We know he's in favor of helping the poor, underprivileged, disabled, veterans, whomever. But we also know he's not exactly smitten with empathy for their plight as he utters the words. He cares, but with an understandable and often funny level of detachment. Compare with Clinton. A "whatever" barely passes the president's lips. There is nary a scintilla of detachment from his sympathy for everyone and anyone at all times, and indeed a fear, even panic, that anyone might suspect otherwise. Dole is different. Sullivan goes on in a little section of this to argue that this ironic distance is actually something admirable, in a certain way. He quotes a couple more examples of him saying "whatever" in different situations. He says, "There are signs that Dole is aware of the complete silliness of much of what passes for political ritual. He knows that the throngs cheering for him today will be cheering for someone else tomorrow, that enthusiasm is fickle, that real support for someone like him always has something completely contingent about it. So he condescends to it under his breath in a throwaway, that wistful grin snickering up his face toward his black, darting eyes. Like the members of Generation X, Dole is post-just-about-everything. The difference, of course, is that he lived through it, and they were born after it. Dole, it's clear, has few illusions about the world. He's seen white-shirted revolutionaries have their moment and leave nothing but a deficit behind. His irony is not, as some boomers would have it, an expression of ennui or listlessness or cynicism. It's the sanest response to the real world, if you'll pardon the expression. Members of Generation X, despite the fashionable assumption, are not disillusioned. They're merely un-illusioned. Their wariness is endemic. Dole gets this. Clinton never will." Anyway, that's by Andrew Sullivan. Let's go to more of my Michael Lewis's campaign diaries. February 19. The act, I should say, is always the same. The announcer brings on stage, one at a time, all the politicians who have endorsed Dole. They race out onto the stage like ballplayers before a game. Dole waits in the background until the crowd reaches a low fever pitch. A quick squirt of the breath spray, and he's on. He stands at the podium with his left foot and left side jutted forward, though he's right-handed. His crippled right hand rests on the podium, but it's not a prop. He'll start in with something self-deprecating. "That's a lot better than the speech is going to be." Something like that. Presently, the voice of Dole emanates from the Milford, New Hampshire, town hall's facade. It's not so much a speech as a series of disconnected phrases uttered in an elegiac tone, some of which cause the people around me to break out into giggles. "Like everyone else in this room, I was born," Dole says. A Dole speech sounds like the sort of thing a red brick building would say if a red brick building could speak. He pulls the rhythms of his "one America" refrain up short, just as it starts to flow. "We're not rich. We're not poor. We're not urban. We're not rural. We're not black. We're not white. You can go on and on and on." I have a dream, kind of. And gentleman in England now abed, well, I don't know. Maybe they should just get up. It is more like the Cliff Notes of a great speech than the speech itself. The only lines Dole can deliver with any kind of strength sound like they were cribbed from Robert's Rules of Order. "Start the hearings. Go through the process. Do it in an orderly way." The whole time Dole is speaking, it is as if he is saying, "This is the speech I would give to you if I was the sort of person who gives speeches." I'm not sure whether Dole is actually modest or simply embarrassed by immodesty. I leave thinking that a man like this runs for the presidency not because he thinks he should be president. He thinks no one else should be president, so it might as well be him. May 27. You never saw a more unhappy-looking group than the journalists assigned to follow Dole into New Jersey on Memorial Day. "I got the best seat in the house to the worst show in town," rumbles a cameraman as we board the plane at National Airport. "I just came in case he got shot or something," says a reporter, who doesn't even bother to take notes. I, too, have my misgivings. Usually, my campaign notebooks are crammed with anecdotes, observations, and incidents. Whenever I'm with Dole, however, they simply refuse to fill up. The Dole campaign remains an arid, sterile place. Not much grows there. Today is a kind of prelude to the general campaign, which will be relaunched in earnest tomorrow with a bold journey across the country. Dole marches for a dozen blocks through Clifton, New Jersey, in front of the parade's single float, bookended by his wife, Elizabeth, and Governor Christie Todd Whitman. The crowd is quiet and sparse, less than one deep. The parade climaxes in a park, where Dole is meant to make a few remarks and lay a wreath on a symbolic grave site. I wait there for him, watching members of the local veterans organization subtly jockey for position. Six old men form the color guard, dressed in red jackets, VFW caps covered with patches and buttons, and the apprehensive air of people who fear they might be asked to improvise. But the really striking thing about them is how old they look, at least compared to Dole. They could almost be a different generation. "Any veterans of the first World War here?" I ask. "We just buried our last one last fall," says one, who sports a POW-MIA pin in his cap. "Don't come around here 10 years from now," says the man beside him, "or we won't be here, either." May 28. It turns out that we are flying all the way across the country to spend less than 24 hours in California before picking up and flying back. First to Chicago, where we'll spend tomorrow night, and then to Ohio, on May the 28th, five months before the election. The only reason it doesn't seem insane is that several hundred seemingly sober men in dark suits follow Dole wherever he goes. There is a kind of ambitious young person who mistakes frenetic movement for advancement in the world. They'll call you from the road and say, "I'm in Bangladesh on business, heading for Iceland." And you know that he thinks this is sufficient explanation of his purpose in life. The Dole campaign has something of this feeling. As long as the candidate keeps moving, everyone traveling with him is exempt from serious self-examination. Which is a shame, since they have no idea why they are doing what they are doing. It's frequent flyer politics. And within a couple of hours, I'm having my first Admiral Stockdale moment. Who am I? What am I doing here? Early the second morning, we descend, in our motorcade of 13 cars and 2 buses, on a seemingly tranquil park in Redondo Beach. The point of the event and the trip is to illustrate that Dole is against crime. The trouble is that Clinton is against crime, too. So Dole needs to show that he's more fervently against crime than Clinton, who at this very moment is on route to New Orleans to deliver his own anti-crime speech. Dole and Clinton are like Time and Newsweek. No matter how much they claim to differ, they still run the same covers, week after week. The park is being celebrated as an example of a neighborhood reclaiming public space from urban violence. But as various political dignitaries loudly disapprove of drive-by shootings, a small group of dissenters forms on the fringe. All but one are the Hispanics who bear the brunt of the new anti-crime esprit. They're hauled off to jail for all sorts of odd crimes, carrying baseball bats into the park after 7 o'clock in the evening, for instance. The exception is a gentle old soul named Art Campbell, who for decades has cleaned the park, coached the local kids, and groomed the playing fields. The ball field at the center of the park is named for him. Art Campbell is a Dole supporter. "I'm for the man," he says. "I don't go by the party." But he's mildly perplexed by the anti-crime rally. "It isn't as bad as all that," he says. A policeman on the scene confirms that the crime statistics in Redondo Beach are in line with those of the nation as a whole. Violent crime has declined steadily here, as it has in other cities, over the past 20 years. More to the point, he cannot recall a single violent crime in the park. "A few years ago, someone shot a gun in the air as he drove past the park," he says, "But no one was hurt." Campbell stops the park custodian, a Hispanic man who speaks poor English. "Do you think this Dole thing is a good idea?" he asks the man. The man takes one look at my notepad and says, "I no want to say." He's afraid of offending his employers. The greatest fear in the park is the fear of offending the people on the platform who are spearheading the anti-crime initiative. Having successfully fed, and fed off of, the fear of crime, we wearily board the bus. I am now certain that nothing interesting will ever occur in the close-cropped frame of the staged Dole event. Where do politics come from, anyway? Not from listening to Bob Dole deliver a speech written by someone else to a group of people he knows nothing about in a place to which he'll never return. Many of the criticisms about Dole can be made of Clinton, too, of course. You can't say anything about Dole's use of push polls, or about the cynicism of his staged events, without having some seasoned reporter look at you as if you were a child and say, "So what? They all do that." The next week, the New York Times will carry a putatively positive piece about Dole's campaign manager, Scott Reed. Toward the end of it, almost by-the-by, we read this astonishing revelation about Dole's senate resignation. Quote, "The element of surprise was essential, Mr. Dole and Reed decided, if the announcement were to appear bold and make an impression on voters. 'If it had leaked,' Mr. Reed said, 'he probably wouldn't have done it.'" Think of it. Just a few weeks ago, the man stood before us and brought tears to our eyes by saying that you do not lay claim to the office you hold. It lays claim to you. Your obligation is to bring to it the gifts you can, of labor and honesty, and then to part with grace. But according to Reed, Dole's decision to end his wonderful senate career was baldly conceived as a PR stunt. Journalists are often accused of being cynical. But the cynicism of journalists does not compare to that of serious presidential candidates. Michael Lewis. His campaign diaries can be read in The New Republic. He's the author of Liar's Poker, which is a really funny, interesting, wonderful book that we strongly recommend. Coming up, how you, you, can imitate Dole for your friends and family, and Mr. Danny Drennan. That's all 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 subject and invite a variety of writers and performers to take a whack at that subject with a variety of different kinds of stories. Today, our topic is Bob Dole. We've arrived now at act two of our program. Act Two, How You Can Be Bob Dole. For this act of our show, we welcome to our show a man named Robert Smigel. And Smigel impersonates Bob Dole on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He used to impersonate him on the Dana Carvey Show, a short-lived program. Smigel himself is former head writer with Saturday Night Live. And he's probably best known for a sketch that he created. To describe this thing, it's one of these things, it's almost hard to believe that a single person came up with this idea. Because it's just one of those things that just seem to spring out of the collective unconscious of our nation. This is a sketch that on Saturday Night Live, they called the Superfans. It was a bunch of Chicago, Chi-caw-go, guys, big guys, who would talk about Da Bears, Da Bulls. My tombstone will say "Da Corpse," I think. Anyway, so at some point, it became clear that Smigel was going to be the person who was going to be imitating Bob Dole on the Conan O'Brien show. And by the way, when he does this, what appears on a screen, there's sort of a TV monitor comes down from the ceiling. And then Conan O'Brien talks to the monitor. And on the monitor, you'll see a photograph of Dole. And then the lips are chroma keyed out or something, so you don't see those lips. What you see is Smigel's lips. And then he does Dole's voice. So when it became clear that he was going to have to imitate Bob Dole, he set about to design. He had to think about it. He had to plan it. Instantly, I thought of Dan Aykroyd's impression, which was ingrained in my head from working at Saturday Night Live. And what I try to do is find something and take it further, because otherwise, it's just boring to do what Dan Aykroyd did. And so I started with the monotone thing. It's sort of how you have to get into it is just, "Bob Dole. Bob Dole pronounces, emphasizes every word about the same way. It's kind of like a test pattern, [? Dooooole. ?] That kind of thing." And Dan Aykroyd kind of does the bully Dole from the '70s. Dole back then was sort of a Nixon protege. And then I figured I'd take it a little further and make it a little munchkin-like. "Because Bob Dole tends to, when he rolls, when he keeps going, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], you'll be hist-- you'll be hist-- you'll be history." That kind of thing. Then I figured out that Bob Dole is actually the tree from The Wizard of Oz. He's not a munchkin. He's actually-- Wait, let's pause on the munchkin. What is the quality that makes it munchkin-like. Mayor of Munchkinland, you know. "And she's not really, really dead. She's really most sincerely dead." Kind of sounds like Bob Dole. "Not really-diddily dead. She's really-- let me tell you something. Bill Clinton's campaign is dead." But anyway, what he's really like is The Wizard of Oz tree, which is, "I'm Bob Dole. How'd you like it if somebody took apples off of you?" You know, he's even got the same expression as the tree. And he's tragic in the way the tree is. People are constantly pulling apples off, and they're not tasting them. I've got about five minutes more on this analogy. Yeah, keep going. Pshaw. Nonsense, Conan O'Brien. Now you listen to me. Bob Dole wasn't last night. Bob Dole's the new president of the United States, that's right. Dole's on a roll. Dole topped the polls. That's right. Dole's in control. Dole's riding a bull-Dole-zer. Shoot that punk. Shoot that punk, smoke that Dole. There's actually something kind of sweet about your imitation of Dole on Conan, because he's always a little bit giddy. On Conan? Yeah. He almost seems deliriously happy. Oh, well, I'm just imagining his deepest thoughts. And he's just letting them out at 12:30 at night, when no one's watching. That's sort of the premise. Like, "Bob Dole's the next president of the United States. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Sing with me, O'Brien." And I would make him sing, you know, "Happy Happy Dole Dole." --Dole de-Dole de-Dole. Wait a minute, Max, Max. Dole de-Dole, Dole de-Dole. Dole-de-- Those are the stupidest lyrics I've ever heard. Dole. The thing about it that's so appealing is that it shows Dole taking pleasure in something in a way that we never get to see him do in real life. When I do a politician on that show, I'm almost always doing the id of that politician. It's basically nonsense. And sometimes I just have Dole giggling, and just-- "Bow to me" is one of my favorite things. Bow down to me, Conan O'Brien. Bow down to the next senate majority leader, most powerful man in the world. Do you feel a certain affection and closeness for Dole? I would think actually imitating somebody, you would have to develop that. Yeah, I really-- it's hard not to like Bob Dole anyway. I mostly feel sorry for him. To me, it just seems like it's only going to get worse for Bob Dole. At the point where he's supposed to catch up, where everybody expects that it's going to tighten, that's when they're going to debate. And Bob Dole needs to have a 20-point lead before they start debating. Do you do him sometimes around the house? Unconsciously, yeah, sometimes. I just got a puppy, and I find it very effective training. Really, like how? Very effective, just when I put on the Bob Dole voice at the puppy. "Sit! You listen to me, puppy. You poop." If you've seen Robert Smigel's imitations on the Dana Carvey Show, and actually, apparently, not many of you have, because that show did not last very long on the television, Smigel's imitation on that show was kind of cruel to Dole. He basically played Dole as this doddering old man who could barely string together two or three words in a sentence. And in this imitation, in this version of his imitation, periodically, Dole would just lose it. He would just forget where he is and what was going on. In one sketch, Smigel actually has Bob Dole going around saying, "Why won't Bob Dole debate me?" That's right. That's how I used the Bob Dole thing there. He's lost track of who Bob Dole is. "Why won't Bob Dole debate me? Bob Dole is hiding. Somebody--" And then he turned around and started yelling at the people behind him, like he thought they were the audience all the sudden. As somebody who has done an imitation of Dole where he's the boisterous, slightly bullying with Conan, the "bow to me" Dole, what do you make of this whole kinder, gentler, personable, "I'm going to tell you my real story," how do you think it's coming off? You think it's working? Well, we've made fun of that on the Conan show, too, you know. Really? Yeah. Well, we've segued from him going, "I tell you, Bill Clinton's going to jail. Hillary Clinton's going to jail. Socks the cat's going to jail. Oh, what am I talking about? What's happening to Dole? Like that, O'Brien? That's a new Dole. New Dole cries. New Dole cries. Boo-hoo. Like it?" This man has cried more-- I don't think there's a politician who's cried in public more than Bob Dole. It's such an amazing flip side to the guy, who's looked down as such a hardass. Wait, when has he cried? Let's list the times. There's at Nixon's funeral, right? Nixon's funeral. He cried in Russell, Kansas. He cried a little bit when he announced his resignation this year from the senate. And he cried when he went to Russell, Kansas. I mean, that's twice this spring. And then he cried at Nixon's funeral. And do you buy it? Do I buy it? Yeah. Well, I buy the Nixon's funeral one. There didn't seem to be any political upside in that one. Yeah, that's true. So if you buy that one, then you have to think that it's possible that he was sincere in the other two. I can imagine the senate one would be hard for him. The Russell, Kansas thing, that stretches credibility a little bit. Because basically, he only goes to Russell, Kansas to cry. Supposedly he's never there except to make a speech once every eight years, when he runs for president. It's actually an odd thing to have a place where you go to cry. You know what I mean? What if every time you wanted to cry, you had to hop the train to Newark? It could be a burden on a relationship, for one thing. Got to go to Russell. Oh my god, I'm feeling a little bummed. So let me ask you, do you have any tips for our listeners who might want to be imitating either candidate during the coming months? Just a couple of pointers on how they might handle it. Give us a couple for Clinton and a couple for Dole. You mean just physical moves? Yeah, physical moves, sure. All right. Well, Bob Dole, I sort of walked you through Bob Dole. Start with the test pattern, "Nnnnn." The monotone. "Dole, and everything is monotone after that. And he says the same thing in the same tone of voice, speaks very rapidly, Dole." And then putting an "Nn" before the Dole makes him seem older. "Nn-Dole," that kind of thing. Clinton, any tips for Clinton? Well, it depends on how far you want to take one. If you want to do the crazy Clinton, then that's easy. You start with Bruce Springsteen. And it's just, "Hey, little Mary with your daddy home. Hey, man. How you doing? How's it going, everybody? Whee-haw." But then there's more of a-- the more accurate Clinton is kind of the caring guy who's just sort of a gentle thing. And it takes very little, very little energy. You just barely, barely breathe, hardly at all. You barely breathe. Also, your voice is going all the way to the back of your throat, isn't it? When I'm doing this, yeah. I feel the air. That's very good, yes. I feel the air pushing toward the back of my throat. Robert Smigel, he imitates Bob Dole still on the program Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Act Three, TV Politics. Most of us experience Bob Dole, the real Bob Dole, on television. Most of us actually experience most politics in this country through television. And we thought to discuss Bob Dole as a television figure, we would get somebody who writes about TV. And the person we got is a guy named Danny Drennan. And he writes something on the World Wide Web called the "90210 Weekly Wrapup." And this is about the TV show Beverly Hills 90210. The way he writes about television, he is in his own genre of writing. He careens from sheer cattiness to his own analysis of the program and how it's produced and all the actors, and then what all that means for the nation as a whole. Periodically, he'll digress into little personal stories about his own life. And so we at this little radio show adore his writing. And in fact, if you want to visit his website, we recommend it. The address is www.inquisitor.com. He also publishes a zine called Inquisitor. Anyway, so we invited him, and we were really glad when he said yes. We invited him to do something for our show. We asked him to watch Bob and Elizabeth Dole when they appeared on a recent hour of Larry King Live. So I'm watching Larry King Live the other night, and Bob Dole is wearing a dark gray suit and a powerish, reddish tie. And Elizabeth Dole is wearing a blue, blue dress and Red Cross red lipstick, which I guess means she's going for that red, white, and blue effect. And the first question is about the statement made by somebody that Hillary should debate Elizabeth. And Bob Dole is like, "It was a joke." And Elizabeth Dole is like, "It was in jest, Larry." And then Elizabeth Dole goes on and on about how the emphasis should be on the presidential candidates, which is funny, because she doesn't let poor Bob Dole get a word in edgewise. So next, Larry King is asking whether there are any women on "the list" for vice president, since Elizabeth Dole said that in our lifetime, there would be women presidential candidates. And Bob Dole goes on and on about his process for picking a VP. And Larry King, sounding like someone out of The Godfather, is like, "But you know all of these guys. What do you need a process for?" And Bob Dole starts to list the things he looks for in a vice president. And two of them are health and age, which I thought kind of weird. Like maybe Bob Dole shouldn't be allowed to say the words health and age at all. And all I could imagine was a room full of Dole campaign handlers in Larry King's green room going "Damn!" at the top of their lungs. So then there's this whole thing about Katie Couric's interview of the Doles, and how she didn't stick to her script and just talk about the book that the Doles have written, which I guess was Elizabeth Dole's cue to start talking about the book, which she did. And she reads the inscription she wrote to Larry King, which goes "To Larry. Here's hoping that Larry King Live will be broadcast live from the Dole White House, 7-15-96. And your program is mentioned in the book, Larry." I totally think that Elizabeth Dole is shaking down Larry King. Maybe he won't be interviewing the Gores or the Clintons because Elizabeth Dole gave him the plug in the book and that emphatic, sternly scolding "Larry" at the end. And then Larry King points his gatling gun mouth at Elizabeth, who, with a big old smile on her face, is like, "I thought we were there to talk about the book, Larry." Like, how harsh is Elizabeth Dole? I seriously would never want to be on Elizabeth Dole's bad side. Next, they're going on and on about how badly the campaign is doing. And Elizabeth Dole is talking about how no one is engaged because it's summer vacation. And Larry King is all, "Well, you know the media. Today's mistake is tomorrow's headline." And how weird to hear Mr. Media Manipulation himself talk about the goings-on of the media as if they are a totally natural state of affairs that he himself has nothing to do with. How annoying is that? And then Bob Dole, instead of casually dropping his buzzwords one by one into the conversation, just reels off a whole bunch of them wholesale. And meanwhile, Larry King is still stuck on the whole tax thing and is trying to pin Bob dole down. And I have to wonder whether Larry King has really bad breath or something, because Bob Dole kept making these faces as if that might be the case. So then Elizabeth Dole is talking about Bob Dole's message and Bob Dole's agenda, and then it's her turn to start reeling off a list of agenda bullet points. And then Bob Dole basically says that without television, a politician can't campaign, which is a pretty scary thing, if you ask me. And then he adds in all the bullet points of what Bill Clinton has done wrong so far. And then Bob Dole is saying how he's glad to be the underdog and that the real campaign is going to kick off with a powerful acceptance speech by Bob Dole at the Republican National Convention. And then Bob Dole announces that Susan Molinari is going to be the keynote speaker, since she is young and dynamic. And Elizabeth Dole adds that Molinari believes strongly in what Bob Dole stands for. And it's almost at the point where if you couldn't see the TV picture, you might very well wonder if Bob Dole is still in the room or not, since everyone, including Bob Dole, keeps saying "Bob Dole." Meanwhile, Larry King is milking the whole Susan Molinari thing. And he's like, "That's a big statement about cities." And Bob Dole adds women to that list. And then he starts going on and on about all this stuff he's done for women all these years. And all I know is that I was taking the M7 uptown bus the other day, and we were going through Midtown. And there were these two women seated in front of me. And in Midtown, there's this big clock which shows a readout of the national debt getting higher and higher. And this one woman is like, "Look, the national debt just gets higher and higher." Like maybe they should take the money that everyone saves with MCI, which is another huge number readout in Midtown, and put that money toward paying off the national debt. So then she asks her friend, "Who are you voting for?" And the second lady is like, "I don't like the situation we're in one bit. I don't see anyone with any high morals or good ideas, and I don't like Bob Dole. I don't like his stance on issues. Plus, I think he's too old." And the first lady's like "Too old." And the second lady is like, "Too old. He would be a one-term president." And the other lady is like, "Definitely a one-term president." So maybe Bob Dole should ride around on New York mass transit to get a sense of what he should be doing. And then Bob Dole goes on about what he's done for women, saying, "I've been living with a woman," which was a really, really weird thing to say. So then we get an advertisement about health insurance sponsored by the Republican National Committee, showing this smirking kid breathing through a tube while his mother goes on about what we need. And then there's a commercial for life insurance featuring these crying statues in the rain. And I don't know that it's such a good idea to remind people about sickness and death when Bob Dole is on the program. And Larry King brings up Susan Molinari again, like, "Yeah, Larry, we get your little prearranged scoop. Quit working it so much." And Larry King is like, "How did you get involved in this tobacco thing?" And Bob Dole is like, "Just blew in, I guess." And then you realize that Bob Dole keeps looking at himself in the monitor, or else someone is there backstage that he's looking at for cues. And how sick is it to refer to the undeniable pull of tobacco company money in Bob Dole's pocket as something that "just blew in"? And then Bob Dole says he's not a scientist and so couldn't know that smoking is addictive, which is weird, because later he refers to relatives who were sick due to smoking-related problems. How much evidence do you personally need, Bob Dole? And then Larry King is like, "Would you tell Americans to stop smoking?" And Bob Dole is like, "Yeah, all of you stop smoking." And Elizabeth Dole qualifies that with "pregnant women and elderly people with respiratory disorders." Where do you think most respiratory disorders come from, Elizabeth Dole? And then Bob Dole is like, "It's not good for you. It's bad for your health. Don't do it." And having said that, like he was about to go on, but Elizabeth Dole interrupts him and goes, "That's it." And they all laugh. And we get an arthritis pain medication commercial and a denture cream commercial. So then Larry King is asking Elizabeth Dole about what she's going to be doing as First Lady. And she starts going on about being a supportive spouse. And Bob Dole makes a joke about calling her up for a transfusion. And then he looks at the monitor again. And meanwhile, Elizabeth Dole is going on about going around the country to places where mentally challenged youths are making beautiful products. And I swear to god, if she got any more condescending, I was going to seriously put my foot through the television. So then Bob Dole goes on the record as not speaking about Clinton's character by listing Whitewater and Filegate as two things he hasn't talked about, even though he just did. And then Larry King brings up more records. And then Bob Dole goes, "Trust." And then Elizabeth Dole starts going on about how Bob Dole was a poor farmboy whose family moved their kids into the basement to rent out the house to make ends meet. How depressing is that? No wonder Bob Dole has a sour demeanor all the time, since he grew up with no windows. And then Elizabeth Dole goes on some more, like maybe she should let her husband talk just a little bit. And then Larry King brings up the Jimmy Carter question. "Can you say you would never tell a lie?" And Bob Dole goes, "Yes." And Elizabeth Dole goes, "Yes." Whose question is that? And then they go on and on about affirmative action. And then Larry King promises to take phone calls for, like, the 50th time. Maybe no one is calling in or something. And then we get that health insurance commercial again and an ad for some ginseng-based energizing dietary supplement to help you feel not so old. Next, they're talking about the stock market. And we finally go to calls, but Larry doesn't seem to know how to work the phones. And the caller's from Georgia. And I was hoping it was that guy who called up when Jesse Helms was on, thanking him for all his work in controlling blacks, only he didn't say blacks. But it was only some guy asking about running mates again. The one call that they take on the show, and it is some yokel who didn't get that they weren't going to talk about possible running mates. So finally, we get Susan Molinari on the phone from a restaurant somewhere, gushing on and on about Bob Dole to the point where they probably should have cut her off. And Larry King asks whether Susan Molinari thinks her pro-choice abortion stand is going to be a problem. And Susan Molinari is going on about how, "This is the man to bring the convention together, and there is no greater honor in the world than to speak on behalf of the gentleman currently on your show." You would think Susan Molinari just found God or something, the way she was going on about it. And all I want to know is does Susan Molinari on the phone to Larry King count as a paid Republican advertisement for Bob Dole, especially when Larry King points out that Bob Dole is the guest who's appeared most on the Larry King show? And then Larry King makes a point of reminding all the news flunkies out there that the two points from his show to remember are "Never lie" and "Susan Molinari." And I don't think November could be any scarier in my mind at this point. Well, it is This American Life, the public radio show that is down with the king. Well, our program was produced today by Peter Clowney and myself, with Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and Dolores Wilber, contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. You can read Danny Drennan's writing about 90210 and other things on the web, and we recommend this, http://www.inquisitor com. There's another dot in there. You can figure out where it is. If you would like a copy of this program, it only costs $10. Call us at WBEZ, 312-832-3380. Or email us, [email protected] And have you emailed us? No, you have not. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass. I think at this point, it's better to be the underdog. And we believe we're on target. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Last year in Janesville, Wisconsin, the city council had to vote in giving some federal money to the Salvation Army to build a homeless shelter. It's a small town, small enough that the council people are volunteers. And one of them, Paul Williams, voted yes to the federal money, but he added wording saying that the Salvation Army couldn't use the facility to hold prayer services or proselytize because of the separation of church and state. Well, these days, those are fighting words. A couple of congressmen were called, and they got a hold of Secretary Green-- This is the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development? Correct. So it got up to the United States Cabinet. Yeah. OK. And Janesville is a town of how big? Janesville is 60,000 people. You get a lot of attention from the US Cabinet over there? No. Not usually. It got bigger. On March 1, President Bush himself chastised the city council, saying that they had, quote, "No right to tell the Salvation Army that the price of running a center was giving up its prayers." In other words, yes, it is illegal to use federal money to proselytize. But just as long as the government was only funding the building and not the prayer service itself, it was fine with the president. For a city councilman who usually deals with sidewalks and zoning questions, who thought he was just following the law, this whole noisy mess was a bit surprising. The local head of the Salvation Army, Major David Taube, was even quoted in The Janesville Gazette, questioning Paul Williams' morality. A quote in the newspaper from him said, I have some concerns that we would have a city council person so anti-Christian, so anti-spiritual. I don't know. I'm at a loss for words. Yeah. And just to be clear, for the record, do you oppose the Christian church? One second on that, OK? Yeah. He wants to know, for the record, if I oppose the Christian church. Um-- Who were you just saying that to? That's my wife. You just put your hand over the phone, and you said, he wants to know, for the record, if I oppose the Christian church. Yeah. Well, as far as in my political role, again, I try and keep that separate. But no, I do not oppose the Christian church. Have you ever celebrated Christmas, the holiday of the Christian church? Let's put it this way. I was educated at a Catholic church, married in a Lutheran church, baptized in a Wesleyan church. So yes, I consider myself a Christian. Thanks to pressure from the Feds, Paul Williams lost. There will be prayer services in the federally funded building. Though in an ironically tidy little ending to the story, the man who called him anti-Christian and anti-spiritual, Major David Taube of the Salvation Army, was recently caught emailing a pornographic picture of himself to somebody who claimed to be a 14-year-old boy. But it was, in fact, a Florida police detective. You know, I don't even know if I should be bringing that up. But once people start calling each other anti-Christian, once it's all about your personal morality, it's hard not to. This is why the Founding Fathers specify in the Constitution that you don't have to have a particular religion to serve in public office. They knew that it just gets ugly when you start dragging everybody's faith into these public debates, and unnecessary. And it's happening a lot. In Georgia, a science teacher who won the Presidential Award for Excellence in science education, whose taught for 28 years-- and we're asked that we not use her name-- tells this story. Under Georgia state guidelines, she is required to teach evolution, and she's not allowed to teach creationism. So she did what the rule said, and some parents complained. And then a fellow teacher ratted her out, informed the school's administration that evolution was being taught within their walls. Because although the rules say that they're supposed to teach evolution, that doesn't necessarily mean the school followed the rules. Before Christmas, I was called into the principal's office. And the question was, are you teaching evolution as a fact? And of course, I'm saying yes. Right. Because in a way, you're in a very cut and dry situation. There are state standards. You're supposed to teach them. And you're just teaching them. Well, you'd think that would be cut and dry, wouldn't you? Over the next few months, she was called into the principal's office two more times. At one meeting, the school superintendent was there to tell her that he didn't believe in evolution and that back when he taught biology, he taught evolution and creationism side by side. She told him that now, that was actually illegal. Things got even more strange for her when she was called in for a meeting with her incoming principal about evolution. We sat down, closed the door. And we got into a discussion of, he wanted me to know where he was coming from. And so he reached around off of his bookshelf and pulled a Bible off his bookshelf. And he said, I believe everything in this Bible. Do you believe everything in this Bible? And he would not let it go. He just wouldn't let it drop. He says, I believe in every single thing in this Bible. And do you believe in everything in this Bible? And I said, yes, I do, but that's not the issue. That was the first time. That was the first time? There was more than one time? Yeah. The next time, we were in the cafeteria. And he said, I can accept a lot of things about evolution. But if the scientists ever get to the point where they say God's not involved, I can't accept that. I want you to say that. I said, this just doesn't feel right. You shouldn't be asking me these kinds of questions. He said, no. It's just the two of us here. It's like we're just two people talking. If they ever get to the point where the scientists say that God's not involved, I can't accept that. I want you to say that. He wanted me to repeat it after him. It felt like I was forced to take an oath. It felt like I was forced to declare my religion. Did you ever think of, like, what year is this that I'm having to fight this? I know, I know. And it felt like I was a caged animal. Much like I was cornered. Lots of teachers don't want this kind of trouble. And people in science education say that in schools all over the country, evolution is mandated, but not being taught. Just as abortion is legal, but hard to find in many places. What's happening in this school-- what's happening all over the place actually-- is not really a debate. It's people acting from two totally different assumptions. One group thinking that religion has no place in public life, the other thinking that, of course, it does. In fact, it needs to be there more. And people who want the separation of church and state these days-- people who thought these issues were settled-- are finding they're anything but. Christian activists are fighting for friendly judges to be appointed to the bench so that they can get court decisions to swing their way on school prayer, and sex ed, and the Bible in school, and Roe versus Wade. The president has come out and said that he will not appoint judges who don't think that our rights come to us from God. He said this even though the Constitution explicitly forbids a religious test to hold a public office like a judgeship. That's Article Six. You can check that yourself. In April, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said that the judiciary has imposed, quote, "a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution." I read that quote. And when I first read it, I had this reaction I think a lot of people might have, which is, isn't the separation of church and state in there somewhere? Isn't that actually one of the ideas that our country is founded on? Chances are that you are like me, and you haven't actually read the Constitution since high school. So today, to clarify this, we have answers. Is there supposed to be a separation of church and state in our country? And if so, why do so many Americans think otherwise? From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today, Godless America. Act One of our show, a quick summary of the advances that fundamentalist Christians are making in turning their values into national policy. Act Two, why they believe the founders didn't intend a separation of church and state in the Constitution as we normally understand it, and why. Well, they're probably wrong about that. Act Three, in this very Christian country, in this very Christian moment in our history, Julia Sweeney takes on the Bible. Stay with us. Act One, The Substance of Things Hoped For In Government. OK. So you've heard about the stem cell fight already, and you've heard about the filibuster fight, which was really about judicial appointments. And you've heard about how gay marriage was outlawed in 13 states in 2004. And you've heard about the pending decisions on evolution in schools in Kansas and Dover, Pennsylvania. But there's a lot more going on than that. First stop on our tour of Christian activists trying to push the country toward more Biblical values, Virginia, where a former state trooper turned legislator named Bill Carrico introduced an amendment to the Virginia Constitution to, quote, "secure further the people's right to acknowledge God," to permit prayer, and the recognition of, quote, "religious beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property, including public schools." Now, of course, it's already legal for a child to pray in a public school, or to read a Bible, or to acknowledge their faith. The Supreme Court saw to that years ago. But Bill Carrico says that people do not understand these rights. And so a lot of these cases actually end up in court, which is why, he says, they should amend the state constitution to make the rules perfectly clear. Basically, it was to protect those Christians from being persecuted the way they're being persecuted today just because they are the majority faith. He got interested in the issue when, as a state trooper talking to a high school class before the prom, he mentioned David and Goliath. And parents complained. He says this happens all the time. I've got a situation that occurred in Isle of Wight county, where a young girl was looking forward to her high school graduation and having the opportunity to sing. But when she chose the song that she wanted to sing at her graduation, just because it had the mere reference to God in the song, she was removed from the program. Do you happen to know what song it was? It was a Celine Dion song, "The Prayer." And the school officials said, you're crossing the line between separation of church and state, and you're not going to sing that song. Yeah. So there's a kind of political correctness. Yes. You feel embattled. Yes. And you see, this country was founded upon those beliefs. Our laws are written after Biblical laws. And also, the wall of separation of church and state is nowhere in the Constitution. And all it's done is give the secular world, who doesn't profess to believe in anything, the right to say, just because I don't want to hear it, you can't say it. Next up on our tour, Ohio. Pastor Russell Johnson of the Fairfield Christian Church runs something called the Ohio Restoration Project, which wants to sign up 2,000 fundamentalist Baptist and Catholic "patriot pastors" in Ohio's 88 counties, register hundreds of thousands of Christian voters, take control of local Republican groups, and elect a conservative Republican named Kenneth Blackwell to the governor's office in 2006. Pastor Johnson says he's doing pretty well for his goals. 600 pastors signed up so far. He expects to be at 1,000 by Labor Day. He says he is simply restoring Ohio to the Founding Fathers' original Christian values. And yes, they came here to advance the Christian faith. The sense of separation of church from the state has been a secular jihad that has taken place primarily from the courts. I think, for instance, the discrimination against Christians defies explanation. But still, 84% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. 6 out of 10 Americans say religion is very important in their lives. Only 16% of Americans say religion isn't important. Christians have Christmas off. It's sanctioned by the state. There's no mail service on Sunday. Attendance at evangelical churches is going up. Like-- Now, I appreciate you did a good thing right there, Ira. I guess I don't-- where is the persecution of Christians? Let me give you a track record on this if I might. From our standpoint, OK? All right. 1962, after 175 years of praying in the classroom, prayer is declared to be somehow an offense. 1963, don't read the Bible. You go on to where they take the Ten Commandments off the walls in Kentucky in '80. In fact, Roe v. Wade. So we now have these consistent messages from the courts. Never happens at the legislative-- never happens at the level of where people will get a vote. And I think that finally, the Christian community has been pushed to the threshold and said, enough is enough. Do you believe that we can be a moral nation without being Christian? Long-term morality without God is a myth. And so if there's a person who believes any of the things that you don't believe-- who believes that a woman should have a right to an abortion, or who believes that gay men and gay women should be allowed to marry-- do you think that the reason that shouldn't be the law in the United States is because we're supposed to be a Christian nation? No, I candidly-- I don't have a problem with people disagreeing. What I have a problem with is when I have a minority trying to dictate to the supermajority. In an idea, for instance, like because there's one child in the school that doesn't want us to read the Gospels, the life of Christ. One child should not keep the rest of the school from having the privilege of discovering a rich history that we have. This is something you hear a lot from Christian activists. They are the majority. And they're turning out their voters. Why shouldn't they get their way? That's what democracy is all about. If most Americans think that it would be OK to have school prayer or teach creationism alongside evolution, well, that's our system in this country. The 2004 elections emboldened the religious right. They are taking credit for the reelection of President Bush and the increased Republican majority in the Senate and the House. Now they're asking, well, what do we get in return? This is Rob Boston, a man with a rather unfortunate name to any of us who have watched Survivor. But that's another story. He's been monitoring these sorts of things at Americans United for Separation of Church and State for two decades, and he says that he has never seen Christian conservatives making such headway as they are now. Some of the bills now before Congress, the House of Worship Free Speech Act, which would make it legal to endorse a candidate from the pulpit and still hold onto your church's tax-exempt status. The Constitution Restoration Act, which would try to bypass the courts on things like the display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings by making it illegal for the courts to rule against any government official or body whose actions acknowledge, quote, "God as the source of life, liberty, or government." There's the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, which counts among its cosponsors Senators John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. This law would force employers to accommodate religious practices and beliefs in the workplace as much as possible. This, by the way, is coming at a time when a handful of pharmacists around the country have refused to fill birth control prescriptions on moral grounds. And Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania has talked about introducing a federal Conscience Law which would specifically permit that. Four states already have conscience laws like this, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Dakota. Again, Rob Boston. This is an interesting example of where, for many people, these church-state issues seem theoretical. They seem abstract. Whether the Ten Commandments monument is inside the courthouse or outside, whether the Christmas creche is in front of the town green, and who put it up, and how long it's there. And a lot of people would just throw their hands up and say, you know what? I really don't care. But when you look at an issue like, can a woman get her birth control pills because of someone's religious bias and religious beliefs, that's an entirely different thing. Do you think a law like this could pass? Given the current state of Congress and the heavy influence of the religious right, I think some of these measures that seem really extreme and really out there do have a chance of passing. And then, of course, we're left with the courts to try to overturn them, and the courts are becoming more conservative by the day as well. At the heart of everything for the Christian activists, as you've probably gathered, is this idea that America has gotten away from what it was supposed to be. That religious values are supposed to be at the center of everything in our country. And now there's a cottage industry of books and DVDs and other materials telling a history of our country this way. What was the foundation upon which our Founding Fathers established this great nation? According to John Adams, the foundation was Christianity. This is from a CD put out by Wallbuilders, which does a lot of this stuff. Wallbuilders.com, by the way. The narrator is David Barton, the founder of Wallbuilders, who declined our request for an interview, but who lays out his case in the materials that he sells. The evidence that our founders did not want a separation of church and state, in Barton's materials, and whenever everybody else seems to talk about it, comes down to this. The founders were believers who often talked about the importance of God and morality in public life. And Barton and others point out that the phrase "separation of church and state" is not actually in the Constitution. It comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802, which is true. And then it just comes down to the language of the First Amendment. That's the amendment dealing with religion. Here's David Barton. Although the phrase "separation of church and state" is well known and commonly associated with the First Amendment, the words "separation," "church," or "state," are not only not found in the First Amendment, they're found in no founding document. Still, many, after learning the phrase is not present, they frequently ask, well, even though the words aren't there, isn't that what the First Amendment really means? Well, according to the Founding Fathers and their discussions of the First Amendment, which are recorded in the Congressional Records, all they wanted to preclude was what they had experienced in Great Britain. They did not want the establishment by the federal government of one single denomination in exclusion of all others, whether that would be Catholic or Anglican or any other denomination. Some of these claims I have to be sympathetic with. We meet one of David Barton's biggest opponents when it comes to history, Isaac Kramnick, a professor at Cornell who co-wrote a well-known constitutional history called The Godless Constitution with R. Laurence Moore. And here is the first surprise about Kramnick. He agrees with Christian activists that there is far too much political correctness about church and state issues. He thinks people get hung up on this stuff too much of the time, that, of course, a kid should be allowed to sing a Celine Dion song mentioning God at a high school graduation. And Professor Kramnick says that Barton's right on other scores too. Barton is correct in that most of the founders were believers. Many liberals get very upset when people like David Barton put out a list of all the quotes from the Founding Fathers about God, because they would like to sort of sweep them away. That the Founding Fathers, Jefferson included, never really spoke about God, and that God was unimportant to them. That's not right. It makes it all the more profound that these people were indeed, many of them, believers. They had no problem with a religious nation, a religious people. But they wanted a secular government. And this, of course, was a great break from the past. And that, in fact, is the incredible achievement of America. Kramnick says the founders wanted to keep religion out of government completely because they knew what happened in 16th century Europe, when millions of Protestants and Catholics killed each other in religious wars. In the wake of that, the philosopher John Locke theorized about a kind of government that could be completely secular. Take no sides in religion at all. And there's lots of documentation showing that Locke and his vision of government had a huge influence on the drafters of the Constitution. And sure, says Kramnick. Barton's right again. The Constitution never explicitly says the phrase "separation of church and state." That's true. So the argument about it not being in the Constitution is absolutely correct. It's not in the Constitution. Nor, of course, is God, or religion, or Protestantism, or the furthering of any faith in the Constitution either. As you write in your book, they mention a creator in the Declaration of Independence, they mention a creator in the Articles of Confederation. In many state constitutions, they mention a creator. But here, they consciously do not mention a creator at all. Absolutely. And then, to add insult to injury, Article Six of the Constitution says, there shall be no religious test for public office. And that created a firestorm around the country. Now you should explain what a religious test is. That means-- A religious test was that in 11 of the 13 states, in their constitutions, in 1787, said you could only hold public office if you were Protestant. What happened after September 1787 in Philadelphia with the signing of the Constitution was that it wouldn't go into effect until 9 of the 13 states ratified it. Americans have no idea how close the Constitution came to being not ratified. How in these state ratifying conventions, the vote would be 30 to 27, something of that sort. And one of the lightning rod areas of debate was, in fact, about religion, was the omission of any religious purpose from the Constitution. No reference to God, no reference to Christ. Now, in each of these state conventions, for the next year, there was a huge cry that the Constitution be changed to eliminate the no religious test clause. With claims like it'll allow a Papist, a Mohammedan, an infidel, a Jew to hold public office. The proponents of the Constitution said no. And in fact, each effort in each of the states was turned down, which was read at the time as a clear announcement that government is a secular function and has no religious purpose. And this is how we know that despite the fact that there's nothing in the Constitution about formally saying separation of church and state, we know what their attitudes were to religion and government. Then there were a series of fights over the separation of church and state, including a 20-year battle starting in the early 19th century over whether US post offices should be closed on Sundays so that work wouldn't happen on the Christian Sabbath. Ministers gathered names on petitions. They took it to Congress. And Congress said no. Congress said no. A staunch Baptist was the head of the committee that recommended to Congress that this would be an unconstitutional interference of Congress in religious matters. And then perhaps the most dramatic example occurs during the Civil War, when, as unbelievable as it seems, many Protestant ministers convened conventions to plead to amend the Constitution to put Jesus Christ and Christian government into the preamble to the Constitution. And their argument, you write, is basically, the reason why we got into this mess and now we're at war is because when we wrote the Constitution, God wasn't in the Constitution, and now God is basically punishing us for that. Absolutely. And therefore, they proposed the Christian amendment which would change the preamble of the Constitution to, "We the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the governor among the nations, and his revealed will as a supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Now, how'd they do with that? You write that they did meet with President Lincoln. They met with President Lincoln, who would have nothing to do with it. There was criticism from a large number of religious groups in the country. And it never got out of committee. Now just to put the final footnote to that story, five more times there would be a Christian amendment put before Congress, and every one of them failed. 1874, 1894, 1910, 1947, and 1954. And there was a kind of booby prize given in 1863 when this failed. And that booby prize was, of course, that "In God We Trust" was put on our money. A somewhat less sacred part of our tradition than the Constitution. But what's fascinating is that Barton and DeLay and Falwell and Ralph Reed have a story. And their story goes like this. The founders set up a Christian government which persisted until the 1960s. And then in the 1960s, a sort of subversive cabal of secularists, liberals, eroded and subverted this government which was supposedly to serve God's purpose. In fact, the story, ironically, is just the opposite, which is the Constitution-- 1787 until the 1950s, the David Bartons and the Tom DeLays of the country were angry that the Constitution was secular, calling it a godless Constitution. And then in the 1950s, it's just the opposite. The secular foundation of government is, in fact, eroded because of the Cold War. In the Cold War, America came to define itself as godly people, of course, fighting godless, atheistic Communism. So it's in the 1950s that you get the first presidential prayer breakfasts. You get the first congressional prayer rooms. And you get Eisenhower saying, we are a nation of believers. And perhaps even more important, the insertion of God into the Pledge of Allegiance. Isaac Kramnick, coauthor of the book The Godless Constitution. The book is being reissued in August with a new chapter about the Bush presidency. Coming up, it's the old story. Girl loves God. Girl reads Bible. Girl's not so sure anymore how she feels about God. 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, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Godless America. And we've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, God Said, Huh? Religious people don't see it this way, but I would argue that God has gotten a lot of play in the mass media lately. There was that saturation coverage of the death of the pope and the picking of the new pope. There are continual attempts by Hollywood these days, in the post-Mel Gibson environment, to do various God-related projects. There's Joan of Arcadia and Seventh Heaven and Revelations and a number of other TV shows. This story you're about to hear takes a different point of view about God. Julia Sweeney was on Saturday Night Live. She's been in all sorts of movies and TV shows. She also did a one-woman show a couple years back about her struggle with cancer called "God Said, 'Ha!'" which Quentin Tarantino made into a film. Her latest one-woman show, which has been playing in Los Angeles, is about-- well, it's about God. This is an excerpt. Not too long ago, two Mormon missionaries came to my door. They were each about 19, in white, starched, short-sleeved shirts, and they said they had a message for me from God. And I guess I was sort of curious, so I said, please, come in. And they seemed really happy because I don't think that happens to them all that often. And I sat them down in the living room, and I got them glasses of water. And after our niceties, I said, OK. I'm ready for my message from God. But they had a question instead, which really threw me a little. I thought it would be more like a pitch at a studio. And they would tell me their story, and then if I were interested, I would have my people call their people or something. But apparently, this was going to be interactive. And they said, do you believe that God loves you with all his heart? And I thought, well, of course, I believe in God. But I don't like that word heart because that so anthropomorphizes God. And I don't like the word his either because that sexualizes God. But then I didn't want to argue semantics with these boys. So after a very long, uncomfortable pause, I said, yes. Yes, I do. I feel very loved. And then they looked at each other and smiled, like that was the right answer. And then they said, do you believe that we're all brothers and sisters on this planet? And I immediately said, yes I do, yes, I do. And I was so relieved that it was a question that I could just answer quickly. And they said, well, then we have a story to tell you. And they told me this story all about this guy named Lehi who lived in Jerusalem in 600 BC. Now apparently, in Jerusalem in 600 BC, everyone was completely bad and evil. Every single one of them. Man, woman, child, infant, fetus. And God came to Lehi, and he said, put your family on a boat, and I will lead you out of here. And so he did. And God led them to America. I said, America? From Jerusalem to America by boat in 600 BC? And they said, yes. And then they told me how Lehi and his descendants reproduced and reproduced. And eventually, over the course of 600 years, there were two races of them, the Nephites and Lamanites. And the Nephites were totally, totally good, each and every one of them. And the Lamanites were totally bad and evil, every single one of them, just bad to the bone. Then after Jesus died on the cross for our sins, on his way up to heaven, he stopped by America and visited the Nephites. And he said that if the Nephites all remained totally good, each and every one of them, they would win this war against the Lamanites. But apparently, somebody blew it, and the Lamanites killed all the Nephites. All except this one guy named Mormon who managed to survive by hiding in the woods. And he made sure that this whole story was written down in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics chiseled onto gold plates, which he then buried near Palmyra, New York. And then they told me how this guy named Joseph Smith found the buried gold plates right in his backyard. And he also found this magic stone back there that he put into his hat and then buried his face into it. And this allowed him to translate the gold plates from the reformed Egyptian into English. Well, I was just looking at these boys with wide eyes, and I was really wishing I could give them some advice about their pitch. I wanted to say, OK, don't start with this story. I mean, even the Scientologists know to give a personality test before they start telling you all about Xenu, the evil intergalactic overlord. Well, then they said, well, we also believe that if you're a Mormon and if you're in good standing with the church, when you die, you get to go to heaven and be with your family for all eternity. And I said, oh, dear. That wouldn't really be such a good incentive for me. I mean, everyone in your family? And then they gave me a Book of Mormon, and they told me to read this chapter and that chapter. And they said they'd come back someday and check in on me. And I think I said something like, please don't hurry. Or maybe it was just, please don't. And they were gone. OK. So I initially felt pretty superior to these boys and really smug in my more conventional faith. But then the more I thought about it, I had to be honest with myself. I mean, if someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the very first time, and they said, we believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse, and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us, and she had a baby, and that was the son of God, I would think that was equally ridiculous. I guess I'm just so used to that story. So I couldn't let myself feel condescending towards these boys. But the question they asked me when they first arrived stuck in my head. Do you believe that God loves you with all his heart? Because I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about that question. Now, if they had asked me, do you feel that God loves you with all his heart, now, that question would have been much easier. I would have instantly answered yes. Yes, I feel it all the time. I feel God's love when I'm hurt and confused, and I feel consoled and cared for. But since they asked me the question with the word "believe" in it, somehow it was all different. Because I wasn't sure if I believed what I so clearly felt. OK. My religious history in a nutshell. I was raised Catholic, and for me, it was all in all a great experience. I know we can't stop reading about all of the people who have had just horrific and abusive experiences as a child in the Catholic church. But for me, it was mostly wonderful. I always felt really lucky to be a Catholic. It was easy for me to believe. I even had religious experiences. I know this is more of a Protestant thing than a Catholic thing, but I had a few times, maybe five or six times, where I felt the power of the Holy Spirit, this force of love and transcendence, come over me and just shake me to the core. And in spite of their nutty story, the Mormon boys inspired me. I realized I'd been getting lazy about my faith. So I decided to rededicate myself to the church. I went to Mass at several different Catholic churches and finally settled on joining one about 10 miles from my house. Their Masses were so emotional. I would have to choke back tears just to say the Nicene Creed every time I went. "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and of all things seen and unseen." Well, I noticed in the announcements that the church offered a Bible study class on Thursday nights, and I decided to sign up for it. The Catholics don't really emphasize the Bible all that much. Their attitude is sort of, leave that book to the professionals. Don't you worry your little self with that complicated book. So I felt eager to finally read this book, this book that I'd always wanted to take the time to read, but I really never had. And I was happy to see that the Old Testament starts out with two conflicting stories about the origin of the universe, one where Adam and Eve are created at the exact same moment, and then in the next chapter, a second creation story where Adam is created first, and then Eve is created out of his rib after he gets lonely. And I thought, wow. For all those people who believe every word of the Bible is true, they can't even have read the first two chapters. In fact, the Bible contradicts itself all over the place. Then we got to stories like Sodom and Gomorrah. All I remembered about that story is that they were these two sinful cities, like Las Vegas or something, and God got mad and wiped them out. And Lot's wife looked back when she was told not to and got turned into a pillar of salt. But the nuns of my grade school didn't explain to us what happens right before they flee. Right before they flee, two angels that are masquerading as two men come for a visit and stay overnight at Lot's house. And this mob forms outside, and they yell, send out those two angel-like men to us so we can have sex with them. And Lot yells, no, which I think is a basic rule of hospitality. Don't give up your guests to be raped by an angry mob. But then what does he say next? He says, instead of the men, please, take my daughters, and rape, and do what you will with them. They're virgins. After Lot and his traumatized daughters flee Sodom and Gomorrah, they all go to a cave in the mountains. And during the night, Lot's two daughters get him drunk and rape him. Do they do this in revenge of what their father did to them? No. The Bible says it's because there aren't any other men around. Even though the Bible also says that they're not that far from a city named Zoar. So I guess no men around for maybe a few miles? And wait a minute. So Lot's daughters just had to drug and rape someone? And I guess if you're their dad and you're the only one there-- I knew the Bible had nutty stories, but I guess I thought they'd be wedged in amongst an ocean of inspiration and history. But instead, the stories just got darker and more convoluted. Like when God asks Abraham to murder his son Isaac. As a kid, we were taught to admire it. I caught my breath reading it. We were taught to admire it? What kind of sadistic test of loyalty is that, to ask someone to kill his or her own child? And isn't the proper answer no, I will not kill my child or any child? At the next class, Father Tom reminded us that Isaac represents what matters to Abraham most, and that's what God asks us to give up for him. I said, but protecting and loving and caring for the welfare of your child is such a deep ethical, loving instinct and act. So what if what matters to you most is your own loving behavior? Should we be willing to give up our ethics for God? And he said, no, it's what matters to you most. It isn't your ethics because your ethics is your love and faith in God. That confused me, but I decided to just let it go. But then I found that Abraham wasn't the only person willing to murder his own child for God. They're all over the place in the Bible. For example, in the Book of Judges, a guy named Jephthah tells God that if God helps him win this battle, he will kill the first person to greet him when he comes home. Who turns out to be his daughter. Who he sets on fire. Some people argue that without the Bible, morality would be relative and wishy-washy. But in the Bible, morality is relative and wishy-washy. In fact, it sure seems like our modern morality is much more loving and humane than the Bible's morality. After Mass one Sunday, Father Tom saw me outside the church, and he said, Julia, you always look so very sad in Bible study class. And I said, well, God is so offensive in the Old Testament. I mean, like, bipolar. And Father Tom said, well, you know, the Old Testament. The stories are legends. They're tales of trickery and deception that were told around the campfire. There's no evidence that Abraham is anything other than legend. Or Isaac, or Moses. But Julia, you can't approach the Bible with modern historical eyes. You've got to read it with the eyes of faith. This is the story that God wants us to know. As I drove home, I thought, OK, calm down. This is the Old Testament. Old. Old is right in the title. A new, a newer testament is coming up. And that's why God sent his son Jesus. Because we clearly hadn't gotten the message right. Right? I could hardly wait to meet Jesus again as if it were the first time. But oh dear. Well, first off, Jesus is much angrier than I expected him to be. I knew that Jesus got angry with all those money changers in the temple and everything, but I didn't know that he was so angry so much of the time. And very impatient. For example, Jesus says he teaches in parables because people don't understand anything else. But the parables are often foggy and meaningless, and Jesus is snippy when even the disciples don't get them. He says, if you don't understand this parable, then how can you understand any parable? And, are you incapable of understanding? I kept thinking, don't teach in parables then. It's not working. Even your staff doesn't understand them. Why don't you just say what you mean? And it was hard to stay on Jesus's side when he started saying really aggressive, hateful things. Like in Luke. Jesus says that he is like a king who says, anyone who does not recognize me, bring them here and slaughter them before me. Or in John chapter 15, where Jesus says that anyone who doesn't believe in him is like a withered branch that will be cast into the fire and burned. In Matthew, he says, I come not to bring peace, but a sword. And then in Luke, he says, and if you don't have a sword, sell your clothes and buy one. Then Jesus just starts acting downright crazy. Like in Matthew chapter 21. When a fig tree doesn't have a fig for him to eat, Jesus condemns the fig tree to death. That's right. Jesus condemns a fig tree to death. Not a parable, by the way. Just Jesus, pissed off that the fig tree didn't have a fig for him to eat when he wanted one. Not exactly the Prince of Peace who taught us to turn the other cheek. And then there's family. I have to say the most upsetting thing to me about Jesus is his family values, which is amazing when you think how there's so many groups out there who say they base their family values on the Bible. I mean, he seems to have no real close ties to his parents. He puts Mary off cruelly over and over again. At the wedding feast he says to her, woman, what have I to do with you? And once, while he was speaking to this crowd, Mary waited patiently off to the side to talk to him. And Jesus said to the disciples, send her away, you are my family now. Jesus actually discourages any contact his converts have with their own families. He himself does not marry or have children, and he explicitly tells his followers not to have families as well. And if they do, they should just abandon them. Isn't that what cults do? Get you to reject your family in order to inculcate you? So that's the New Testament family values for you, the supposed big improvement over the Old Testament family values, which seemed to be mostly about incest and mass slaughter and protecting your own specific genetic line at all costs. The Bible. The Good Book. The Good News. I was so disillusioned with the Bible by the time I finished the Epistles, I didn't think it could get any worse. But it did. We were just about to read the last and most oddball book of the Bible, Revelation. Revelation tells us that in heaven, Jesus will resemble a dead lamb with seven horns and seven eyes. And when the gates of hell are opened, locusts pour out with human faces wearing tiny crowns, and they sting people with their tails. Revelation tells us that only 144,000 people will even be saved and go to heaven. And none of them will have quote "defiled" themselves with women, which I guess excludes most heterosexual men from heaven. And depending on how you interpret that word "defiled," I would say excludes all women too. As we finished Revelation, the whole Bible study group just sat there, dumbfounded, our Bibles on our laps. I said, Father Tom, I am having a really hard time with this book. And he told me to pray for faith. I left the church thinking, is this one big practical joke? Where is my God, the Jesus I thought I knew? The one that I love and the one who loves me? I drove home, and I was stopped at this red light on Crenshaw and Wilshire. And I saw all these people walking to church, holding their Bibles. And I wanted to yell out the window, have you read that book? I felt like I was in a horror film. And I realized that the clue to the insanity was not some secret document. It was a book that everyone was holding, that was in every hotel room. The biggest bestseller of all time. And yet if you cared enough to just glance inside, you found you'd opened the door to an insane asylum with a bunch of crazy people dancing around, yelling, "yippidee-yippidee-yah!" And I had quickly shut that door. And how was I going to pretend that I hadn't opened that door? But some things were just too big to ignore. Like the whole point of the New Testament, that Jesus died for our sins. As if someone can pay for someone else's sins. For the first time, after going to church my whole life, I considered the idea that God's son came to earth and suffered and died for our sins. Why? Jesus suffered, but you can't argue that he suffered any more than a lot of other people have suffered. I could think of examples in my own family. My brother Mike who had cancer, he suffered unspeakably for a very long time. Eyelids freezing open, and his eyes drying up. Canker sores all over his throat, and he couldn't swallow. Weeks and then months of gut-wrenching vomiting and nausea before he then died. So OK. Jesus suffered. He apparently suffered terribly for one, maybe even two days. I heard someone say once, Jesus had a really bad weekend for our sins. I suddenly thought, why would a God create people so imperfect, then blame them for their own imperfections, then send his son to be murdered by those imperfect people to make up for how imperfect those people were? And how imperfect they were inevitably going to be? I mean, what a crazy idea. So I tried to concentrate on what I did like about the church. The stained glass windows were pretty. The light in the church. The religious art. The songs. Not the words to the songs exactly, but the melodies were nice. Especially at Christmas. It was also pretty in the church then. After Mass, Father Tom saw me outside the church, and he said, Happy Easter, Julia. And I said, Happy Easter, Father. And he said, you know, I can see you frowning from the pulpit. And I said, I'm sorry, but Father, help me. What can I do? It all just seems impossible to believe. He pulled me towards the coffee and doughnuts table. He said, I've spoken with some of the other priests about your predicament. I loved how he said "predicament." I felt like I was 16 and knocked up. I said, yeah? What do they suggest? And he said, listen. We all struggle with doubt, but we all come back. Just remember Proverbs 3:5. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. So God gave us the gifts of reasoning and intelligence and curiosity, but then we're not supposed to use them? Father Tom sighed, like he was so tired of me and my struggle. And I felt so angry that he used that particular proverb, like he was shutting the door. Then Father Tom suddenly blessed me. It was kind of awkward. He just started waving his hands over me and chanting this phrase in Latin. Not that this is so out of the ordinary or wrong. It just felt like he was trying to perform an exorcism. I came home, and it felt remarkably quiet. Just me and God. Not saying much. And the truth was, I was starting to get nervous about our relationship. I felt like we were this married couple in trouble, just trying to find some common ground. And then one day I was Cometing out my bathtub, and I thought, what if it's true? What if humans are here because of pure, random chance? What if there is no guiding hand, no one watching? I realized I had spent so much time thinking about what God meant that I hadn't really spent any time thinking about what not God meant. A few days later, as I was walking across my backyard into my house, I realized that there was this teeny-weeny thought whispering inside my head. I'm not sure how long it had been there, but it suddenly got just one decibel louder. And it whispered, there is no God. And I tried to ignore it. But it got a teeny bit louder. There is no God. There is no God. I'm embarrassed to report that I initially felt dizzy. I actually had the thought, well, how does the earth stay up in the sky? You mean we're just hurtling through space? That's so vulnerable. And then I thought, well, what's going to stop me from just rushing out and murdering people? And I had to walk myself through it. Like, why are we ethical? Well, we have to get along with each other in order for communities to exist. So I guess that's why I don't run out and just murder people. And then I felt like I'd cheated on God somehow. And I went in the house, and I prayed. And I asked God to please help me have faith. But already it felt slightly silly and vacant, and I felt like I was just talking to myself. And then, over the course of several weeks, God disappeared. And I wandered around in a daze, thinking, no one is minding the store. I had shared my mind with God my whole life, and now I realized my thoughts were completely my own. No one was monitoring them. No one was compassionately listening to them. One day I was sipping my coffee, walking along a busy shopping area near my house. And I was lost in thought, thinking, so I don't think anything happens to us after we die. Our brain just stops like every other organ. So people just die. And then I thought, wait a minute. So Hitler, Hitler just died? No one sat him down and said, you screwed up, buddy, and now you're going to spend an eternity in hell. Huh. So Hitler just died. And my brother Mike. He just died. I always had this idea that Mike's death, while premature, was his divine destiny somehow. And that his spirit didn't really die, but it lived on. Not just in the memory of those that knew him, but in this real, tangible sense. And I realized that I now thought he died. He really died, and he was gone forever And then I realized I had to go back and basically kill off everyone I ever knew who died who I didn't think really died. And then I thought, oh, so I'm going to die. Then I started thinking about all the happenstances, all the random little moves which resulted in me being alive, me, in particular, at this moment. Not just of my parents meeting, but even of the billions of sperm against the hundreds of possible eggs. I thought about this randomness multiplying. My parents, their parents, and all the ways it could have gone one way, but it went the way it went. Richard Dawkins wrote, "Certainly those unborn ghosts include poets greater than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. But in the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I in our ordinariness that are here." An excerpt from "Letting Go of God," Julia Sweeney's new one-woman show. She's planning on a movie and a book. For news of all that, go to her website, juliasweeney.com. Our program is produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Laura Bellows. 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 program by Torey Malatia, who keeps telling me to give up on these big, conceptual shows about current events that I want to do. It's not working. Even your staff doesn't understand them. 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. I'm Ira Glass. There have been seven Peaches in the duo Peaches and Herb over the years. But it was Peaches number three-- her real name's Linda Greene-- in the biggest hit ever, singing the duet with Herb. (SINGING) I was a fool to ever leave your side. Me minus you is such a lonely ride. We live in a country where 3 million people have purchased copies of this song. And Peaches number three tells this story. She was on tour, and she visited this elementary school back in the day. And she has asked these little kids-- first, and second, and third graders-- what their favorite song was, and they all shouted, "Reunited." And what they said was, that song was played when my mommy and daddy got back together. And you know what that speaks to? There are not many songs for people who split up and get back together again. The reunited couple is a completely under-served market, right? There's "Love Is More Comfortable the Second Time Around," there's "Break Up to Make Up," and there's "Reunited." That's pretty much it. Oh, wait a second, here's the chorus. (SINGING) Reunited and it feels so good. Reunited 'cause we understood, there's one perfect fit-- Who is singing the songs for the reunited people? Who is writing their stories? Well, today on our radio show, we tried to redress this grievous, grievous oversight and tell three stories of reunions-- in each case, very unlikely reunions that were gotten to through very unusual means. Act One is a man reunited with a woman. Act Two is a man reunited with an animal. Act Three, a man reunited with a nation. Sarah Vowell tells that last story. And let's just get right to it, huh? From the day my parents met to the day they were married, it took three weeks, which wasn't so out of the ordinary in Iran in 1973. Back then, people didn't get to date. It just wasn't done. They had to leave it to their families to choose a spouse for them. They got married and hoped for the best. Now that I know how my parent's marriage began and ended, I can hear hints of how the next 30 years would go for them in the different ways they described their feelings at the very beginning. This is my mom, Mina. I thought, he asked me, and he's serious. And I thought I'd fall in love with him. And I thought, well, I have to get married, and he was right there. [LAUGHS] So, wait. He was right there? Or you thought you-- or you were in love with him? He was right there. And I liked him a lot. And I thought then, I thought I liked him a lot. I loved him. I loved him, I guess, then. Yeah. I think. [LAUGHS] I was only 19, for god's sake. [LAUGHS] Were you in love with Mina? Yeah. How did you-- tell me how you felt. Well, love is love. I don't know how to explain about love. When you love somebody, so you want to do everything for her. This is my dad, Abbas. It was always less complicated for my dad. From the beginning, he loved my mom. And from the beginning, my mom didn't know what it meant to love him. My mom borrowed her wedding dress from a cousin. They were married in a large hall in downtown Tehran, with lots of food and dancing. It was all new and fun for my mom, until that night. There was this business of proving my mother's virginity, which meant my grandmother, my dad's mom, sat outside their room and waited for a piece of white cloth that would prove my mom was pure. My grandmother carried it downstairs and displayed it for my dad's entire family, who were there waiting. For my mom, a 19-year-old girl who had never held hands with a boy before, this was traumatic, and she didn't want to talk about it on tape. This was the beginning of her marriage and her sex life. My mom has a saying. I've heard it over and over growing up. An Iranian marriage is like going to the grocery store and buying a watermelon. You don't know what you've got, until it's too late. By the time my mom realized she wasn't happy with her watermelon, my parents were already parents. The main issue was my father's temper. He could erupt at any time. My mother tiptoed around it. She started to shut down. She expected my dad to throw a fit about everything. She has lots of stories, like the time she went to get her driver's license. In Tehran at that time, everybody failed the driver's test. So to practice, people took it several times. One day, my dad decided my mom should get some practice, so he drove her to Tehran's DMV and sent her inside, expecting to wait 10 minutes. But miraculously, she passed and then was shuffled into another line to take the driving test, which she also passed. In the end, what should have been a 10-minute failure ended up taking two hours. Finally, my mom emerged ecstatic with her brand new license. So I just walked out and I showed him my-- you know? I passed, I passed! And he started to yell at me. I told you 10 minutes! Why are you so late? You're so stupid! I had a meeting. I thought, so if you had all those things, why did you want me to go and take the test? And then after that, it's like, I always remember he would calm down, and then he would just forget that it ever happened. Yeah, he just-- nothing happened. Every time that I wanted to bring it up and to tell him, you know, you embarrassed me and you embarrassed yourself. Did you realize there was 10 people were looking at you? Your kids were looking at you? He said, you're making too big of a deal. Nothing happened. Everybody gets angry. It was kind of like living with an alcoholic. This is my sister, Nilofar. Because you never knew. Like, one second we'd go out for a picnic, and it'd be sunny, and everything would be great. And literally, the camera wouldn't work. And he'd freak out, and the rest of the day would be shot to hell. When people asked me about my parents, I'd say, my mom doesn't love my dad, my dad loves my mom, and they're not very happy. And the only one who probably didn't see it that way was my dad. Nobody ever complained to him about his temper. And even now, he has a hard time remembering the moments that upset the rest of us. I thought it's OK. Yeah, I thought if asking somebody your life is OK, your marriage is OK, yeah, I said, it was OK. Because as a-- I don't know. Maybe as a Iranian man, I didn't see anything wrong. My dad wasn't just being clueless. By Iranian standards, there was nothing wrong with this marriage. Most of my mother's friends put up with a lot worse. And my mom was the first one to say that if they'd stayed in Iran, in an entire society that thought about marriage the way her Iranian friends did, my mother wouldn't have hit a breaking point. It happened when she was 40 years old. And because of complications from a medical procedure long ago in Iran, she'd had to get an emergency hysterectomy. My sex desire just gone down to the drain. And I talked to him. I said just, I really can compromise with you. You're a healthy guy. You have highly sex drive. And I'll work with it, but you need to work with me, too. "Work with me" meant she'd still have sex with him, but a lot less than he wanted. He said, no. And he said, you know what? I'm still young, and this is my desire. If you wanted me not to get angry, be happy, you know, be good husband, take it or leave it. And that night, I thought, OK, I'm all yours, [LAUGHS] until my kids get out of the house. Then, I did my plan. When they had this conversation, I was in eighth grade. And we'd been in the US for almost nine years. I never knew this was a turning point, but my mother tells me it was the moment she started plotting her divorce. This was a huge step for her. My family has lived in Tehran since the 1880s, and in that time, no one, not one couple, has divorced. In 125 years, everyone on both sides of my parents' families has stayed married. And that's not because there were so many happy marriages. My mom plotted the divorce for six years. She waited until I left home and went to college, before she told my dad she wanted out. He was shocked. He'd had no idea this was coming. And then, as if they wanted to make things as uncomfortable as possible, they continued to live together for six more months. My mom had no other place to go. She filed the official divorce papers without telling my father while they were living in the same house. It was a pretty grim time. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. And from a very small period of time, I start to drinking. And I thought, OK, this is not good. And then, I went to see the doctor, and he put myself in medication, like a Prozac or something. And that one helped me a little bit. But still, I was very, very-- I thought this, my life is done. I was constantly worried about my father. I had no idea how he'd manage living by himself. I was still in college working as a secretary when I got a phone call one day. It was my dad sobbing. I had seen him cry once before when his father died. And that time, he cried quietly. And I could tell he didn't want me to be any part of it. On the phone that day at work, I had no idea what to do. I was in a crowded office, trying to sound like I was having a casual conversation. People kept walking by, and I was trying to make my voice sound calm. Other calls kept coming in, but I couldn't put my dad on hold when he kept repeating, I can't do this, over and over again. I felt the same way talking to him-- I can't do this. But for the first time in my life, I started spending time with him anyway, because I was scared for him. He'd come and visit me at school. I always made sure it was for breakfast. I remember thinking that nobody gets too hysterical over breakfast. Do you remember talking to me about Mina and the stuff during that time? Yeah, for the first year, I remember I talked to you about Mina. And then after one year, I tried to not talk about anything at all, because I beg her, I ask her, OK, back together. But when she said, no, I said, OK, this is never happen. It's going to be never happen. Why should I bother her? And somehow, I want to, a little bit, forget about Mina. While I was worried about my dad, I was excited for my mother. For 27 years, she thought my dad was the one thing holding her back. And my sister and I thought what she thought. We had this glorious, liberated woman vision for her. I pictured her coming home, relaxing with a glass of wine. I pictured her dating, throwing her head back in laughter at sophisticated jokes told by handsome men her age. I thought she'd divorce and turn into a completely different person-- a much happier person. For a very short time, I was right. There was a lot of relief. Looked like somebody took a big, heavy weight off my shoulders. So I don't have to call person every two hours and tell him where am I. I don't have to cook all the time. I don't have to clean all the time. So it was me, and me, and me. So went to, you know, coffee shop, and sit there and read the newspaper. It was such a good feeling. I never had it, because I went from my parents' house to my husband's house. She read the newspaper at a coffee shop exactly three times. She never dated-- not once. And things started getting harder. My mom called me all the time in tears. She'd talk about how much she hated my dad. And she'd tell me how lonely she was. She had all of this energy, and nobody to direct it to now that my dad was gone. My mom had always seemed so independent, but that was when she was surrounded by people who depended on her. I was so isolated. My family weren't around. My kids were so busy. And my friends were very kind, very nice, but after in two years divorce, I never, ever had experienced that they invited me with the bunch of friends. They invited me like I'm a drug dealer, and nobody have to see me. And they feed me one night, and kick me out of the door. Meanwhile, my dad was reluctantly turning into an American bachelor. He joined a gym. He had no food in his refrigerator. He was always at work at his dry cleaning business. And if he did have any free time, he spent it reading that most American of genres. Actually, I read a lot of book about relationship between man and woman. And one is give me good information-- Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. I want to give myself more knowledge, what I did wrong. If I want to go to have a relationship with other lady, I don't have to do something like that. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus changed my father's life. It's hard to imagine my dad sitting in his little apartment struggling with chapter titles like, "Women are Like Waves," and "Healing the Resentment Flu," but I can see why this book helped him. There's a thing in the beginning about how many marriages this book has saved and how everyone at any age is capable of change. And that's exactly what my dad needed-- someone to give him a chance. The book offered simple advice like, as a man learns to listen and interpret a woman's feelings, communication becomes easier. If he becomes very frustrated while listening, he should not try to continue. Instead, the respectful thing to say is, I really want to hear what you are saying, but right now, it is very difficult for me to listen. In this passage, the word "listen" appears eight times. For my dad, who'd never been exposed to the idea that wives needed to be listened to, this was revolutionary. You know, I thought I'm right, that because I'm right, now everybody is not-- Yeah, because of that. And some chapter of this book is give me, so OK, no, you wasn't right. You have to relax and then listen. My dad started dating. But the book didn't teach him not to talk about his ex-wife on his dates, so nothing was working out. But he was determined not to be alone. So he had relatives in Iran introduce him to a woman, and he got engaged. By this time, about 2 and 1/2 years after their divorce, I was more concerned about my mother than my father. It was my father who, of the two of them, was seeming more liberated. My mother just seemed stuck. Every time I went to her house, there were three maps of San Jose covering her kitchen table. She'd get home from work and just sit and stare at them, tracing out new and better routes she could take to her office. All of her willpower had been used up just getting herself free. I remember being so disappointed in my mom. She'd come this far, and then sort of just stopped. There was nothing left in her to find someone new. In one point, I was in an airplane one day, and I saw a couple of old couples. And I thought, oh, my god, I wish I was them. I wish I had my, like, 30-years husband beside me. And I was sitting behind them, and she started to explain to the guy that this is her friends, and this is that, and this is-- I thought oh, they're dating. They're not husband and wife. I thought, I don't want to-- in age 50, I don't want to explain to somebody my every single detail of my life. I want somebody to know me. And yes, he gets angry. Yes, he's short-tempered. Yes, he's that, but I got old with him. Not long after that came the day my mom did the second most surprising thing she would ever do in her life. It was two days after her 49th birthday. She called my sister to get together and celebrate, but my sister was busy. She said, no, we celebrated your birthday year-- I mean, a week after we were going somewhere. And why don't you get a boyfriend? Nah, dah, dah, dah, dah. [LAUGHS] She said, if you're lonely, you have to get a boyfriend, and your problem is going to be solved. You know, we have a life. And that day I thought, this is not working. I need to fix this. This is not working. I have to leave these kids alone. I have to get somewhere that I don't need her that much. I thought, let me try that old man again. [LAUGHS] One day, I remember Sunday afternoon, telephone is ringing. And I pick up the phone. After, I think, one year, it is Mina. I called him, and he got so surprised. He says, what's going on? Are you OK? I said, yeah, I'm OK. I was wondering, when is your wedding day? He said, well, two months from now. And you know, it's just I'm flying two weeks from now. I said, well, congratulations. I told you, I am going to get married with this lady. Even I told you everything. Do you want to come back? Still, I am coming. I want to come back to you. You know, I said, you're getting married, for god sake. He said, well, yeah, but actually, you are my wife. Suddenly, she started crying, very bad. I was worried about her. I was very, very upset again. I didn't know what should I do now. My dad was two weeks away from going to collect his new bride. He felt awful about standing her up, but he'd never stopped loving my mom, even though he'd spent the last two years trying to forget about her. And so he didn't really have a choice. My dad promised my mom that he'd changed, but she didn't want to move too fast. So my parents, for the first time in their lives ever, started dating-- well, sort of. On their first date, they didn't leave the house. He came to my house. And you know, we talked. And in fact, I cried all throughout. Why are you crying now? Do you know? Is it because-- have you not talked-- is it because you haven't talked about this for a while? Well, I think, when I look back, whole thing was a sad event. And you know, I just told him, you know, what have we done regarding that point? He said, well, I did tons of mistakes, but you were with me with all those mistakes. Because you should have, you know been firmer. You should have let me know that how much you hate me. You never told me that you hate me. You never told me that you were that much upset. You always said, yes, yes, yes, yes, and-- you know? And he listened. You know, I told him everything, and he never got upset, or never got offended, or never got red and blue, or-- you know? So I told him everything that I was upset about that I never had the guts to tell him. And he listened. And he said, you're absolutely right. I lost you. You were the most precious thing that I ever got. And so I want to fix that, if you let me. It was kind of relief, yeah. We had a lot of information. We have to release for 25 years' marriage what parts we did wrong and what part it was OK. After our conversation and after he went to leave, he hugged me, and he said, you know, just let's try one more time, and let's see how it's going to go. And he hugged me, and I thought, oh, my god, feels good. [LAUGHS] I thought I fall into a shoulder that I can rely. The second courtship took six months, instead of three weeks. They got married at City Hall. Everyone they knew was overjoyed, except for my sister and me. We boycotted the wedding. It seemed ridiculous to us. After three years of worrying about them and holding their hands, they were heading straight back into the misery they'd worked so hard to leave behind. But it turns out we were wrong. They traded their unhappy Iranian marriage for a happy American one. When you think about American relationships, you think about the divorces, the self-help books, the constant talking about feelings. And even though all of that seems undignified and laughable, it's all working for my parents. Now I can see my dad struggling to keep his temper in check. He thinks about hurting my mom now, about embarrassing her in a way he never did before. I see them laugh with each other and talk to each other. I used to be so nervous around them, because the atmosphere was so tense. Now, they actually seem to like each other. And for a long time, I attributed everything to my father's change. He learned to control his temper, and now they're happy. But that's not the way they see it. Divorce, I think, is changed Mina more than me also, a lot. Basically, I had a lot of problem in my life that he wasn't the cause of it. When two years I sat down, I always thought, he's not here. I still have those problems, you know? I don't socialize not because of-- it's not him, it's me. Living on her own allowed my mother to see my father the way he'd always seen her-- as a choice she wanted to make. And now she says she loves him for the first time in her life. Everybody agrees that if they'd stayed in Iran, none of this would have happened-- not the heartbreak, not the new-found compatibility. This is my sister, Nilofar. The West did break them up. And then, they had the freedom to get back together again, you know? I always felt like we had such a weirdly and kind of such an American experience, like, all of a sudden in the middle. And I don't know what even that means except that my parents got divorced, and then they talked about their feelings, and they both went to therapy. And my dad read Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. He did, among other things. And we talked to my dad about relationships. And he started dating. And I was just like-- it's like I feel like we had this family, like the crazy family on the block who doesn't put up Christmas lights, like the non-American, crazy family. With a bad lawn. With a bad lawn all of our lives. And then all of a sudden, my parents turned All-American and had this American experience. And now we're like this little happy family. And it kind of grosses me out too, because I'm like, this is not where we fit. You know? This is not our family. You know what I mean? I love it. I think it's great. I love it. It feels really normal and good now. I'm still struggling with normal and good. When you thought about your life as some slightly depressing, slightly boring novel lying on the bargain bookshelf, it's weird to have it end up on the bestseller rack in the self-help section. Nazanin Rafsanjani. In the years since we first broadcast that story, she was on the podcast Startup many times. And she now heads new show development for the podcast company Gimlet Media. Her parents are still together. Coming up, a reunion that attempts to defy the most powerful force on Earth. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, "Reunited (And it Feels So Good)," stories of unlikely reunions achieved through the most difficult paths possible. And we've arrived at Act Two of our program. He's just like a big bundle of just loving whatever. If you've ever had a favorite dog that you can think of as a child, or some other animal-- and he'd lick your face, you know? And yes, he was cuddly. "Cuddly" is not usually the word you used to describe a full-grown Brahman bull. They're white, regal, ancient-looking, with huge horns and a blackened hump the size of a bowling ball that rises between their shoulders. That muscle right there is the one that throws all the bull riders off. When they flex that muscle, the rope just pops right out of their hand, and they're long gone. Yes, you're a good boy. Yeah. Bulls usually don't even want you near them. Come on, buddy. Now, Ralph Fisher had been around bulls and steer all his life. He'd worked the rodeo as a young man. He'd trained animals as an adult. When he found Chance at an auction, he'd never seen a bull so tame. His kids would climb all over Chance. Chance would nuzzle up to Ralph's wife, Sandra, and lean his head. It really is like having a pet dog or a pet cat, except the size. But they seem so much less demonstrative, you know? Wrong-- [LAUGHS] Really? That's wrong. I don't know if Ralph and Sandra would agree with this, but I think everything that went bad, all the trouble that eventually unfolded, it all came because they were blinded by their feelings. With the world's largest Herd of saddle-broke tame Texas Longhorns and Brahmans, Ralph Fisher's photo animals are sure to be a crowd-pleaser at your corporate gathering, convention, sales meeting, or even at your own private party. Ralph and Sandra have a family business taking pictures of people standing next to or on top of animals at barbecues, parties, the occasional presidential inaugural ball. And Chance was the star. This is their promotional video. They did dozens of shots of people sitting on Chance, one after another. With $1 million liability insurance, beautiful tame animals, and state of the art photo equipment, we furnish your clients and guests with a lasting memory of your Texas event. Because of the business, Chance is possibly the most photographed bull who's ever lived. Chance met Ashley Judd and Roger Clements, Mother Theresa and Sonny Bono-- those were separate meetings-- Hitman Hearns, Sugar Ray Leonard, Dan Rather. Chance did the Letterman Show. You know, this animal, certain parts of this animal, it looks like he's shoplifting sporting goods. Chance was in a movie with Vince Vaughn. That sure is a handsome bull. Yes, sir. That's about the handsomest bull I've seen in all my days of cattle ranching. In the movie, Jeremy Davies plays a guy who doesn't talk to people, but does talk to Chance, which all builds to this climactic scene where, for reasons that are not exactly clear, Kate Capshaw castrates Chance in the middle of the night in a driving rainstorm, just to prove a point. Now, you watch this, because I'm only gonna show you once. (SUBJECT) Oh, no! So Sandra and Ralph had this really sweet situation. They got to work side-by-side with all these animals, which they loved. Chance was so tame that he was allowed out of the pasture and even had a favorite spot in the front yard, under the trees. Sandra would watch him from the kitchen window, which was a really nice feeling. You'd be doing the dishes, and you'd look out, and there's your tame pet bull, like Ferdinand, laying on the grass. Then, a rainy day in September, Chance didn't come in from the pasture to eat. Sandra went looking for him. And finally, Ralph headed out to the pasture and found him dead. He was 19, which was really old for a bull. It was a really a sad day. I took the camera out, and I was going to take some pictures. And then I said, well, you know, he deserves more than that. So I skinned him. I skinned his whole body. It took me all day. It was raining. So it was a really sad time. I'd skin a while, and cry a while. I was just like a baby, just crying like a baby out there with my knife, you know, skinning him. And I'm going, well, somebody has to do this. And I'd have to toughen up and regroup. And this lasted all day long. And I guess I was a complete wreck by the time it was all over with Ralph says he had no choice. He had to skin him in the first 24 hours, because he wanted to get him taxidermied, turn him into a full-sized Brahman statue, have been around forever. And people could still have their picture taken with him. Chance could stay in the family business. So I was so emotional-- everything was really emotional. And all the family had a good cry too-- all of my kids and the people who knew him so long. They all just hated that. OK, rewind. Three months before all that happened, Ralph heard about this way that he might be able to cheat death with Chance and keep him around. It was more than taxidermy, but it was a real long shot. Someone called me and said, we've read an article in the paper that A&M is going to clone an animal. What do you mean, "clone?" They said, you know, clone, make one from another one. I said, oh, no, it can't be. A&M is Texas A&M, a world-famous veterinary school and animal hospital. It just happens to be an hour and a half drive from Ralph's house. It was Chance's regular hospital. And so we called up and said, you know, you're going to clone an animal, right? They said, yes, we take tissue and we-- and we said, well, why don't you use Chance? And so other folks would call, then. Some friends would call and talk to him. And they finally just-- I think we bothered them so much, they gave up. They said, OK, well, we'll do it. In the end, the scientists decided to clone Chance for a simple reason-- he was old. There were some things they thought they might find out by cloning an older animal. And Chance was there anyway, getting a mole biopsied for disease. The scientists could use the DNA from the mole to do their cloning. In Texas tonight, a man, his wife, and their bull have been reunited. Yeah, I guess he's been reincarnated. 10 months and 18 days after Chance died, the long shot paid off. A clone was born-- the first cloned bull. It was huge news. And it was Ralph who figured out what to call Chance's clone. Second Chance. And he was just the prettiest little white Brahman calf you ever saw. And spindly. And barely able to stand. I thought it was the same animal. I would say, you know, we got him back. That's the first headline, I think, in the news clippings when they interviewed me-- we got him back. The vets at A&M would ask us, or kidded with us about whether the calf was going to recognize his own stall in the barn when we got him home. But we sort of blew that off. Well, the first day we brought him home, we turned him loose over here in the yard. And he went over and laid down in the same spot. This still kind of chokes me up. He laid down in the same spot that Chance laid in, you know? That's not reasonable. And it all was spooky. That was spooky. The other thing they noticed right away with Second Chances is that he has Chance's same mannerisms when he eats-- unusual mannerisms. Instead of putting his head into a feed bucket and holding it down there and chewing until there's no more food, both Chance and Second Chance raise their heads, close their eyes, and chew. I've never seen another animal do that. I've never seen another animal do that. And there's something else about Second Chance, something harder to quantify. I just feel like he always recognized Ralph Fisher. And Ralph would lay down on the ground, and Second Chance would lick him and lick his boots. And Second Chance would lope across the pasture and come to us. And we watched other people. Vets would crawl in there, and he wouldn't come across the pasture to them. He just always seemed to recognize Ralph. And what did you think? Did you think somehow his memory got transferred? Well, no. I still don't think that. I think that he just has the same instincts, the same-- that he's going to make the same choices. Why would the eating thing be the same? A clone is akin to a genetically identical twin. It's not the same animal. It's not Chance. Dr. Mark Westhusin is one of the scientists who runs the Reproductive Sciences Lab at Texas A&M, the lab that cloned Second Chance. And he says that because a clone is just a twin-- nothing more, nothing less-- it may not even look the same as the original. And just like twins, clones don't necessarily act like the originals either. But Dr. Westhusin understands how Ralph or Sandra may not see it that way. Well, people get attached to their animals, and they-- you know? And they want to, sometimes, see more than is there. And they do see more than is, maybe, really there. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, that's like-- That's love, right there. Yeah, that's love. That's not necessarily a bad thing. And it was interesting for me to listen to Ralph tell how he lies under the same tree, and he eats his food just the same as the old Chance did. And I'm like, that's really cool, Ralph, you know? But I just-- how's his blood glucose today? [LAUGHS] I'm interested in that, you know? Dr. Westhusin reminded me several times, this is not the same animal. Don't expect the same attitude from a pet. And I didn't believe him, because everything looked the same. Just when I see him, especially at a distance, he looks so much like Chance. And every day, as he gets older and older, so much. Every year on Second Chance's birthday, Ralph and Sandra would throw a party for him, fire up some barbecue-- which, if you think about it, would be so disturbing for the guest of honor, if only he knew. Anyway, on his fourth birthday, all the family, and friends, and neighbors came to the front yard, posed for pictures with Second Chance. We had his birthday cake, which is a big feed tub with candles on top. And we blew the candles out. And I said, it's about dark, so I think I'll lead him back to the barn. I put one finger in his nose ring, which is a common thing. It gives you close contact. And if they make any aggression, you can immediately feel it and respond, you know? Anyway, I was walking him. We just did a few steps out of the yard, and I had the lead rope in the other hand. We just took a few steps, and then, boom, caught me with his horn and slammed me down. And that's when he dislocated my shoulder. Hit me in the back, so I was immobile on that side. He picked me up and [MAKES WHOOSH NOISE] slammed me down, you see? And then he proceeded to get on top of me with mostly his head, his forehead, and his horns. We found three deep, deep holes, six or eight inches, in the yard that next day where he had missed me. And he was really trying-- he was really attacking. It was like, you know, on purpose. Oh, no. I said, oh no, this can't be. This can't be happening. Because we had had so much faith in him. And you know, oh, it just-- you know, I didn't-- at that time, all I was thinking about was, why are you doing this? Why? And I was just so disappointed the whole time. I remember, when I was kicking him in the face, I was just going, how could you be doing this to me? Quit it. I think my feelings-- he actually hurt my pride. Since the attack, Ralph acknowledges Second Chance is not the same animal as Chance. And he believes it. He definitely believes it. When you love, you see what you want to see. Everybody knows that. And part of him still holds out hope-- hope that even if Second Chance is not Chance right now, he'll turn into Chance, they'll still get their reunion. Well, the hope is involving his age, since I did not have chance until he was almost seven years old. Right. I don't really know how Second Chance is supposed to act. Oh, you don't know if Chance was just like this back in the day? Right. Right. So he might just have to go through a little stage and settle down. I know horses settle down. My Texas Longhorns settle down. Ralph, here's one of things that I've been really wondering about your situation. I wonder if having Second Chance around all the time is ever painful for you, because it reminds you that you don't have Chance? It's like, here, you have this ghost of your favorite animal walking the property, who isn't exactly Chance, and if it just kind of breaks your heart a little bit? No, sir, it's just the opposite. You're just exactly as wrong as you can be. So far, right now, I feel like we've gotten about 95% of him back-- I mean, the same qualities, the same fun. That satisfies me. That's better than zero. When he was laying out in that pasture out there dead, he was a zero. I mean, we would never have any enjoyment out of him any more. And there's a tremendous difference between 0 and 95%. People want to believe it is resurrection, sometimes. And it is, in fact, not resurrection. It's reproduction. This is bad news Dr. Westhusin has had to deliver to a lot of people over the years. It was his lab at Texas A&M that cloned the first house pet, that cloned a cat named CC. It was international news. And for a while, his lab got a lot of money from investors who wanted to start a business cloning people's pets-- which they've gotten away from now. But for a while, the scientists were deluged with calls from pet owners, people who wanted what Ralph and Sandra wanted-- they wanted their animals back. You know, some were like, I have hair in the jewelry box that I've kept for 10 years. And will that work? No. You know, I had several calls where the animals had already been buried, and they were so-- you know, I didn't think about this till after I buried him. Do you think there'd be any possibility we could go out in the yard and dig it up and get some tissues to clone this animal back? And I'm just like, well, no, I don't think so. It's going to be pretty ran and full of bacteria. And we probably will not be able to get the tissue. And they'd say, well, it's cold up here, you know? And it was frozen when we did it, so I'm sure the carcass is still frozen. And it hasn't deteriorated too much. What do you think? When I visited Ralph's ranch to interview him and Sandra, it had been about a year and a half since the birthday party where Second Chance attacked Ralph. There were a bunch of us on this trip, including a film crew. And one night while we were taping up by the house, we heard a scream. And one of the crew came running up from the barn where Ralph and Second Chance were. What? You guys? What? [INAUDIBLE], the bull attacked him. Who? Oh, my god. The bull attacked him. What's the address here? We threw Ralph into a car and rushed him into town to the nearest hospital. He was banged up pretty badly. Finally, Sandra came out from the emergency room to tell us that he'd be getting 80 stitches where Second Chance gored him. The doctor is examining him right now. Yeah. And he gored him, like, in his crotch? It's his left scrotum is ripped, and his testicle's hanging out. [SIGHS] Oh, god. One of the producers of This American Life, Jane Marie, was in the barn, and she saw the attack. She says Ralph was bringing Second Chance some feed, trying to back him into a pen, when Second Chances just tossed Ralph. I screamed. And I didn't want to look at it because I thought he was going to kill him, you know? And I didn't want-- And what did you see? I just saw him fly up in the air, and then the bull-- it was loud. It seemed really loud, because it was at the corner of the fence. So he threw up in the air, and he landed on the corner of the fences. And he's ramming him in the ground, into the fence. So the fences are all shaking, and the bull's making all the noises. And it seems like the bull's going to break through the fences after he's done killing him, you know what I mean? It was very, very loud, very, very fast. It's almost like Second Chance was trying to tell Ralph that he's not Chance, using the only language he has. And of course, he's not Chance. In movies and books, when somebody tries to bring back a loved one from the dead-- whether it's a pet, or if it's a person-- it never works out well. It's one of the all-time ranking bad ideas, right up there with deciding to give robots and computers human feelings, or going back in time to change just one little thing in the past. The next day, we were finally allowed to see Ralph in his hospital room. So Ralph, how are you feeling? Oh, I feel good. They had me up walking this morning, first thing. I've walked the block in the hospital about four times now, and the last two without any help. There was a scar on his nose. His lip and chin were busted. His spine, we found out later, had a hairline fracture. So you were saying when we talked before that you felt like, with Second Chance, what you've got is 95% of what Chance was. And I wonder if, after this incident, you might downgrade him to just, like, 80%, or 70%? [LAUGHING] No, because this is exactly the same type incident as when he butted me 18 months ago, a year and a half ago, when he-- Come on, you think, really, 95% after that? I'm just thinking that, you know, we just have to have a lot of faith in things to work out. So I forgive him, you know? I just shouldn't have been that close. Yeah. What would Second Chance have to do to convince you he's never going to be like Chance? Like, how many times would he have to attack you? After he's seven, then he has to attack me. Then the lines will be drawn in the sand, like we were discussing. Yeah. You still have hope. Oh, yeah. Surely, yeah. I've been having fun here, and-- Sandra, hand me that horse, would you? Sandra hands him this little toy horse that one of their friends brought Ralph. How does it work? That's how I feel right now, you know? He-he-he-he-he-he-he. I'm going to walk out of here tomorrow or the next day, and I'll go right back out there and give him another bucket of feed. I mean, that's what you have to do. Yeah. If it was easy, there'd be a bunch of kids out there taking care of Brahman bulls. Well, that happened back in 2005, which was when this episode was first broadcast. Ralph turned out to be right. As Second Chance got older, he did become tamer and more trustworthy, but never as docile as Chance was. Sandra and Ralph always had to be careful with him. And in March of 2008, eight years old, Second Chance died. In an email to friends, Sandra wrote, "To think that this huge animal who's put Ralph in the hospital twice will be so missed-- it never occurred to us that by having a clone we would lose him twice." Sandra said that before his death, Texas A&M collected some tissue, which opened the door for a possibility of a Third Chance. This story, by the way, is one that we did for our TV show back when we had a series on Showtime. If you're curious to see Chance, and Second Chance, and Ralph, and Sandra, you can find the series at Showtime, or Amazon Prime, or iTunes. On August 16, 1824, an elderly French gentleman sailed into New York Harbor, and giddy Americans were there to welcome him-- or rather, to welcome him back. It had been 30 years since the Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette, had last set foot in the United States. And he was so beloved, so universally revered, that the frenzy, the ardor of his reception has yet to be matched. 80,000 people showed up to cheer for Lafayette-- 80,000. The entire population of New York at the time was 120,000. When Lafayette first got here in 1777, he was only 19 years old. A wealthy, orphaned aristocrat, he charmed his way into a commission in George Washington's Continental Army as an unpaid volunteer. He was a relentless soldier, almost freakishly brave, disciplined and oozing panache all at once. He rode a white horse, was wounded in the Battle of Brandywine, led the liberation of Virginia, and suffered through a winter at Valley Forge, living among his fellow soldiers in a crummy hut, though he could have easily afforded to wait for spring in a mansion the size of Newark. His troops adored him. George Washington considered him his adopted son. Alexander Hamilton wrote him letters that read like mash notes. Invited by his old friend, President Monroe, to be the nation's guest on the eve of the 50th anniversary of American independence, Lafayette's trip here amounted to a euphoric 13-month victory lap around the country in which he visited all of the then-24 states. Everywhere Lafayette went, he was serenaded by music composed in his honor-- "Hail Lafayette," "Lafayette's March," "The Lafayette Waltz," "The Lafayette Rondo," and in decreasing geographical order, the songs, "Lafayette's Welcome to North America," "Lafayette's Welcome to the United States," "Lafayette's Welcome to New York," and "Lafayette's Welcome to Philadelphia." Meanwhile, the souvenir trade cranked out an unprecedented pile of Lafayette-themed knickknacks from ladies' gloves to dishes. How many times must he have reached for a cookie and seen his own eyes staring back at him from a commemorative plate? In Brooklyn, Lafayette was invited to lay the cornerstone of a new Children's Library. At the ceremony, he picked up and kissed a neighborhood kid, the five-year-old Walt Whitman. In Philadelphia, the French chef in charge of preparing the-- count 'em-- 60 courses for Lafayette's banquet dropped dead in his kitchen that very morning, felled by overwork and the steam heat of simmering sauces. And speaking of Philadelphia, if you have visited what came to be called Independence Hall, you have Lafayette to thank. The building where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed was decrepit and abandoned. It was only when Philadelphians needed a symbolically appropriate place for Lafayette's reception did they remember the old hall and sweep up. When Lafayette waded through the crowd of 20,000 locals there to greet him and crossed the-- to him-- hallowed threshold, he preached, "Within these sacred walls, by a council of wise and devoted patriots, was boldly declared the independence of these vast United States, which has begun for the civilized world the era of a new and of the only true social order founded on the inalienable rights of man." Notice the melancholy in that word, "only", when he hails American government as the "only" true social order founded on the inalienable rights of man. After the French Revolution of 1789, Lafayette not only watched his hopes for American-style civil liberties in his homeland get chopped into thousands of guillotined pieces during the Reign of Terror, he subsequently spent five years in a royal Austrian prison and lived through the restoration of the French king, the dictatorship of Napoleon, and the restoration of yet another French king. So Lafayette, more than anyone, was aware of the uniqueness and the importance of the American republic. At that point, American democracy had descended from its early idealism into the kind of messy partisan backbiting we're familiar with today. Lafayette's arrival in 1824 coincides with one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history, with no clear electoral college winner between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, with Adams assuming the presidency under suspicions some labeled "the corrupt bargain." Meanwhile, Congress had just fought its first epic battle over slavery, the fight that led to the Missouri Compromise, the fight that would soon enough lead to the Civil War. But Lafayette, belonging to neither North nor South, to no political party or faction, was a walking, talking reminder of the sacrifices and bravery of the revolutionary generation and what they wanted this country to be. His return was not just a reunion with his beloved Americans, it was a reunion for Americans with their own astonishing, singular past. On New Year's Day, 1825, Congress threw him yet another of his nightly banquets. And Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, toasted Lafayette as a great apostle of Liberty. In reply, Lafayette toasted back with a prophecy-- "To the perpetual union of the United States. It has always served us in times of storm. One day, it will save the world." And he was right. Every so often, America has saved the world. Of course, we muck it up every now and then, as well. But in 1917, after American Expeditionary Forces crossed the Atlantic to aid France in World War I, General Pershing marched his troops to Lafayette's Paris grave where the old soldier had been buried under dirt from Bunker Hill. They placed an American flag into that American dirt. Lafayette, one of them said, we are here. Sarah Vowell. Her book about Lafayette's experiences in America is called, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States. (SINGING) Welcome back. Oh, hey, man, how you doin'? You good? I know you like that. (SINGING) Welcome back. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Diane Cook, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollock Our senior producer for today's show was Julie Snyder. Additional production on today's rerun from Jessica Lussenhop, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Special thanks today to Chandra Conway for bringing us this story of Second Chance, also to Chris Wilcha and Jenny Golden. 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, who waved around a big knife and told me my very first day on the job-- And you watch this, because I'm only gonna show you once. Oh, no! I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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In a sense, the job our government got after 9/11 was nearly impossible. They wanted to stop terrorists before they attacked. But how can you find somebody and stop them and lock them up for something before they actually do it, before they blow up a subway car or take down a building or commit a crime? There's a dilemma, then, for the government, particularly if you've got a group of individuals who you've been surveilling for some time who look like the they fit some profile of would-be terrorists, but they're in the country lawfully and they've committed no crime. On what basis do you take them off the street? This is William Banks, the head of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University, which did a study looking at the terrorism cases that the Justice Department has prosecuted since 9/11. And he says that what the government decided to do about this dilemma was simply prosecute people that it found suspicious with any charges that it can make stick. At least it would get them off the street. And that meant arresting, detaining, for a variety of different reasons-- what you might call the kitchen-sink approach, throw it all and see what sticks. And that's not very pretty and it's not very efficient. Take one of the best known cases, one that you may have heard of, the Lackawanna Six. These are six young American men, Muslims, who lived outside Buffalo in the town of Lackawanna Back before September 11, they went to Pakistan and Afghanistan for religious instruction. In Afghanistan, they were taken to an Al-Qaeda training camp. Osama bin Laden was there, they met him. After 10 days, one of the guys didn't like what he was seeing and hearing and he left early. Three other guys also left early. They came back to the United States. When they returned, there was an anonymous tip given to the FBI, and FBI began serious surveillance of them. And they were in that classic dilemma that I just described: were they a sleeper cell waiting for instructions from somewhere else to carry out a terrorist attack in the United States, or are they just curious young men who happened to travel and simply made a mistake and come back to resume their lives in Buffalo? Dozens of FBI agents had them on 24-hour surveillance and they did nothing illegal. So eventually the authorities just couldn't wait any longer and hauled them in. Attending the terrorist camp was material support of terrorism and thus illegal by itself. The men plead guilty, got 8-10 years each. And we still don't know if they were, in fact, a sleeper cell. We don't know if they were terrorists. And this is difficult. Because these cases are all about getting people before they do anything bad, in most of these cases we never find out if the people were really connected to terrorism. Today on our radio program, we have the story of another one of the biggest cases that the Justice Department's had on the War on Terror, one of the few that's actually gone to trial. Again, they went after a guy who had not done anything wrong, and they convicted him. On WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. This story takes place in the world of international illegal arms sales and the world of wiretaps and informants and prosecutors. You'll be hearing FBI surveillance tape, you'll hear from the man who got put away, and you'll hear from the U.S. attorney who led the team that put him away. Petra Bartosiewicz has the story, which we're devoting our whole show to today. What you're about to hear is a victory speech almost four years in the making. It's April 23 of this year and the US Attorney is giving a press conference on the steps of the federal courthouse in Newark announcing the conviction of Hemant Lakhani. Good morning. My name is Christopher Christie, I'm the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey. The jury has spoken, and Hemant Lakhani is not a women's clothing salesman. He's been found guilty on all counts for attempting to lend material support to terrorists, money laundering, smuggling, illegal brokering of weapons. Today is a triumph for the Justice Department and the war against terror. I don't know that anyone can say that the state of New Jersey and this country is not a safer place without Hemant Lakhani trotting around the globe attempting to broker arms deals. Later, the very same day, in the Passaic County lockup sits the convicted terrorist sympathizer Hemant Lakhani. Oh, I'm sorry. Hemant Lakhani is a liar, a shameless braggart, a snob. He's amoral, selfish, and he's greedy. But the thing is, if you hear his story, it's hard to believe that on his own he would have ever succeeded in buying or delivering a missile to a terrorist group. In fact, he's an amazingly incompetent illegal arms trader. And it's not at all clear that the world or New Jersey are any safer with him off the streets. How is Mrs. Lakhani? She's OK, I'm going to talk to her later. That's me comforting him, telling him I'm sorry, that his wife is going to be OK. The truth is, I'm not sure I'm exactly sorry, and I don't really know if his wife is going to be OK. But when an old man is sitting next to you crying like that reminiscing about their life together, what else are you going to say? By putting me away for 100 years or 5 years or 50 years, what do you think they're doing? Do you think that terrorism is going to stop? I have nothing to do with terrorism. I'm not Muslim, I'm not a part of Al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hamas anything. And what am I going to get from America? What have I got against America? Why? Hemant Lakhani is 70-years-old. He is Indian, but he's a British citizen who lived in London for decades. And all his life, he's made his living by being a salesman of one sort or another. Clothing, rice, oil, armored personnel carriers-- more on that later-- and lately, it seems, an illegal shoulder-fired missile. So how did a salesman, a guy with no criminal history whatsoever, become a target in the War on Terror? Bad timing has a lot to do with it. As it happened, the US Attorney who sent him to prison, Christopher Christie, was nominated to his job by President Bush on September 10, 2001. His office has this huge conference room with giant windows facing lower Manhattan. We're sitting in my conference room doing this interview, you look out those windows, you have an unobstructed view of of Manhattan. And people sat in this conference room and watched both buildings collapse. And so the atmosphere when I came in a few months later after my confirmation was still one of real crisis and of real sadness, and it was enormously stressful. And I can tell you that in my first six months here, I was confronted on a weekly basis with a widow or a child who had lost their family. In my own parish at home we lost two people. In my children's school, there were three parents who were killed. And they look to you now-- you're the US Attorney-- and they look to you to say, are we safe? And so that was the atmosphere when you walked in, and that was the atmosphere under which Lakhani started. You have to place everything that happens in the early parts of Lakhani in that context, that we were intent, as prosecutors-- and I believe the agents felt this way, too-- of making sure it wasn't going to happen again. We clearly now had a brand new mandate from the President and the Attorney General. And the mandate was prevent a terrorist attack, not solve it after it happens, but prevent it. And I don't think people still understand what a sea change that was for federal law enforcement in this country. So it's understandable that Christie's interest was piqued when he heard a report from an informant about Hemant Lakhani his very first week on the job. It was in a normal weekly terrorism briefing on the fact that we had this informant who was telling us that there was someone who approached him regarding his willingness to broker missile sales. That informant is the next important piece of this story. To explain his part in it, we actually have to go back a couple decades to Lahore, Pakistan, to an American Drug Enforcement Administration agent named Charles Lee. Lee was a former seminarian who, sitting on the toilet one day at school, happened to pick up a Reader's Digest and opened it to a New York cop story called "Merchants of Heroin". He was so taken with the story that he quit the seminary the very next day and became a federal agent. He ended up stationed in Lahore. One day, a contact brought this guy to his office named Habib, who said he wanted to work for the US government on drug cases. He talked about some people that we were quite interested in. I asked him about a particular individual up in Northwest Frontier that we had had no success with. He was wanted in, I believe, at least two or three judicial districts. And he was already indicted, all we needed to do is get him out, but you couldn't even get the Army to go after these people up there. So Habib said that he could get this person out. I thought, well, nothing could be a better acid test than to try that with Habib to begin with, because if he could do that, he must be able to do just about anything. And here, Habib comes along and in no time flat, delivered this guy right out. Kaboom, we had him. And well, it made a believer out of all of us. This guy obviously could do it. So that started it. So everybody loved Habib then. Habib turned out to be a great informant. For about a year and a half, he and lee made case after case. Then one day, Habib's cover was suddenly blown. A drug dealer tried to kill him, and Lee swooped in to save him. Within 24 hours, Habib and his family were in the US. But now he had no job and no support. So after a while, he tracked down Lee who, by then, had returned to the US and asked him if he could do DEA cases in the States. Lee tried to discourage him, telling him he'd done enough. But Habib was persistent and they started working together again. But Lee says Habib wasn't on top of his game because he wasn't on his native turf, and because he was just plain burned out. And that came to light during one investigation where Habib tried to incriminate a guy who, in Lee's words, was not a doper, period. Lee couldn't figure out what Habib's motive was for setting the guy up. When that happens, it calls into question this guy's abilities and his veracity and, I mean, it calls everything into question. Asking him about it, he didn't have the answers. And when you don't have the answers in this game, it's good night. So rather than trying to second guess a bunch of that, you just close this guy out. That's the end of him. Unreliable. So Lee dropped Habib and fell out of touch with him, until one day he showed up at his house broke, and once again pleading for Lee's help. By this time, Lee had retired. Still, he felt guilty for abandoning Habib, who had risked his life for the government and who he considered a friend. So he went ahead and introduced him to the FBI. He figured Habib might be tapped out on drug cases, but maybe he could do some other kinds of informing, like in terrorism investigations. And at the same time, Lee started a rice importing business with him. He thought it would help get Habib on his feet permanently. But pretty soon, he found out Habib had ripped him off. He'd sold the same shipment twice, and Lee had to make good on $25,000 he'd stolen from a customer. And then he found out Habib had ripped other people off, too, had threatened people, said he could get people killed. Lee was floored. He cut off Habib completely. He also typed up a nine-page letter about what he learned and delivered it to Habib's FBI handler. I mean, if you find out about it, you better end your relationship with him. It's really, at that point, not even a judgment call. He never heard back from the FBI, but the FBI did, in fact, deactivate Habib sometime after Lee sent his letter. And then, after 9/11, Habib's experience and language skills suddenly made him a hot property, and different FBI Bureaus were fighting over him. He ended up in the Newark Bureau, which is also the jurisdiction of US Attorney Chris Christie. It's Habib who first spotted Hemant Lakhani and brought him to the attention of the FBI. When Lee heard about the case, he was stunned that the FBI was talking to Habib at all. I was surprised. I don't know. It went through my mind, I wonder how they could justify doing that? I wondered if it was a legit case. I'm sure these terrorism cases are exceedingly difficult to make, and exceedingly difficult to break into. And therein lies the temptation to reactivate a guy like Habib. Maybe they took him out and dusted him off and put him back to work. So here's how Habib ended up at the center of one of the biggest post-9/11 terrorism-related cases. Habib knew an Indian gangster named Abdul Kayum, who also knew Lakhani. Just to clear up a confusing thing about the tape you're about to hear, Habib's full name is Mohammed Habib Rehman, and the government refers to him as Rehman. But his nickname is Hajji, a term of respect for a Muslim who has made the Hajj, the pilgrim's trip to Mecca. So other people call him Hajji. Here's US Attorney Chris Christie. The ties that Lakhani was claiming to have to us to the terrorist whose last name was Kayum was one that was of particular interest to us. The fact that Kayum even knew who Lakhani was-- you know, I don't know what a women's clothing salesman is doing being associated well enough with someone like Kayum to wind up having Kayum be able to recommend him to someone like Rehman. A word here about Abdul Kayum. He's suspected of a series of bomb attacks in Bombay in 1993. Kayum's name is on terrorist watch lists around the world, and Lakhani's association with him is one of the most incriminating things about this case, and something Lakhani has never been able to explain away. What we do know is that in the fall of 2001, Kayum was sitting in Lakhani's hotel room in Dubai-- a hotel they both regularly stayed at, Lakhani says-- talking business. At the time, Lakhani's career was in something of a slump. He had been a successful clothing importer, but when that fell apart in the early 1980s, he went into other stuff. He bought a rice business, and later a small Indian airline. But those went under after a while too. He tried to recoup his losses by brokering various other deals. His latest one was an oil refinery deal. At the moment when he was sitting in the hotel room with Kayum, he was looking for oil investors. At some point, Kayum gets a call on his cell phone from Rehman, aka Hajji, who Kayum knows only as a rich businessman. So what happened is that Kayum said that Hajji is a very powerful man in America, he's worth, himself, a few hundred million dollars. And maybe he can help you, speak to him. So I said, oh hi, Mr. Hajji, hello. And then he tells me that I believe that you're looking for a financier for a refinery project. So I thought he must be a powerful man. Of course, he was nothing of the sort. At this point, Rehman was making his living as an FBI informant, and had actually racked up a string of unpaid debts. But Lakhani knew none of this. So Rehman starts to feel Lakhani out to see if he could be of interest to the FBI. He calls him over several months. Henry Klingeman, Lakhani's defense attorney, says at this point, the informant saw Lakhani as his meal ticket. A meal ticket, dupe, patsy. Rehman is everything Lakhani's not. He's smart, he's savvy. When Rehman reports back to the FBI, the information looks incredibly promising. He describes Lakhani as a major weapons trafficker to terrorist groups in at least five countries. Again, Henry Klingeman. I'm looking at a set of handwritten notes prepared by the FBI agent who handled the informant. The notes are dated December 19, 2001, and they include his summary of what the informant said to him about Lakhani, specifically that Lakhani was a main weapons trafficker tied to Pakistani, Indian criminals, Sri Lankan terrorists, Nepal and United Arab Emirates terrorists, that Lakhani is a broker of crude oil from Iraq-- and again, this was during the time of the embargo. Saddam Hussein was still in power and Iraqi oil was embargoed. That Lakhani was supplying weapons to the Mojahedin, the holy warriors in Kashmir, that he was best friends with the Ukrainian Prime Minister-- no name given-- and that he was worth $300 to $400 million, meaning Lakhani. Lakhani, who lives in a semi-detached London home in a London suburb. Two old cars in the garage. With respect to what weapons Lakhani claimed he could sell, the agent's notes indicate that the informant told the agents that Lakhani could sell large-scale weapons, including missiles, anti-aircraft guns, any type of weapons. On January 17, 2002, Lakhani and Rehman finally meet for the first time in Newark. Now the investigation kicks into gear. The government surveillance tapes are rolling. They show grainy black and white images of Lakhani sitting across a large table from Rehman. They're in a room at the Gateway Hilton overlooking Newark Airport, and clearly Rehman is now trying to initiate a deal with Lakhani. And just as clearly, Lakhani is eager to oblige. The two men speak in Urdu and Hindi, and the translation sounds sort of like English-language instructional videos. Rehman's translator is the first voice you'll hear. Actually, the main thing is-- You mean the guns for fighting? Yes, the guns, and the anti-aircraft guns. Yes, they're available. Do you have something latest, latest missiles, something sinister, just like Stinger with an effective range of at least 15,000 feet? Yes, available. Give me the details about that one. The main thing is the anti-aircraft gun. Yes, the anti-aircraft gun and anything else you think is important. Ammo? In ammo, I can give you whatever you want. Anything you ask for, every gun and everything, as much as you want. Do these people also have submarines? Yes, they're expert in this. Good. I mean, this is a guy who promised to sell submarines to the informant if the informant wanted them. That's the kind of thing that ought to make an FBI agent listening to the conversation just take his headphones off and shake his head. Why are we doing this? This guy is promising to sell submarines. It's preposterous. I mean, the one thing he didn't offer was an aircraft carrier or a space shuttle. But if he had asked them for one, I'm sure he could tell you that Lakhani could get you both. Lakhani supposedly told the informant that he-- meaning Lakhani-- has people in the US government. And next to that, it says, obtains weapons, NVG-- which, as we've said, is night vision goggles-- so the obvious implication is that Lakhani has contacts within our own government from whom he obtains weapons, including night vision goggles. And also get me order for night vision goggles. What is that? That's something for seeing at night. Are they buying it? Yes, they need a lot of them. It is their demand. What, sunglasses? And it's just evident that he has no idea what this guy is talking about. And they had a similar conversation about plutonium. Supposedly, Lakhani bragged to the informant that he could get plutonium in 22-pound bottles. Now, how he came up with an increment, one can only imagine. But in any event, the informant mentions PLU 135, which is plutonium. And again, Lakhani betrays an absolute ignorance about what this guy is talking about. None of the claims that Rehman initially made about the Lakhani checked out, not one of them. Not the supposed arms deals or the nuclear material or the personal wealth. Though it's very possible that the source of this bad information was Lakhani himself. Klingeman describes his client as a name dropper who associated himself with real events and real people, but actually had nothing to do with them. To be sure, his bragging is boundless. Here's a small sample, taken, mind you, from just one conversation. The richest man in London as an Indian is concerned, I was the richest man. This was Lakhani in those days. And when I used to get done at the airport, there was a red carpet for Lakhani. Red carpet. Nothing, not blue or green, a red carpet was given to me. Why? Because I was the most important man. I became very friendly with the Royal Family, and it's a fact. And they used to love me. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] is the [UNINTELLIGIBLE], you know that. I know him very well, believe me. He claimed to have lunch with Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. Said he knew Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, the President of Congo. When I first visited him in prison, I asked him if he really knew all these people. He told me, you want to meet Tony Blair? Give me 48 hours and he'll be in your house. So it's quite possible that Lakhani lied to Rehman about who he was, or maybe Rehman exaggerated. Understandably, this isn't something the government wants to contemplate. Here's US Attorney Chris Christie. Did you ever feel at any point in the investigation that he oversold Lakhani even a little bit on some of those things that didn't seem to pan out, like his $300 to $400 million net worth, that he was a major arms trafficker in numerous countries? You know, listen. I'm not going to sit around and second guess it. What was done was done, and I think ultimately the jury decided that question. For Christie, it was enough that Lakhani knew Kayum, and that he had done at least one arms deal before he met the informant. That was enough experience in the arms trade to be suspicious. Like if you came to me today, Petra, and said to me, Chris, give me a brochure on the Stinger missile and see if you could fax it to me. Just because I'm doing this program, and if you could get it for me. I wouldn't know the first place to start. Where do I get a brochure on Stinger missile or on an Igla missile. I would have no idea where to start. I don't know if you'd have an idea of where to start. Lakhani knew. Actually, if you Google the word Stinger, missile, and brochure, you can find a Stinger sales brochure in a few seconds. And the one arms deal the government knew Lakhani was part of went like this. As an assistant to another broker, Lakhani had helped arrange the sale of some armored personnel carriers to Angola for use by the President of Angola. Proper paperwork was filed with various governments. Everything was above board. It was all perfectly legal. If you push Christie, he'll admit that at the end of the day, Lakhani wasn't exactly a criminal mastermind or even a very good salesman, but he was the suspect they had. They couldn't predict where the next attack on America might come from, so they'd investigate Lakhani as aggressively as possible to see where he might lead them and who he might lead them to. So they begin to ratchet up the case. The informant Rehman tells Lakhani he wants to order 200 missiles. But first, Lakhani has to prove he can deliver. He needs to get just one, a sample, and he needs to ship it to Newark. There's talk of hundreds of thousands in profits and a half million dollar bonus. Then Rehman tells Lakhani that he represents a Somali terrorist group called the Ogaden Liberation Front-- a real organization, by the way, but not a terrorist one. And at a certain point well into the deal, Rehman tells the group wants to start Jihad in America, and throws in a reference to Al-Qaeda for good measure. Lakhani, usually talkative on any subject, seems to have no reaction to this news. "Boss, you have no idea how much money there is in this business", Rehman says. If you ask Lekhani why he did it, he can't really explain. He says it wasn't ideological or political, and he claims he didn't need the money. The best answer he came up with when my producer, Sarah Koenig, and I interviewed him was, well, voodoo. And a lot of long distance phone calls. By the second meeting, you had already agreed to try to get this stuff for him. Why did you do that? Well, I told you it was a mistake. To say it's a mistake, it seems to be understating the activity. It's more than a mistake. It's a serious decision to enter into something that's potentially-- You're interrupting me. It's a legitimate question. There's a guy who you have some doubts about, he's asking you for things that you know are illegal, basically. You have other priorities with your oil deal, you're trying to get financing, why do you bother to go forward with this guy? Well, it happened. He induced me. You can call it inducing. He induced me, that's all I can tell you. I have no other reply. What does that mean, exactly, to you, though? How did he get to you? You are very worldy, you know many people, you've done these deals before, how is that he is able to convince you? He induced me, that's all I can tell you. He induced me. Nothing more. I was not greedy, I was not looking for extra money or big money or small money, because money isn't an object in my life. But he induced me. Somehow he made some kind of magic on me and I could say no. Whatever happened, I don't know. And he used to bother me like nobody's business. He would bother me 10 times a day. Sometimes-- I can show you the transcript-- call number one, call number two, call number three, call number four, call number five. 10:05, 5:11, 5:20. 300 telephone calls he has made. What about these, what about that? He just annoyed you into it? Not annoyed, but he would not leave me alone. Did you ever get suspicious that he was so persistent? Yes. Did you want him to like you? Well, I don't think anybody who dislikes me in my life. Nobody has disliked me. Klingeman, his attorney, says Lakhani didn't seem at all bothered by the phone calls and attention. In fact, he says, his reaction was just the opposite. Fundamentally, what drove him was a desire to be part of something. He had failed in business and, to a great extent, he had failed in life. He's an old man. And this was his chance to be part of something. He enjoyed the flattery and the attention of the informant and he enjoyed the phone calls, he enjoyed the globetrotting, and I think that more than anything else is what drove him. Here was someone coming to Mr. Lakhani, a sad sack, Willy Loman of a character and saying, you're a big boss, you're a big man, you have connections. Help me. And Mr. Lakhani has never heard this from anyone before. But was Lakhani just a sad sack? It's true, a lot of the business deals Lakhani bragged about seem like complete fabrications. But some of them were real. And his wife, Kusum, showed me photos proving that he moved in some pretty fancy circles. This is a photo of prince of Abu Dhabi who came to play polo with Prince Charles, and we visited the grounds. Prince Charles is shaking hands with my husband, and I am standing by on the side. But then again, there are so many odd moments in the FBI tapes, moments where Lakhani just seems out of his element. One minute he'd be talking about weapons systems, the next he'd be offering a diamond deal or scrap metal, anything. Here's an exchange where Lakhani is weirdly candid about what he thought his first meeting with Rehman was going to be about. Lakhani is speaking first here. When you first met me, did you have any idea that you will be doing this? How did this happen? Yes, I was looking for a serious person. After meeting with you, I felt that this could also be done. OK, to be honest, my idea was this: you told me there are so many Mexican people and they eat a lot of mangoes. Do you remember the mangoes from India? It was my idea to import mangoes from India. I'm telling the truth. Mangoes. And then, without missing a beat, Lakhani goes right back to discussing weapons. Then there's this exchange about Indian sweets. To me, he seems like an insecure man here, desperate to please. Again, Lakhani speaks first and he mentions Kusum, his wife. Eat the sweets I brought for you, they are very high class. Try this one. Wow. Is it your favorite one? Yes, I like it very much. Yes, it is balushahi. This is my favorite. Kusum told me you would like it. Yes, I like it most. Believe me, Kusum said you would like balushahi. Yes. She was saying this sweet is very good, even I did not know it. Really, it is very delicious. Kusum was saying so. I will call her right now and tell her that you like balushahi. Haha, that's what I told you. So she was right. Will you eat some? Yes, definitely. Kusum was saying you will like it. Is it true? Yes. Oh, this is very tasty. But ask US Attorney Chris Christie about it, and it turns out he reads the scene completely differently. I absolutely agree with your description of him in that way, but I take something completely different from it. I don't think that he's this inane guy, which is what I'm getting from you. This is an idiot sitting there talking about the sweets he got and why doesn't he get to the missile deal already? But the fact of the matter is Lakhani's trying to be a nice guy, a good guy. He's trying to get on this guy's good side no matter what he has to do to do it because he wants to make the deal. This is the conduct of a person who's a salesman. I don't care what you're selling, whether it's a used car, women's clothing, or a missile. The deal is to get a customer who's willing to buy, and who buys from you. And he thinks, this guy could go to somebody else if he gets frustrated with me so I'm going to try to keep him close. And that's the way I view that interaction. Coming up, in the words of the old saying, keep your friends close, keep your shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile closer. Our story about Hemant Lakhani continues in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. This is American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today, we're devoting our whole show to the story of the government prosecution of Hemant Lakhani on terrorism-related charges. For nearly two years, Lakhani spoke with government informant Mohammed Habib Rehman. Again, here's Petra Bartosiewicz. It did seem Lakhani would say anything to please Rehman. Whatever item Rehman requested, anti-aircraft weapons, landmines, radioactive suitcase bombs, his answer was always the same: it is available. Here's Lakhani in the second meeting promising to get Rehman Russian-made Igla missiles, the surface-to-air, shoulder-fired kind. How many do you want? About 200. It will be done. It will be arranged immediately. I will go there on Sunday. The delivery will be ready on Monday. He says this on April 25, 2002, that he'll deliver on Monday. But the truth is Lakhani can't deliver on Monday and he can't deliver for the next year. Lakhani's problem isn't just that he can't deliver the missile, it's that he can't actually acquire one. So even though he's promising Rehman the deal is nearly done, in fact there is no deal. Month after month after month, he puts Rehman off and Rehman, understandably, is getting impatient. Here's Lakhani's attorney, Henry Klingeman, again. In terms of the chronology, between January, 2002 and August of 2003, there's a pattern. And there's no point in going conversation by conversation because the conversations are all the same. The informant says, what's happening? Lakhani says the deal is done. The informant says, well, where's the missile? Lakhani says, it'll be here any day. And the missile never shows up and the informant calls back two days later and says, well, what's happening? Lakhani says, the deal is done. The informant says, well, where's the missile? Lakhani says, it will be here any day. And then it just goes on and on and on. Lakhani's one, and possibly only, weapons contact with the Ukrainian state-controlled arms manufacturer, a company called Uker Spitz Export. This was the company that Lakhani got the armored personnel carriers from in the Angola deal. He showed Rehman their weapons brochures, but to buy missiles from them, he'd need special government paperwork, which he didn't have. So he started asking around in some shadier corners of the former Soviet republics. Apparently, he wasn't so subtle about it because soon enough, the FSB, the Russian Security Service, caught wind of it and started tracking Lakhani. Here's Chris Christie. At some point, Russian law enforcement-- the FSB contacted the FBI to let them know that they knew Lakhani was contacting legitimate sources in the old Soviet Union in an attempt to buy these missiles. Well, I know at that point for me, the light bulb really went on and I said, this guy's for real. He knew the right people to call. Still, Lakhani couldn't seem to get one. Months passed. The US government had given Lakhani a buyer, but they were getting tired of waiting for him to drum up a seller. If only he'd find a missile, their case could be done. So they get him a missile. They cook up a plan with the Russians. FSB agents posing as arms dealers sell Lakhani a dummy missile, real in every respect except that it had no munitions. Even an expert would have been fooled. Lakhani falls for it. He even watches the missile being loaded onto a ship in Saint Petersburg that he thinks will carry it to the US. What he didn't know is that the American government had spirited the phony missile onto an airplane. They eventually delivered it to Rehman's hotel room in Newark, in full view of the hidden FBI camera. When Lakhani saw it there, he was shocked. Not that it had arrived in New Jersey, but that it was luxuriating in a suite at the Gateway Hilton. What were you expecting when you went to the hotel? I was expecting to discuss everything, that's all. I never thought that the missile would be sitting on the sofa. Yeah, that's it. I see the box lying exactly in the middle of the sofa, the big one. Not the two side ones, but the middle one. I said, he is a guest of you? And I'm surprised, I told him, how did it come? He said, Lakhani, I told you. In America you can smuggle anything. So I said, you are a very powerful man, Mr. Hajji. That's what I told him. And then he wanted to open it. I said, no, don't open it because I'm scared because I don't know how to even open. Which is right side or wrong side? I don't know nothing about it. Here's the video of that moment. Lakhani speaks first. That is so wonderful. Allah fulfilled your wish. The stuff arrived here. What a big thing. Please sit down. This box, how it arrive here? Yes, it is here. Boss, what did I tell you? I told you that you can smuggle anything into America. Didn't I tell you? Yes, the same box. That's right, the same box. Yes, I raise my hands. I can't believe what we have done. Realizing the deal is almost finished, Lakhani becomes so delighted, he leans over the box holding the missile, puts both his hands over his head, and shakes them around as if he's trying to amuse a newborn baby. A few things seem clear here. First of all, he doesn't know the first thing about how this missile works, not even which end is the shooting end. And it seems obvious he's never done anything like this before. He makes a few illegal weapons sale faux pas even your mother wouldn't make. Earlier the deal, he'd offered to pay for the missile with a personal check. Later, he hand-wrote an IOU for it to a Russian agent using his full name, Hemant Shantalil Lakhani. But here's my favorite. Rehman is first here. Boss, here is another thing. It has a serial number. What does it mean? This is the serial number, and we don't need it. Why not? Because. It can be caught. It can be tracked from the serial number. It is good that you've told me. Look here, I have removed it. So you don't need it? Right. What's also clear, though, is that Lakhani knows perfectly well what Rehman wants to do with the missile. They've pulled the curtain back from the hotel window and are holding up the missile as they survey the airplanes parked on the tarmac at Newark Airport. Boss, from here, if four, five, or six planes fall, what will happen? They will be badly shaken. What will happen to their economy? If it happens 10 or 15 places simultaneously at the same time-- You mean different airports at the same time? The same time is very important. They will think the war has started. So he's putting on my shoulder and he says, look, now from here you can see the airport and we can shoot. And he asks me, how many airports? I said, look, I only know JFK, that's all. I don't know, I've never dealt within America, so I can't tell you anything. He says, no no, 10 airport. And what is the best time? I said, the best time is the busiest time is either on Monday or Friday. That's all I told him. Which is the busiest time, not the best time. Busiest time. To do what? To shoot. Say, Sunday morning at 10 o'clock? Like Sunday morning. In the morning, around 10:00 or 10:15 or 10:20 when all are still sleeping or whatever. What is the busiest day for flights? Monday. Monday? Yes, Monday or Friday. You've got a missile on your shoulder-- or he does, I don't know. He does. He does, OK. And you're looking at airplanes and he's saying, when's the busiest time? And he's talking clearly about shooting down a commercial airplane. Who started this? September 17, he said that I'm buying this for the purpose of shooting civilian airlines. What did you think of this purpose? Did you think that was a good idea? Not at all. I thought he was joking. Sitting in jail, Lakhani went on to say that he thought the weapons were to be used in Africa in tribal skirmishes in Kenya or Nigeria or wherever, but even his own lawyer told us he didn't buy that one. The tape of this last meeting on August 12, 2003 just peters out. That's because at a certain point, Rehman leaves the room and six federal agents come in and arrest Lakhani. Once he understands the meetings are on tape, he pretty much confesses, saying something like, I'm sorry. You know everything. But even then, Lakhani still didn't quite comprehend what was happening. Kusum told me when she visited her husband in jail right after his arrest, he asked her where everyone else was, why Rehman wasn't sharing a cell with him. And that's when she told him. There is no one else. You're it. She said Lakhani was dumbfounded. He'd bought a fake missile from a fake arms dealer and delivered it to a fake terrorist. Every part of the crime had been supplied to him by the US government. That was almost two years ago. Lakhani's case went to trial in January this year. The only defense available to him was entrapment, that if the government hadn't set him up, he would have never supplied a missile to a terrorist group or anyone else. At trial, the state would have to prove that Lakhani was ready and willing to do the deal, or that he was able to actually get the missile. Lakhani's lawyer told jurors that although he may be loathsome and an idiot, of the requirements, was only willing. Not ready, and certainly not able. Here's Lakhani's lawyer, Henry Klingeman. The entrapment defense is designed for people who are morally guilty, to be legally not guilty. In terms of a legal defense, this was a great defense on September 10 when cooler heads might have prevailed, because he was clearly entrapped. Unfortunately for Lakhani, it was well past September 11, and what jurors saw was a man talking enthusiastically about shooting down airplanes. But the government's best weapon at the trial was the weapon itself. On the first day, FBI agents carried in a wooden box shaped like a coffin and set it down with a thud in front of the jury. Then the prosecutor opened the box and piece by piece it took out the missile, a long, green steel tube. Donna, a bank executive, was one of the jurors. She asked that we not use her last name. I am known as juror number six from the Lakhani trial that took place in Newark, New Jersey. I listened very intently to both sides of the argument and day number one, I hadn't passed judgment. I was just very focused on making sure I took as many notes and not to let my emotions sway. Because as soon as I started to hear the bad things being said about America and Americans-- and I'm very patriotic-- they upset me. When I saw the missile being brought into the courtroom, they took it out and they passed it by the jurors, I cringed. Every time I saw the box, I cringed. Donna soon found the evidence overwhelming. So did everybody else. Everybody except one person. My name is Gussie Burnett, I'm 65 years old, I work for Newark Public Schools and I'm a librarian. Burnett, juror number nine, was the lone holdout. As far as I'm concerned, it was entrapment if he didn't actually do anything. Some of the other jurors seem to think that Lakhani actually could have done this, that he could have gotten that missile if he tried long enough. Did he try for 22 months and then get one, after offering all these millions of dollars and he couldn't get a missile? No, he wasn't gonna never get no missile. And they knew he wasn't gonna get one either, that's why they bought it and set it right there in his lap. From day one, I just can't understand it. They came in and they sit down and they says, this man's guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. They didn't even think about it. Hey, wait a minute. Let's analyze these things, let's do them one by one. For a few hours, Burnett held her ground. It didn't go so well. So I say, he's guilty, someone says, he's not guilty. And I say, he's guilty because look at page 48. And then someone else would say, well look at page 52. So everyone trying to make themselves heard, voices started to rise so you could be heard over the crowd. The juror who felt that he was not guilty I think felt overwhelmed by probably a good six, seven, eight jurors talking loudly at the same time, that actually turned into screaming to be heard. It was probably very intimidating for her. Because it was all directed at her. Correct, because she was the only one that thought that he was not guilty. Pretty soon, Burnett changed her vote. This is how that happened. I just closed on a house in January, and everybody in the jury room knew it because the court was closed down on April 25, so I could go close on the house. So when we came back, I think we started deliberating on a Wednesday. And we got to one count, and I said to the man, not guilty and there ain't nobody gonna change my mind. And the jury foreman said if I didn't go along with them, I wouldn't see the inside of my house until December. So I saw, what the hell. He don't mean nothing to me. This man guilty. But I know it was wrong. It wasn't right for me to do the man like that. It wasn't right. But it's over now. Are you saying you regret your decision to find him guilty? Yeah. Yeah, I really do. Because as far as I'm concerned, the man was entrapped. I should have held out. So the only person who bought Lakhani's defense caved in the jury room. It took just over seven hours. The jury found him guilty. In the end, the government spent almost two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars trapping a man who didn't seem to have any connection to any real terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. Chris Christie says it's his main regret about the case, that Lakhani didn't lead them to any other suspects. We asked Christie if maybe the problem wasn't that Lakhani refused to talk but that he simply didn't know anything. I guess it's possible, Christie said. Even so, he's happy with the outcome because it proves that law enforcement is meeting its new mandate. What Lakhani is emblematic of in the war on terrorism is, in the biggest way, the new American approach to law enforcement in the area of terrorism. We're going to try to catch people before they act. But this very policy, as good as it sounds, is what worries people like Henry Klingeman. You could probably go to the Middle East and collar a random person on the street and ask them what they think of America and ask them what they would do if they were given the ability to send missiles to the United States, and you could probably find millions of people, sadly, who would say, I would do it in a heartbeat. You wouldn't even have to pay me and I would do it. Now, on the government's theory, we'd arrest all those people because they are willing to participate in this type of activity. And we'd say, well, we stopped them before they were able to actually do it. But those people may not be capable of getting involved in Jihad, whoever they are on the streets of Ramallah or the streets of Kabul or wherever. But Mr. Lakhani was not in that position and was not inclined to do this type of thing. He was all too willing to do it when asked, but he was never going to do it until he was asked. And no one was going to ask him, because no real terrorist would ever go to Mr. Lakhani and ask him for anything. So if the government is going to go out and apprehend people before they even think about this stuff, or maybe after they think about it before they ever do anything about it, then we might as well put barbed wire around the entire Middle East, because that's really the logical conclusion on that policy. Ask Christie about this and he says what might have been in Lakhani's case, whether he could have ever gotten the missile, isn't even relevant. You're saying that he's a person who facilitates terrorist activity. But actually, he's a person who potentially might have facilitated. I mean, the fact is there actually wasn't a terrorist group, there wasn't a missile, he didn't do this deal. So is the question-- I guess you see him as someone who really would have been approached by a terrorist. I'm not sure where the evidence is for that. How do you make that argument, really? It seems like it's all speculation to say, he might have turned into a bad guy. No, I disagree with you. He was a bad guy. Once you find someone who is that, basically, amoral, then whether or not he was actually able to do it, that debate-- which I have one opinion of and the defense has another opinion of and maybe you have a slightly different opinion-- who cares? I mean, at the end, who cares? I don't have a crystal ball and I don't know, if this had fallen apart, what Hemant Lakhani would have done next. So the question is, confronted with those realities as American law enforcement, what we do? Do we ignore it because we say, maybe he could, maybe he couldn't? Let's see, let's see if he does. I'm just not willing to take that chance, and I think most Americans would say the same thing. Hemant Lakhani was willing to sell missiles to a person he believed to be a terrorist, who expressly said he was going to use them to kill innocent people. And so there are good people and bad people. Bad people do bad things. Bad people have to be punished. These are simple truths. Bad people must be punished. And so, he's not just a guy with four beers in him at the corner bar who says, if I could get a missile and I'd sell it to whoever if I could make a buck, that's not who we're talking about here. So let's not minimize him either. He's not Osama bin Laden, but let's not make him Elmer Fudd either. All I know is that he's not the kind of guy I want coming through Newark Airport. He's not the kind of guy I want in this country. That's the kind of guy I want in federal prison, and so that's where he's going to go. And at the end, that's the success of the Lakhani case. In Washington, the Lakhani case is seen as one of the most successful prosecutions in the War on Terror. It was one of three cases the Justice Department cited in testimony before Congress when the Patriot Act came up for renewal as an example of proactive, preemptive prosecution, which is basically designed to catch terrorists and the people who give them money and help before they actually do anything. Here's then-US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, giving a talk at the American Enterprise Institute a week after Lakhani's arrest. The title of his speech was "Securing Our Liberty: How America is Winning the War on Terror". Hemant Lakhani is an alleged arms dealer in Great Britain who is charged with attempting to sell shoulder-fired missiles to terrorists for use against American targets. The Lakhani investigation would not have been possible had American, Russian, and other foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies not been able to coordinate and communicate the intelligence they had gained from various investigative tools. But what's so hard to figure out is whether the government's methods are actually working. President Bush said recently that 400 people have been charged with terrorism-related crimes since the September 11 attacks, and that in over half of those cases, the defendants were convicted or pled guilty. But a recent investigation by the Washington Post, which spent six months examining almost every case, found that in reality, only 39 people, not 200, had been convicted of terrorism or national security-related crimes. And only 14 were connected to Al-Qaeda. Lakhani was counted as one of those 14. Most of the cases involve people who maybe were suspects in terrorism investigations. But when the evidence didn't pan out, they were charged with some low-level offense, like overstaying a visa, and given a short prison sentence or just deported. In other words, the Patriot Act is good at generating a lot of cases like the Lakhani case, turning up suspicious people who may or may not have anything to do with terrorism. To be fair, these are the leads the government has, so these are the leads they pursue. And for now, most people seem to be fine with that because they're scared. Even Donna, the juror, who knew the Lakhani missile sale was all a fake set up by the government was still terrified by it. Let's put it this way. I'm starting to look at colleges with my daughter. She's a junior in high school. I tell her, wherever we look, we're driving. I won't fly. Because now I realize how easy it is to take down a commercial airliner. You hear about suicide bombers and people that just don't care. Hopefully, my mind will change later on, but that box being wheeled into the courtroom is still too fresh in my mind. And you sit there and you think about innocent passengers losing their life and I won't fly. So has the Lakhani case make you feel more secure or more afraid? In some respects, it makes me feel more afraid because now I'm really aware of people out there that try to do harm. I feel secure with the FBI looking out for us, but unfortunately they're not going to be able to stop every terrorist or every accomplice trying to help terrorism. That's the thing about the Lakhani case. Knowing its whole history makes you feel simultaneously comforted and afraid. Hemant Lakhani will be sentenced this summer. He's 70, there's a good chance he'll spend the rest of his life in prison. Petra Bartosiewicz is a reporter in New York City. Our program is produced by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder, Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Laura Bellows. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. 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 usually calls me by one of these names: Meal ticket, dupe, patsy. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK America, prepare to have your life change for the better. There is a situation that you find yourself in all the time. And it has been unclear what to say or do in that situation until now. We heard about it, and it was like Post-its. It was just all of the sudden something that you needed to use all the time. It just explained so much. That's Nancy Updike, one of the regular contributors to our radio show. And she tells the story this way. A couple years ago, friends of hers were traveling in Europe, and they are walking through these old buildings. And these people do not know anything special about architecture. But you know how it is when you're a tourist. They're walking through these buildings, and they're looking at the doorways and the tiles. And they decide that they think that this one building has a very Moorish influence. And they're pointing out details, and saying the Moors this, and the Moors that. And finally, one of them turns to the other and says, you know what? We sound like we're in a magazine, a magazine called Modern Jackass. Modern Jackass. Of course, there is no Modern Jackass. But ever since I heard that story, I found myself referring to Modern Jackass all the time. It's incredibly useful, and it could be useful to you, to back out of all kinds of awkward conversational situations. The thing about Modern Jackass is, it's usually not something about which you know nothing. It's something about which you know a little bit, enough to sort of get yourself into trouble. Like you read an article. Exactly, or something on the web. Just last weekend, I was out for breakfast with some friends. And we got into this conversation about these people who do caloric restriction. Have you heard about this? Apparently, there are these people who believe that if you eat a lot less, it can make you live longer. As so we're talking about this, and somebody's explaining the cells of your body go through all this wear and tear when you actually digest food. And before you know it, one of my friends-- somebody who knows nothing about biology, actually-- starts talking about mitochondria. Mitochondria. And maybe he had a little bit of knowledge about this. But it was totally Modern Jackass. Modern Jackass, the medical edition, which Nancy says that she finds herself in quite a bit. My mother sends me information about partially hydrogenated oils. And then when somebody says, wait, why is partially hydrogenated oil bad again? I say, well, it's an unstable compound, which it is. It's oil to which hydrogen has been added in order to make it solid at room temperature. That I know. That's a fact. And why would that be bad, Nancy? Well, that's where we get into Modern Jackass territory. It's unstable in your body. There's an extra hydrogen atom that can interact with things. Oxygen and form water. Exactly. Having no information, that's one thing. That's pure. The trouble is when you have a little bit of information about the problems with electronic voting machines, what it really means, the battle between carbs and protein. It's hard for some people not to take the tiny pigment contained in that tiny bit of information and paint a vast canvas of the entire world. It is exactly the problem that people encounter in every story in our program today. It's This American Life, from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. Today we bring you four stories of people taking a smidgen, a tiny smidgen of understanding, and stretching it far past the breaking point. Because as everybody knows, all over the world, a little bit of knowledge can be a very entertaining thing. We have Dan Savage matching wits with a six year old boy. Stay with us. Act One, When Small Thoughts Meet Big Brains. We have this story about people functioning with a tiny little bit of knowledge, long past the point that you think they would, from Alex Blumberg. I can reconstruct the events that led me to one of the most embarrassing conversations of my adult life. The chain starts back when I was 11 or 12, and I first heard the term Nielsen family. I was probably listening to some adults talk. And from their conversation I gathered that networks consulted Nielsen families to find out how popular a television show was. But that didn't make sense. Why would they only ask people named Nielsen which shows they liked. I started thinking. I knew that when they figured things like this out, they didn't ask everybody, they just asked a small percentage of people, and then extrapolated. I think I figured they had done some research and found that the name Nielsen-- because it was a common name maybe, and it seemed to cut across class and economic lines-- actually came pretty close to a representative sample. I knew this wasn't the way they measured public opinion now, but it seemed like the Nielsen surveys had been around for a while. And I figured they were just a holdover from a more primitive, less statistically rigorous time. After that, I really didn't think about it again. Or if I did, it was only with a mild curiosity. I wonder why TV still does it that way? Fast forward 20 years. I was talking with a friend of mine, who was telling me about her friend, who had been selected to be a Nielsen family. And I said to her, isn't that weird that they're all named Nielsen? My friend looked at me for what seemed like a long time. Somewhere during her very long pause-- because of the very long pause, in fact-- I realized, of course they're not all named Nielsen. That makes no sense at all. At the time of this conversation, I was 34 years old, and I couldn't believe I had gotten this far without ever stopping to think it through. It made me wonder what else I'd missed, and if this has ever happened to anyone besides me. When I was a kid, and I would see the school crossing signs, and there's the picture of the little kids walking, and it would say school x-ing And I thought that the x-ing was a word. And I pronounced it zing. Turns out, I'm not alone. I've been talking to people about this for weeks. And there are a lot of us out there-- like me and this woman, Jodie Mace-- carting around our childhood beliefs well into adulthood. Jodie thought there were lots of zings, deer zings, railroad zings. That makes sense. When I was in my 20s, and I was walking into work, and about 10 geese walked in front of me on the sidewalk. So I just turned to my coworker and casually said, it looks like they should have a zing sign there for the geese. There was a sort of long, awkward silence. And I thought that he was thinking, you know, that really is a good idea. But instead, he finally said, you know, zing isn't a word. In talking to people, I found out that a lot of these lingering misconceptions involve mispronunciation. And often, the mispronunciation survives into adulthood because the mistake just sounds better, or makes more sense. It should be a word, and it should be zing. You don't want a kid to walk slowly across the crossing. If he's smart, he's going to zing. Consider the word misled. I talked to three people, including my own father, who used to pronounce it mizeled. All three believed it was the past tense of a nonexistent verb, mizel, which means to deceive or to mislead. There's another guy I spoke to who thought, well into his early 20s, that the word quesadilla was Spanish for what's the deal? Most of the common childhood myths, like that babies come from storks, get corrected sooner or later. They're not obscure enough to sneak into adulthood unscrutinized. But occasionally, even a very popular childhood myth can make it through, like unicorns. In my head, a unicorn wasn't really any different than a zebra. This is Kristy Kruger. I mean, in terms of believability, I think the unicorn is really ahead of the dinosaur. What do you mean? Well, I mean, when you think about a dinosaur from a kid's perspective, a dinosaur is these really large, monstrous animals roaming the Earth. And then you have a unicorn, which is basically just a horse with a horn. As Kristy Kruger grew up, she says that if she ever thought about unicorns, they were on a grassy plane somewhere in Africa, drinking from a watering hole with the wildebeest and the impala. And then one night, she found herself in a conversation at a party. It was about a group of five to seven people, kind of standing around the keg, just talking. And somehow a discussion of endangered species came up, in which I posed the question, is the unicorn endangered or extinct? And basically, there was a big gap of silence. As you might be gathering, at some point in all these stories, you come to a big gap of silence. And then everybody laughed. And then that laughter was followed by more silence when they realized I wasn't laughing. And I was like, yeah, oh God, unicorns aren't real? Oh no. Sometimes a ridiculous belief will survive into adulthood, and it's our parents who are to blame. Robin didn't think there was anything strange about the way she was raised. She lived together with her sister and her parents in a nice house in the suburbs. She went to school like the other kids, watched TV and did her homework. And she ate the exact same thing for dinner every night of her life, baked chicken. It was like Monday, chicken. Tuesday, chicken. Wednesday, chicken. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, chicken, chicken chicken, chicken, chicken, every night of my life until I left for college. At the end of the first week of college-- when everyone's desperately trying to fit in, and it's important that you act cool and sophisticated and whatever-- everyone begins complaining about the food that we're being served. What was the hard stuff in the sloppy joe? What was that mystery meat? What animal did it come from? And I'm looking at these people like they are crazy. The variety we are getting here every night. Every night there's a different meal. One night it's mac and cheese. One night it's mystery meat. One night it's sloppy joe. I was like, how can you criticize? I mean, it's a testament to what great chefs they must be that they can make a different meal every single night of the week. And they just kind of stared. And they're like, what? And I'm like, what, what? What's running through my head is, wait a minute, these people are implying that they had variation in their meal plan for their entire life. It's mind-bending. I mean, I don't care what I learned throughout college. This is the revelation that has stuck with me. This is what I've learned. All of a sudden like, holy God. When Robin came home for Thanksgiving that year, and confronted her mother with the startling fact that everyone else ate things besides chicken growing up, her mother just shrugged her shoulders and said, you liked chicken. Robin had to concede the point. Even when they'd gone out to restaurants, Robin ordered chicken. They all had. Here's one more. When Harriet Lerner was a girl, her family was going through some lean years. There were two kids, the house needed repairs. There wasn't much money for holiday gifts. Harriet was seven and she wanted a bike. Her sister Susan was 12. She wanted a set of encyclopedias. But when they came downstairs on Christmas morning, there were only two small boxes waiting for them. What was inside them-- and we both had exactly the same gift-- were these real ugly, metal tissue holders painted black, with these corny red and yellow roses. They were painted with these cheesy looking red and yellow roses. And I looked at my tissue box, and I started to cry. And I looked at my big sister Susan, and I thought, of course she was going to cry too. And she looked like maybe she was going to cry. But then she sort of put on a big smile. And then she told me that the boxes were painted by trained monkeys. The box became Harriet's prized possession. She kept it on display in her room through elementary school, through high school. Her friends asked her about it, she'd say, oh yeah, it was painted by trained monkeys. Nobody ever challenged her on it, maybe because she believed it herself so completely. And then one day, she was home from college, back in the house where she grew up. And I'm going through some papers, or maybe I was snooping through Susan's papers, and I found a composition, and it had her name on it. And she had written it in high school. And it was called "The Tissue Box Story." So I sat down on the floor of Susan's bedroom to read this composition. And Susan told the story just as I told it, except that she wrote how she felt when she saw me crying. And how she then looked at my parents, and saw that my mother was about to cry too. And how she looked at the tissue boxes, and then she remembered that my father had a friend who made them. And she knew how much my parents hated taking charity. And suddenly, even though she was about to cry, she forced herself to smile. And she pretended those boxes were painted by trained monkeys. And of course, I didn't know any of this. But the funny thing she wrote in her composition is that she just rushed upstairs and started crying all over her pillow. And she wasn't really sad about the gift really, is what she said in the composition. She wasn't sure why she was crying, except that it was sort of like she had volunteered to be a grown up before she was even ready for it. Up until that moment, I had never thought to question my sister's story. I had never subjected it to the scrutiny of a grown up mind. I mean, I was 20. I don't know, I had this tissue box that was painted by trained monkeys. And then it wasn't painted by trained monkeys, really. Up until reading that story, Harriet thought that her sisters lies had been only to torment her, like the time Harriet swallowed an apple seed, and her big sister convinced her that she had an apple tree growing inside her. She had always been jealous of her sister, always wanted to be the big sister. But reading her sister's story that day made her realize how responsible her sister felt for her, and for their entire family, and how there were benefits to being the baby. It was good to learn all that. But the vision of the lie-- that we live in a world where monkeys can be trained to paint-- is hard to give up. And really, it's just that I can still picture this tissue box, and how much I loved it, this tissue box painted by trained monkeys. I know what she means. For me, there's something appealingly weird about a world where only people who happened to have been born with the name Nielsen get to decide what goes on television. And not long after the day that Jodie Mace's coworker set her straight about the word zing, she found herself on the opposite side of the exact same situation. She was having a conversation with another coworker, and he asked her if elves were real. Elves? Like that live in the forest, she asked, with the pointy toes? He nodded. She paused. And then she said, yeah, of course they are. Alex Blumberg is one of the producers of our show. Act Two, And Daddy Makes Three. Around the time in 2004 that gay couples were starting to marry in San Francisco, and gay marriage became a hot national issue in the presidential race, Dan Savage found that his own family became very interested in the subject, but in ways that seemed to defy every stereotype. Dan's mom-- a nice Catholic lady from Chicago's North Side-- wanted him to marry his longtime boyfriend, Terry. Dan's dad-- a Republican and former Chicago cop-- felt exactly the same way. And they felt this way for the most traditional reasons-- commitment, love. Meanwhile, Dan and Terry, the actual couple, the actual homosexuals in the story, they weren't even sure if they wanted to get married. And there was one person in the family who was adamantly opposed to gay marriage. Here's Dan. Even my mother has spoken to him, but he refuses to budge. Boys don't marry boys, he insists, and girls don't marry girls. He has also made it clear that if Terry and I ever married, he would refuse to attend the ceremony. Who is this stubborn relative? My father, the family's sole Republican? Terry's born again Christian brother? My sister's Texan boyfriend? No, try our six year old adopted son, DJ. One of his first pronouncements on the issue came when he was just four, when he announced from the back seat of the car that Terry and I didn't really love each other. Why not, we asked. Because you're not married, DJ explained calmly. People who don't love each other don't get married. And since you're not married and can't get married, that means you can't love each other, not really. We traced the circular logic back to its source, a five year old girl. When her parents divorced, they told their only daughter they couldn't stay married because they weren't in love anymore. These words bounced around the little rock tumbler that is her mind until an opportunity to wound another child presented itself to her. Her parents weren't in love anymore and couldn't stay married, she told DJ. And since his parents can't get married, we can't love each other. We have done our best to root this notion out, explaining to DJ that marriage is a promise two people make each other. And that while most men marry women, and most women marry men, men can marry men and women can marry women. We've made a point of showing him same sex wedding announcements in the Style section in the Sunday New York Times. We watched some same sex weddings in the evening news. And after two years of exposure to the liberal media, DJ now concedes that we could get married. But he nevertheless insist that we shouldn't. If we do get married, he insists that he's not coming to the wedding. He'll come to the party after the wedding, provided there is cake, but there is no way he is going to the ceremony. He agrees that we can love each other, but he insists that boys don't marry boys, and girls don't marry girls, and no gay wedding announcements in The New York Times are going to change his mind. It's odd to reflect that my 64 year old Catholic mom-- raised to view marriage as a sacrament-- believes marriage is about love and commitment, not about genitals. But my six year old son-- raised by a gay couple, and not having seen the inside of a church since the day he was baptized-- somehow came to believe that marriage is about matched sets of boys and girls. How'd that happen? DJ's traditional position on gender is not something he learned at home. While he was always into all the traditional boy things-- cars, trucks, guns-- until he was four, the boy things he liked were just the things he happened to like. He liked guns because he liked guns, not because boys were supposed to like guns. Then one day we packed DJ off to preschool. The teachers at his progressive Montessori school would sooner feed children tacks than force boys to do boy things and girls to do girl things. No, it was the other children who indoctrinated DJ into the world of gender expectations. From day one, it was the boys versus the girls. And there wasn't much the adults could do about it. When the children weren't engaged in Talmudic discussions about which toys or activities were male or female, the boys were chasing the girls around the yard during recess. And what did DJ learn from the other children about marriage? It was a boy and girl thing, his classmates all agreed. And it wasn't an agreeable thing to the boys. Marriage was a weapon, something the girls would threaten to do to the boys if they ever actually caught them. To turn the tables, the girls only had to threaten to marry the boys. Marriage was nuclear cooties. Once the threat was issued, the boys would turn tail and run, the girls chasing after them now, like a bunch of magnetized pinballs whose charge had suddenly reversed. So to DJ, it didn't make any sense that his two dads, both boys, would contemplate marrying each other. Boys weren't supposed to be interested in marriage anymore than they were supposed to be interested in dolls, or dresses, or fairy tales about princesses. Marriage was a girl thing. And since there weren't any girls in our family, why was this subject even coming up? Grandma thinks Terry and I should get married, I told DJ one day in the car. Look at me, Daddy, he responded from the backseat. I twisted around and watched as DJ attempted to roll his eyes. Eye rolling is an important interpersonal skill that DJ hasn't quite mastered yet. Instead of rolling his eyes, he looks up and to the left, and slowly rolls his head around his fixed eyes. Are you trying to tell me something, DJ? You know, he answered. I know, but Terry doesn't. He can't see you. So I'll have to tell him. Terry, when I looked back, DJ was nodding his head, which I guess means he wants us to get married. No, DJ said. Rolling my eyes means I don't want you to get married. Why not? Dad, boys don't marry boys. So should we marry some girls, Terry said. No, DJ said. Why not? Aren't boys supposed to marry girls? DJ thought about this for a second. Then he explained that we weren't the kind of boys who marry girls. Since we loved each other, and since we were his dads, we had to live together forever. Married people live together, and we wouldn't be able to do that, since we had to live with each other and be his dads forever. And so we couldn't get married, because then we would have to live with the girls we married and not with each other, which we couldn't do because we were his dads and had to live together forever, because we were his dads. A few weeks later, DJ woke up in the middle of the night with an earache. I got some Children's Tylenol into him, and we curled up together on the couch in the living room, waiting for the medicine to do its job. We talked about skateboarding. We talked about school. We talked about the cosmic injustice that earaches represent. Then we talked about sex. Dad? I want to be gay with Joshua when I grow up. It was a radical change of topic, but it wasn't a bolt from the blue. DJ had been asking questions lately about what exactly gay meant. He knew he had gay parents, and that gay marriage was always in the news, and that if his parents married, it would be one of those gay marriages. Despite our best efforts to explain what gayness was without popping in an old Chi Chi LaRue video, DJ was still a little fuzzy on the concept. Apparently, he had concluded that being gay meant living with your best friend. I didn't want to tell DJ that he couldn't be gay when he grew up, but I didn't believe he was going to be gay when he grew up. As best anyone can tell, most kids, over 90%, will grow up to be straight, whether they're raised by gay or straight parents. I almost told him he wouldn't be gay. He plays with trucks. He likes Power Rangers. He threw a perfect spiral the first time he picked up a football. He was throwing it to me and I dropped it, naturally. The kid is straight. But on the off chance that he wasn't going to be straight, I started naming all the couples we knew, gay and straight. And DJ joined in. There was Eddie and Mickey, Billy and Kelly, Laura and Joe, Grandma and Gramps, Mark and Diane, Shirley and Rose, Brad and Rachel, Nancy and Barrack, David and Jake, Amy and Sonya, Henry and Beth, Maureen and Ed. Most of the men we know are with? I asked. Girls, DJ said. That's because most men wind up falling in love with women when they grow up. And most women wind up falling in love with men. Those men are called straight. Men who fall in love with men, like me and Daddy, are called gay. Am I going to be gay? I don't know, DJ, but probably not. Most men aren't gay. You could be gay when you grow up, but it's much more likely that you're going to be straight, like Uncle Billy, or Uncle Eddie, or Tim, or Brad. But I want to be gay, like you and Dad. Ah, I thought, somewhere a fundamentalist Christian's heart is breaking. This is precisely what they worry about when they condemn gay parents. Our kids will want to be gay. They will want to emulate their parents and adopt their sexuality. If you believe, against all evidence, that sexuality is a matter of choice, it may be a rational fear. But sexuality isn't a matter of choice. It's an inborn trait. And DJ could no more choose to be gay like his parents than I could choose to be straight, like mine. It's not a decision you get to make, I said. It's not a decision I got to make. It's a decision your heart makes. When? When you're older, I said. One day, your heart will let you know whether you're going to be the kind of man who falls in love with a woman or a man. There was a long silence, and I thought DJ had fallen asleep. He was curled up next to me, resting his head against my side, and I couldn't see his face. I stayed very still. Grandma says you're supposed to marry the person you love, DJ suddenly said. He hadn't fallen asleep. He'd just been quietly working through something. That's right, I said, Grandma does say that all the time. But you love me, and we're not going to get married. Grown up love is a special kind of love. People don't fall in that special kind of love with their sisters or their mothers or their sons. There's something in your heart that makes you go out into the world and find someone new, someone you've never met before, and that's the person you fall in love with. Why? Because that's how new families are made. And one day you'll meet the person you want to make a new family with, and that's the person you're supposed to marry. Why? Because marriage is a promise that you make to that other person, a promise to stay in love with them forever, to be related forever, so that you'll always be together. Did Henry's parents fall out of love? Henry was a friend of DJ's whose parents were in the middle of an ugly divorce. Yes, they did. So they broke their promise? Yes, I guess they did. DJ got quiet again. Do you and Daddy want to get married? Sometimes we do, I said, but sometimes we don't. Grandma wants us to get married, you don't. I changed my mind. Why? You and dad have to stay together forever. We will, I said. We love each other and always will. DJ sat up on the couch and looked me in the eye. I want you and Daddy to promise, to pinky promise, to seriously and forever promise, and no breaking your promise. You want us to get married then, I said. Yes. And there it was, my reward for a sleepless night. My son was giving me his blessing to marry. I'll tell Terry, I said. We'll see what Daddy says. Dan Savage, reading from his book The Commitment, in which his mom and his six year old son wage a battle of ideas. His great, great podcast is available at thestranger.com. Coming up, baby Einstein takes on the real Einstein. 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, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, A Little Bit of Knowledge, taking a small bit of information and drawing on it. And coming to conclusions and inferences is, of course, a sign of intelligence. We all do that. It's just sometimes, it gets a little complicated. We've arrived at Act Three. Act Three, Sucker MC-Squared. We have this story from Robert Andrew Powell. Bob Berenz didn't come into my life as a physicist. I knew him originally as the goalie on my hockey team. I'd see him every Wednesday night. We'd play hockey for an hour or so, and then he'd go back to his house, and his family, and his job as an electrician. He retired from the team a couple years ago. He was 48, a bit too old to be stopping slap shots. Away from the rink and with extra time on his hands, he hatched an idea for an invention, a superconductor of some sort. Bob's a tinkerer, great with car engines, computers, any kind of electronics. But to build something as ambitious as a superconductor, he needed to go back and study basic physics, something he hadn't done since high school. So I sat down, I got out my books and started reading. Of course, I never got to the invention because I found something else, something that I couldn't understand, couldn't resolve. And I think something much more important, because it's something every Nobel Prize-winning physicist missed. That something, he said, was the most significant development in physics in a century. I discovered that physics is fundamentally operating off an incorrect principle. And the principle is that e equals mc squared. That's wrong, without question. It gives you wrong answers every time you use it. I guarantee it. Bob believed he'd disproved Einstein's theory of relativity, and that's why he got back in touch with me. I'm a journalist. Bob said he needed my help drafting a book about his findings. He said the book would make him famous. He said it would make us both rich. Bob suggested we call the book E Does Not Equal MC Squared. I met up with Bob at his small yellow house in South Miami. On his bookshelves, alongside hockey trophies and framed photos of his daughters, stand copies of Physics Demystified, Trigonometry Demystified, and Calculus Demystified. Physics is simple, he says. It's the physics community, academia that mystifies him. All right, in this point I have to be completely honest. I did write a paper early on, and I submitted it to a physics site. And it was summarily rejected out of hand. But I did learn an important lesson, that physicists and what's being done by them is very complicated, very mathematically intensive. What I've got is none of that, so it completely, almost in reverse, goes over their heads. OK, we're going to have an arrow. This arrow represents force. I'll put a big letter F there. In a nutshell, Bob believes Einstein misunderstood the relationship between energy and time. Bob insists the error is self-explanatory and obvious. But whenever he's tried to show me his reasoning, I don't see it. I can't tell if I'm confused or if Bob's confused. --times its velocity. It actually should be mass times speed. It's a mathematical thing, it's no big deal. Unless you're a physicist, then you'll focus on it, to the exclusion of the truth. So if we look at the mass times the speed-- The only physics class Bob ever took was in high school. After graduating, Bob audited a couple college courses, but they weren't for him. Last summer, right before he called me, Bob had decided to give himself a year to find a wider audience for his discovery, a full year, free from electrical work. His wife, Celia, supported this sabbatical. She earned enough money in her corporate job to keep them afloat. What if it's totally true, and I didn't support him? I mean, would I feel like a schmuck or what? I mean, really, it's like, so go for it. You can ask Celia if she believes Bob has disproved Einstein. But for her, that's not the point. He felt strongly about it. It's like, just because I don't understand it doesn't mean that it's not real. He's done all this research, and he sits here and does all this studying, and he reads all these books, and he does these tests. I mean, he's the most disciplined individual I have ever known. Just because I don't understand it, doesn't mean a damn thing. Bob's my friend. He was my goalie. I didn't want to be the guy to kill his dream either, and like his wife, I didn't feel qualified to disprove him. Maybe he had stumbled onto something simple and profound. Electrician disproves theory of relativity, that would make for a pretty good book. I told Bob I'd run his work past a trained physicist. This turned out to be more difficult than I had expected. A scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory replied to my email with a curt, please don't waste my time again. The head of the Physics Department at the University of Miami dropped Bob's research paper like it was radioactive. He receives one of these papers each week, he said. It turns out, there is a whole community of people out there who also claim to have disproved Einstein's theory. So persistent are these outsiders that John Baez, a Professor of Mathematics in California, felt compelled to publish the crackpot index. It's an online quiz you can take to see if you are, by his definition, a crackpot. There are 35 items in the index, including 10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein. 10 points for each claim that the theory of relativity is fundamentally misguided. 10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a quote, "paradigm shift." 10 points for each statement along the lines of, I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right. Here's Baez. I'm sure that I've seen at least 100 different crackpot theories. I will get emails from people asking me to help them work out the details of their theory. And so it's sort of like saying I'm good at music, but I just don't know what the notes are supposed to be in this piece. If you could just write down the notes, I could come up with a great piece of music. He told me about a few of the more infamous crackpots. One guy who calls himself Ludwig Von Plutonium believes the solar system consists of a single radioactive atom. Another was Alexander Abian. He was a math professor at the University of Iowa who, in his later years, came up with the theory that all the diseases on Earth are due to the pernicious influence of the moon, and so that we should destroy the moon, in fact. Destroy the moon? Yeah, we have to blow it up to prevent the spread of AIDS. And he also had an equation that was sort of like e equals mc squared, something about how energy gets used up pushing time forwards. Why do people do this? I think they do it because they really want to understand the universe. And they have very noble, albeit grandiose, motivations, trying to do what us regular physicists also are trying to do for our own noble and grandiose motivations. And I think what distinguishes them from physicists who can make a useful contribution is that they don't want to be somebody whose epitaph says that they tightened the screws on a particle accelerator that made a great experiment. They want to be Einstein. And most of us can't be Einstein. And that's the trouble. When I told Bob about the index, he had already seen it on the internet, had taken the test, and had concluded that, technically, he's a crackpot. But that never even gave him pause. There is a climate within the physics community-- because they have to go through so many years of study, and such tough mathematics, and this and that-- that anyone who comes into the zone and hasn't gone through the same steps that they have, is looked on with a little bit of disdain. I'll tell you what, I do challenge any real physicist to stand with me on a blackboard, and we'll go over this. Eventually, months later, I did find someone, a real physicist who was willing to take Bob's challenge. I first met Dr. Brant Watson at his office in Miami. On his wall hung a portrait of Albert Einstein, certificates recognizing several patents, and curiously, a poster of some Victoria's Secret lingerie models. Dr. Watson holds a PhD in nuclear physics. He says he enjoys hearing new ideas, and was genuinely interested in reading Bob's paper, which he did. When he finished, he handed me a Kit Kat bar as I explained that Bob had invested close to 12 months in his research. Really? Yeah. What he came up with took a year? He's been working on it for a year. That's too bad. He should have talked to me a long time before he got started. You can tell when somebody is worth listening to, real quick. I sat in a class at Florida State with Don Robson, who was teaching theoretical physics. And I remember one time, my jaw just dropped, like in a cartoon, but it dropped without me making it do it. How stunned I was to see this beautiful formula that he was writing on the board. And I said, my God, that one formula expresses everything, but I know I could never do it myself. Well Bob, with what he wrote, out of the question. Dr. Watson said Bob's work was riddled with the kind of mistakes a freshman physics student would make in his first week of class. No, he corrected, they were the kind of mistakes a freshman sociology student taking a physics elective would make. He said Bob's biggest error was repeatedly confusing momentum with energy, which apparently, in physics, is a big deal. I relayed this to Bob, thinking that would be the end of it. Yet Bob didn't waver. He remained so earnest and so obstinate that I arranged for Bob and Dr. Watson to meet face to face. I thought it would be a quick meeting, that Dr. Watson would turn Bob around. I was wrong. I do not say momentum is the same thing as kinetic energy. Oh no? You did about 10 times in that paper. And I marked every one of them. No, no, no, 10 times in your paper. Well, I don't want to get into that part of it, because-- That is a part of it. That's what we do it into first. As physicists, the first thing we check is the units. If the units are wrong, then apples equals oranges, which we don't accept. That's a very efficient way to find out if somebody's wrong or not. That's how we do it. I understand that. Now that's not the issue. The issue is-- Accord was never reached. Bob and Dr. Watson's frustration with each other devolved into name calling. In fact, I have to mention this. Under the hallmark of schizophrenia is, they get a good idea, and then they never investigate whether it's right or not, OK? So this is an ideation. Are you calling Bob a schizophrenic? No, I'm telling you have to watch out for this kind of thing, because some people may think that. Finally, Bob, defiant as always, volleyed back with what all along has been his main point: e equals mc squared doesn't make sense because it's difficult to understand. A fundamental law of physics should be self-explanatory. Well, the only thing I can see with physics is you are getting way too complicated. I mean, you have to go to school forever. You have to know this outrageous amount of calculus. When I see all that, I know that physics has gone off the rails. Let me tell you why it looks so difficult. There comes a point at which you can see beyond the gap, that you'll never cross the gap. You just can't do it. No matter how hard you try, you can't do it. Especially when you got to the conclusion Einstein was wrong, it should be e equals mc, I guess, instead of mc squared. If you used mc, there would have been no A-bomb on Hiroshima. We don't have radios, we don't have lasers, we don't have atomic bombs, we don't have anything. No cellphone, no microwave, no nothing, man. We don't have anything. Back at Bob's house, we talked about it. Bob was fuming. Nothing Dr. Watson had said had changed his mind. How come Brant can't persuade you that you're wrong? Well, this is not really fair, but I'm going to say it anyway. It's like he was talking the party line. He didn't strike me as being all that bright. I know he has a couple of patents, and he's this big professor, and it's probably not fair for me to say that, but I'm not claiming to be this incredible genius in this one area. It's very simple what I ran into. And I need some help to get it put into a forum where people can understand it. But it really isn't that difficult. I understand Bob's stubbornness this way. Since he was a kid, he was going off and reading books and figuring out things on his own. When he was 12, he taught himself how to construct an FM transmitter from spare parts, building the coil himself. He is a self-taught auto mechanic, and self-taught television repairman too. Almost everything he knows about electrical work he learned from books. He has based his whole life on the idea that he can figure out things on his own, technical stuff that, to most of us, seems just as hard as e equals mc squared. No wonder he thinks he can trust his own judgment on this one. It's a hard habit to break. It's hard for him to see himself any other way. As the end of Bob's sabbatical neared, I had asked his wife, Celia, about a possibility Bob wouldn't even acknowledge. What would it mean, in the big picture, if Bob is totally wrong? I think it would be a huge blow to his ego. It wouldn't change anything for me, as far as how I feel about him. He'd still be Bob, and he'd still be the man I love, and I'd still be in love with him. You have got to love him, man. It's either you love him or hate them. It's like he can be an arrogant son of a bitch. You live with the good and the bad. There's so much more to him than that, than that uncombed and unkempt hair, and the fact that he doesn't keep doctors' appointments, or make them, which makes me the nagging, bitching wife, but that's OK. It's part of the package. Bob has returned to his old job, electrifying houses and office buildings. At home, he set aside his physics books to focus on the wiring system on his Carmengia, a clamshell of a car he's rebuilding by himself, from the tires up. He says he's trying to take an engine designed in the 1930s and get it working for the 21st century. It's an ambitious project, complex, challenging, and totally over my head. I have no doubt he'll pull it off. Robert Andrew Powell is the author of the book We Own This Game about youth football. He's in Boulder, Colorado. Act Four, The Art of Adult Conversation. We end our program today with this fable of the consequences of saying more than you truly understand, from Alexa Junge. I know everybody loves their grandmother, but I really, really loved my grandmother. I still dream about her kitchen. From the time I could ride my bike to her house, pretty much every day I'd pedal over after school, drink Fresca, and listen while Grandma Maxine, mostly known as Mac, would hold court. While all the other kids were getting high and listening to Marshall Crenshaw, I was sitting in my grandmother's kitchen, eating Christmas colored, coconut covered ice cream snowballs, while she dropped ashes and pontificated about life in New York in the '20s and '30s, her work designing costumes for the WPA Theatre, her views about sex, communists, sex with communists. I don't know if she was as progressive as she pretended to be around me, but it was my grandmother who told me, sleep with a bunch of men, so that when the right one comes along, you'll know what you're doing. That I didn't have a boyfriend was of little consequence, since for all intents and purposes, my grandmother was my boyfriend. Sometimes at night, after my parents were asleep, my brother would bang on my door and snarl at me to quit hogging the phone. Then, as he left, he'd say, oh, and say hi to Grandma for me. Our bond was so strong, I was moved to write Joni Mitchell influenced ditties about it, which I would play and sing loudly on the piano in our tiny house. Actually, I had written a whole anthology of songs about adolescent yearning, which I scratched into my musical notebook. Songs from this period included "Drifter," "Rainbow Blues," "Where Is My Rainbow?" and then of course, the aforementioned testament to grandma love, "For A Friend," which went a little something like this. [SINGING] Coffee and ginger snaps, you give to me a chance to be myself. Feathers and silver rings, old cuckoo clocks, and quiet talks together. That I never actually performed my composition for her was of little matter, since it was pretty much common knowledge that I was her favorite, and in case you had any questions, she was mine. Around the time I was thirteen, I started to become aware of a rich history of favoritism in my family. My mom, the story went, had been my Grandfather Marvin's favorite. He took her to museums, taught her to paint, exposed her to Ogden Nash, Arthur Miller, made her play the cello like he did. And because my mother was taken under my grandfather's wing, my uncle came to belong to my grandmother, just like I did. Because my grandfather died when I was six, I never really knew him. He was a beloved teacher. There is no question he was charismatic and multi-talented. The thing is, I'm not exactly sure how nice he was to his wife. Maybe it's not even true, but I remember my father saying how dismissive he could be of my grandmother, how much she blossomed after his death. So as far as I could tell, the Oedipal brouhaha that made it difficult for my mother and grandmother to get along had also paved the way for me. I was getting to have the relationship with my grandmother that my mother never had. And to my mom's enormous credit, she never even told me about the trouble between them until I started to see some tension and made the mind-bending leap that relationships are complex, and things aren't always what they seem. Suddenly I started to wonder if me being Grandma's favorite wasn't just about me being her favorite. Maybe I was a pawn in some kind of game. Grandma Maxine didn't get Mom, so instead she went for me. Maybe I was just a chump. I needed to get the bottom of it right away. There wasn't any plan. And even now, I have to strain to remember what I was thinking on that day, because I wasn't. It was a spur of the moment decision. I really can't explain what happened. I know I went to her house after school, but instead of our usual meeting in the kitchen, I crossed into the living room. We chit-chatted, like grownups. My grandmother's ash dropped. She caught it in her hand. Then I launched in. I was thinking, if my husband spent all of his time with our daughter and acted like he liked her more than me, that would be a pretty hard pill to swallow. I would probably hold on tight to my son and treat him like he was my favorite. I remember she sat down and got herself an ashtray. For 45 minutes, we talked about her marriage. I offered up my special insights about how her distant relationship with her father probably contributed to her dependence on my Grandfather Marvin. Maybe that's why she stopped working after having such a promising career. I remember feeling exhilarated, like I was onto something, mapping out a new world. Since I was now a member of the big kids psychology club, I could kick it up a notch. In fact, I had to. Are you very sad about your father's funeral? You do realize he's dead and he's never coming back, don't you? Don't you? She wasn't resistant or defensive. She answered here and there, blew smoke rings. In fact, she seemed utterly unfazed, so much so, that when we had finished our tete-a-tete, I went off to roller skate and didn't come back until a few hours later when I was either hungry or wanted a ride home. I rang the doorbell. No answer, so I went around back. Through the screen door, I could see Maxine was sitting in the dark living room in her bathrobe. I had the distinct impression that when she had heard me at the door, she hadn't moved a muscle. How long she had been sitting there I couldn't tell, but she was sniffling and blowing her nose. I went inside. She apologized for not answering the door. What's going on, I said. Aren't you feeling well? She responded simply, some of the things you said upset me. Oh, she'd been sniffling because she had been crying. I didn't recognize it because I'd never seen her cry. It was so out of character I didn't even know she could cry, let alone be so upset by something I said. The terrifying thing is that somewhere I think I had even expected my grandmother to congratulate me for being so clever in cracking the codes. But while I was tossing off all these adult words and ideas, I didn't really understand what they would mean to her. I don't know, I was just kicking it on up. I just wanted to share. In fact, what I'd done is more along the lines of getting a sawed off shotgun, shooting willy-nilly into her house, and then coming back 20 minutes later and asking if she had redecorated. I don't know how I got home. I think my dad came and got me and my bike. At dinner, I sort of mentioned that Grandma had kind of maybe been distressed about something. My mother had clearly been debriefed, which meant that my grandmother had called my mother and told her what happened, which was, as far as I knew, unprecedented, since the only thing my grandmother spoke to my mother about was her weight and inability to handle money. I guess she was upset, I conjectured. Well, my mother said, what did you expect? After that, things were different. I'd still sit in her kitchen while she held court, but something was lost. When she'd be quiet like she'd been in the living room, I'd start to worry I was screwing everything up again, and then I'd work very hard to try to keep her laughing. It was like after that, she knew I could hurt her, and I knew I could hurt her. There weren't going to be any words that could undo the words I had sent out into the universe. She couldn't trust me anymore. And we could never go back. I thought about it a lot over the years, how in a matter of minutes, I irreversibly corrupted what had been the most precious relationship in my life, and how it happened without me even knowing I was doing it. I dream about it, sitting across from my grandmother, light slipping through Venetian blinds on a yellow grey Southern California afternoon. Some of the things you said upset me. Some of the things you said upset me. Alexa Junge is a writer in Los Angeles. Well, our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, and Sarah Koenig. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Laura Bella, Seth Lind, PJ Vogt, and Emily Youssef. Our website, where you can sign up for our free weekly podcast, absolutely free. And you just have a little time left to enter our new t-shirt design contest, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who always has this advice for me. Sleep with a bunch of men, so that when the right one comes along, you'll know what you're doing. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Kristy went to one of those high schools for the performing arts, like in Fame, except not good. One of her teachers would leave the room for long stretches to smoke cigarettes, another spent lots of class time gossiping about which celebrities were dating. One of my music teachers, he never got the memo about separation of church and state. He would talk about Jesus all the time. And he actually would ask, "So, raise your hands. How many of you went to church on Sunday? I bet you would have gone to church if I would have given you extra credit." When a jazz piano class conflicted with World History, her counselor simply signed her out of World History. He listed it on her transcript as a class that she took, but she never actually went to class. It was that kind of school. She was there to study piano, and that's what she devoted all of her energy to. She practiced after school for four hours to eight hours a day. Yeah, so I practiced a lot. I mean, I didn't really know much outside the walls of the practice room. And I just really realized, when I got to college, I was way behind. I mean, I didn't even know how to write a paper, you know? But it wasn't exactly in class in college that she realized just how far behind she was. She could fake it in class. It was on stage that she realized, in an improvisational comedy troupe that she joined as a freshman. On stage, her lack of knowledge could be kind of harrowing. Like, if someone referred to Henry Kissinger in a scene, I'd just have no idea who that was, at all. The audience would throw out suggestions, like the Hindenburg thing. The Hindenburg disaster, yeah. Yeah, and I just had no idea. And then you had to re-enact it on a stage in front of people, and you had no idea what it referred to? I cannot tell you how many times something like that happened, where everybody was laughing and I had no idea why they were laughing. It was really scary, actually, to be honest. I mean, I was so nervous. And I really wanted to stay in the troupe. I didn't want to get kicked out, but I really was so clueless. In one of the sketches they would do on stage, they would ask the audience for a bunch of historical events, and then they would do their own little renditions of these events in the historical order that they happened. And in performing this one day, Kristy confounded her cast mates by putting World War I before the Salem witch trials, but she did manage to locate it after the invention of the wheel. And after the whole show, everybody was like, "God, Kristy. What was up with that? I mean, why did you start off with World War I? It was the Salem witch trials." They just thought that I wasn't thinking. And I was like, "I didn't know that World War I came after the Salem witch trials." Yeah. They kind of looked at me in disbelief. Did you know what the Salem witch trials were? I did. You know what, honestly? You know, I don't even think it's about that. I think it's about that I didn't remember anything about World War I. I thought if it was World War I, it must have happened a long time ago. Does that make sense? Yeah. Because the world is so-- Because it's the first war. That ever happened. Sure. Absolutely. It was like, well, invention of the wheel, then it must have been World War I. Right. I had no idea it happened in the 1900s, you know? It was the first one. Well, I can see the confusion. So, to cope with this problem you were having, that you were on stage, you have no idea what's going on, people are laughing at you, and you have no idea why, did you come up with any kind of coping strategy? I totally did. I came up with some characters that, in their essence, it was OK to be ignorant. So I would use a stoner a lot of times. I'd be like, "Whoa, dude. I have no idea what's going on." And then I would use the troll, which was really my favorite. I would just kind of throw my hair in my face and talk in gibberish. And I'd just be like, Dar! Flar! Figgy floo! Vee floogle ooh! Flogalo vase!, like that. You'd be in the middle of a scene with another performer, and suddenly that's what you would do? You would just get a stumper? Yeah, in every scene, regardless of the time period or setting. Does that work? Yeah. It works. And that's how Kristy turned things around for herself, by pretending to be exactly the thing she was scared she was: an ignorant babbler. I think that it saved me. I think I was really lost in this troupe. Did you get into social situations that were awkward in exactly the same way that being on stage was awkward, where people would be talking about stuff and you wouldn't know what the hell is going on, and then, basically, you would just turn into the troll? I wish that the troll would work in real-life situations, where you're sitting around having a conversation and someone brings up a historic reference that I have no clue, and everyone else is engaged in this, and I just kind of wish I could contribute by going, "Well, fig, floo! Thar! Flar! Dar, de, var, far." But, it doesn't really work out that way. Well, today, on our radio show, we have three stories of people in the same situation Kristy was in, where people think of them as up for grabs. They're worried about how people will see them, and like Kristy-- Flogalo vase! --they take action. They take control of how they're going to be seen with dramatic, drastic steps. Fig! Floo! Thar! Flar! Far! Well said. Flar! Dar, de, var, far! From WBEZ, Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our show today, Dewey Decibel System. In that story, an American institution calls in the cavalry, calls in very unlikely allies in order to change its own image. Act Two, Goldstein On Goldstein. In that act, Mr. Jonathan Goldstein considers the question of manliness, specifically, his own manliness, and turns to a real man for answers, namely, his dad. Act Three, Heart Shaped Box. In that act, a mom decides that she's going to remake all of the ideas that her son has about his father using a very simple tactic. Stay with us. Act One. This first story is about an audacious act of rebranding done by a group of people who are not normally thought of as being very audacious at all: public librarians, in this case, teen librarians, the ones who work with teenagers. Alex Blumberg prepared this report last summer. If you travel among the teen librarians of Michigan, as I did recently, you'll hear a strange phrase over and over again. The phrase is lock-in, like, did you hear how the lock-in went the other night in Kalamazoo? One of the biggest practitioners of the lock-in is a guy named Bill Harmer, the only person I've ever met who could accurately be described as a maverick teen librarian. He explained to me that a lock-in is when the library reopens its doors after closing time, lets a bunch of teenagers in, and then-- Once they come in to the building, they can't leave. Oh, OK. So they're stuck there until the program's over. So inviting a bunch of teenagers to a library and then locking them in is a fun activity for them? Yeah. They love it. They love it. Every time I've done one, we've had at least 50 or more teenagers show up. It turns out, the lock-in is a state-of-the-art technique in the arsenal of the modern, teen librarian. The library has an image problem. Teenagers see it as the equivalent of summer school: boring, no fun. But Bill Harmer and his colleagues say that's the old library, and they're on a campaign to change people's perceptions. Bill has attacked this problem with inspiring devotion. He's had sleep-overs in the library where 50 kids camped out between the stacks. He's hosted late night car tournaments. He stocks the teen section with the latest in Japanese Manga comics and graphic novels. And he's assembled the largest and most comprehensive DVD collection in the entire state, he says, including video stores. But last fall, Bill hatched a plan to take teen library programming to a place it's never gone before, to leave the lock-in in the dust. The plan was this, stage a series of concerts inside libraries all over Michigan, but not the type of music normally associated with the library: acoustic instruments, lyrics about ducks and bunnies, singing puppets. No. This would be rock music with electric guitars and huge speakers. This would be, in other words, the state of Michigan's first ever rock and roll library tour. And I know what you're thinking. Libraries: famously quiet. Rock and roll: famously loud. This is the diabolical genius of Bill Harmon's idea: making something appealing by binding it with its exact opposite. Card catalogs packed with Harry Potter and Judy Bloom and this. The song you're listening to now is from the CD of the band that Bill Harmer booked on his library tour, an indie rock trio out of Detroit called The High Strung. We are The High Strung. I'm Josh Malerman. I sing, and play the guitar, and write the songs. Derek? Oh, I'm Derek Berk. I play the drums, and I fix the van. And I take care of a lot of reality issues. He's the treasurer. Yes. No, I'm the CFO of the band. I'm Chad Stocker, and I play the bass. Most of the time we play at rock clubs. Yeah, rock clubs. It's like, if you can just picture a smoky bar, a lot of drunk people. With a long-haired sound guy that's probably mad about something. The High Strung agreed to the library tour last December, and then they didn't think much about it. But Bill, meanwhile, was going around to library conferences pitching the idea. In the end, he booked 34 library shows, one every other day from June through August. When he came back to the band with this information a couple of months later, not only had they sort of forgotten about it, but they'd had no idea it was going to consume their entire summer. I talked with them two days before the tour started, and they were a little freaked out, more than a little. I'm terrified. You know that? No. I know. I know. Absolutely. It's like this weird, unknown thing for a band to do because we're not like a novelty act. This tour, I think, is geared for sixth-graders to 12th-graders, for the most part, and their parents. I feel like we're almost going to be like tamed beasts. Watch my language. Don't get too close, kids. Cover the liquor up off the breath, you know? We should be in a cage. Yeah. We are playing inside the libraries most the time. And I went to one yesterday, and the guy showing me, he's like, "This is your stage." And it was, like, the reference desk. I was like, "Oh. Yeah. Where do we plug in?" He was like, "Plug in?" Josh, Derek and Chad have known each other since middle school. They formed their band about five years ago in New York. Early on, Josh booked a couple of live shows so they could get used to playing in front of people. Once they got on the road, they liked it so much they didn't want to quit. They've been touring non-stop now for four years straight. They've played in 42 of the 50 states to all different crowds. In Austin, Texas, they played to an audience of over 1,000. But a show in New Orleans that they drove all night to get to didn't have a single person. Even the bartender left. There was one guy there, but he was passed out drunk the entire show. They're in the position of a lot of indie bands: some critical recognition, one CD out, another one due this September, a website, something of a following. In short, a teeny bit of fame and not really any fortune. We've been living off $10 a day, each, for four years now. Right. Which is pretty nuts. No matter how much money we make the night before, we each just get $10 a day. Who decides that? Our CFO. Me. I decided that three years ago. A brilliant CFO. There's been no adjustment for cost of living. He's not very progressive. No. I mean the dollar menu is still the dollar. Sometimes there's a buy-out, which is exciting. And that's, when? It's when they give you money. Some places you play at their restaurant too. But, if they don't have food there, they'll either order you a pizza, or something, or a burrito, or [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Or there's the elusive buy-out where they actually give you cash. That's the best. Then you can buy whatever you want. Cigarettes and a cheaper sandwich somewhere else. Right, and pocket the extra money. Yeah. I thought you meant you would take the money and go get something really, really good. But you're actually [INAUDIBLE] even worse. No. You get something worse than what they would give you so you can save the money. I know this is a digression, but one of the things I found most charming about the band is this fact. A while ago, they saw some footage on TV of an old Motown act. Everyone in the group was wearing the same outfit. And they thought, now, those guys look together up there. We should do that. So, a couple of months ago, they started performing every show in identical uniforms. Tight, white, really tight, white, outfits with blue stars up and down the sides, you know? If you can imagine Evel Knievel, I guess. And it's more fun for me, man, because I feel like a superhero when we wear those outfits. It separates you from the audience, or something, you know what I mean? It makes you into a television show, or a superhero, or something. So how does that work if you're wearing the same costume every night? Yeah. That's a great follow-up question. That is good. That's a very intelligent question. For the first time ever, I'm really persistent about us cleaning something, because I want to make sure that we always have these uniforms to wear. And they can be outrageous if we wear them for three shows in a row without washing them, so we've just got to find a laundromat in every city, you know? I hang out. These guys don't. I go and do that. And I'm alone at these weird laundromats in every town we go to. Josh is kind of-- In charge? Josh is kind of in charge of cleaning the laundry. Cleaning the get-ups. We call them get-ups. We're like, you got the get-ups? Yeah, they're in the bag. There's a get-up bag, too. The High Strung, in many ways, are the perfect band for this tour, because they're both very rock and roll and very library. They've all been to college. Chad wears round glasses. Josh says one of his main song writing inspirations is William Faulkner. He actually wrote an outline for his last album in which he describes his 12 songs, each a different take on optimism. And they're huge library patrons, and not just because they like to read. The truth is, bands, nowadays, are in libraries all the time because there's the internet and stuff there. And when you're on the road, it's a valuable place to go for a band. Yeah, It's our office. It's like the field office. You got internet, and you got a clean toilet with, usually, there's toilet paper and a door that locks. Wait. Are are you telling me that you guys stop at the library in every-- Yeah. Shave there. We do. We usually shave there. Yeah. We're in a lot of libraries across the country. I used to work at the Ann Arbor district library as a security guard there in college. Oh, my gosh. It was all leading to this. And we used to have to kick out people that had their shoes off, or if they smelled too bad and got complaints, or if we caught them cleaning up in the bathroom, and stuff. And then, years later, I'm doing that. I don't know if you've risen or fallen. The next time I catch up with the band is at the Escanaba Public Library. It's the band's 25th library in their 34-library tour. And the audiences, they say, have been all over the place. Some have been high school kids, mainly 16- to 18-year-olds. Others, like this crowd, have skewed much younger. It's about 40 kids, mostly between the ages of nine and 14, many of them swinging their legs on those stackable metal library chairs, accompanied by grandparents or parents. The emcee of today's show is the Assistant Children's Librarian, Charlotte Oshe, who does her own librarian version of, hello Escanaba, are you ready to rock? Hello, kids. Congratulations for finishing your summer reading program contracts. We are so proud of you. You are here to see a, what? Concert? Concert. Right. We're in a gray, carpeted conference room off the main floor of the library: fluorescent lights, a white board with a graph showing recent expenditures. This room is normally used for county budget meetings. The band, in regular street clothes for this tour, takes the floor. How cool is it that your library does this, huh? This is awesome. OK. We are The High Strung. Yeah. Clap for your library. This is great. Here It Comes Again. 1, 2, 3, 4. The loudness definitely catches people off guard. Kids flinch, startled. Some of them cover their ears. Watching it all, I feel very nervous for the band, for the kids, for the parents who brought the kids, for everyone. When I ask the band about it later, they tell me nobody involved has any idea what to expect. It's like, what is going on here? You feel like you're in a sociology experiment. This is let's put the loudest thing known to man inside the conference room of the library with a bunch of 10-year-old kids and see what happens. There was kids that were scared when we were in Brighton. In Brighton? Yeah. Even though we were outside, they still had faces of disbelief. Or they were like, this is not what-- everyone's always telling me to be quiet here. This is not supposed to be happening. They said that to us, right? Yeah. Yeah, almost to where they were angered. That one girl said that there. They were angered. Like, everything everyone's been telling me up to this point has been a lie. In the audience, no one dances or even moves, really. They all sit and watch, attentively but a little passively, like the way you'd watch someone reading aloud during story hour. Between songs, the band throws in some public service-y library messages. Another exciting thing about libraries are-- and this is something that we need, terribly-- are maps and atlases. This is all reference material. You can check it out, but you can't check it out. You know what I'm saying? So in these maps, we find our way all over the country. And you can even look up crazy places all over the world. I want to know if anyone has been to Sweden or Venezuela? No. OK. The reason I asked because this next song we made a video for for MTV, and if you lived in Sweden or Venezuela, you may have seen it, because that's the only place [INAUDIBLE]. This song is called Wretched Boy. 1, 2, 3, 4. So here it is, the image of rock and roll and the image of the library going head to head. Bill Harmer hopes that the image of rock and roll will win out and that the library will seem cooler as a result of this bizarre collision. But what if the opposite proves true? The library wins, and this tour does nothing except make the band seem lame? Basically, you are being sort of retained to make this institution that is not necessarily seen as cool cooler. That's sort of a big responsibility. Do you guys feel cool enough? That's a weird thing. That's a really weird thing. That's the weirdest question I've ever been asked. I think so. I think the public library-- That is a really weird question. I think the public library is really cool. Sure, yes. But I think that maybe people don't know it, and maybe teens don't know it. Are we cooler than the library? No. Are we cooler than the idea of the library? Maybe. As the show progresses, it seems less and less like a rock show in a library, and more and more like just a rock show. Josh gets on top of a table for his guitar solo and jumps off at the end. A group of adolescent girls sits in front of Chad, the bass player. He's one of those happy musicians who can't help but smile an adorable smile while he plays super complicated riffs. You can practically see the communal crush develop. Between songs, they flirt with him. One girl complains that her tan this summer came out usually orange and that she looks like an Oompa Loompa. What? Aren't Oompa Loompas green? Oh. I like their pants. Oompa Loompa's got cool, cool clothes. 1, 2, 3. I know the show is going well when, at one point, I notice that Josh has actually broken one of his guitar strings. By the time the head children's librarian comes out and does the librarian version of let's give it up for the band, I said let's give it up for the band, one thing's for sure: this county library conference room has been rocked harder than it's ever been rocked before. Boys and girls, would you truly let these gentlemen know how much we appreciate them? Come on, really let them know. But the question is, was it rocked hard enough to actually change the image of the library? I talked to scores of kids at three different library shows in three different towns. Maybe half are what you'd call library kids, part of the teen reading club, or on a first-name basis with the local librarian. The rest just saw ads in the paper, or their parents did. But everyone talked about the library tour the way this group of teenagers in Iron Mountain did. They're all standing outside the show, wearing black, heavy metal T-shirts. So if you had to describe the way you thought of the library before this concert, what would you have said? What were the adjectives that would come to your mind if you thought about that? Dull. Quiet. Very quiet. Activities. And now? Amazing. Come on. Seriously? Yes. Yeah. It's better than it was before, anyways. I liked it. Yeah, because before it was just old ladies. Now it's young people. It was a lot of fun. And then there was this 11-year-old in Menominee, who had planned on going fishing, but decided to check out the rock show instead. Did it make you think differently about the library? Yes, it did. It made me think about, hey, if librarians could do this, make a library not very much a library with making it loud, basically, anyone could do anything. The High Strung are enjoying the library tour as well. Librarians, as a group, tend to be better at organizing and promoting rock shows than actual rock promoters, as well as much more likely to address you as honey. Also, it's the first tour they've been on where they don't have to drive to another state after the concert is over. They've all been spending a lot of time with their girlfriends. And, even though they're playing a library show almost every day, because they're mostly during the day and because they're mostly within driving distance of Detroit, it's been a very relaxed summer and, by their standards, lucrative. How much are you guys getting paid for this? Oh, that's none of your damned business. More than we normally get, I would say. On the high end of average. High end of average for what we usually make at our shows. Yeah. And we won't have to wait at the end of the night for some promoter to sell a bunch of cocaine down the street to have enough money to pay for our guarantee. You know? Overall, the band is surprised how similar the library tour has been to a regular tour, except for one thing. On a regular tour, they don't stick around for a Q&A 20 minutes after every show. Some people in this room would like to know if you have a girlfriend, and how old you are. How did your families take it when you decided to start a rock band? Do you guys live together? Did you guys read and go to libraries when you were teens? Why isn't the drummer wearing any shoe laces? I didn't think of this before we started this whole thing, but I really think that, a lot of kids, this is their first rock show, and I did not think of that angle at all when this whole thing started. Like, wow, we really are-- I really remember the first time I saw a bunch of grown men dancing around, making noise together, and people watching. It's like that's an experience. So yeah. And surprised I just never thought of that. And now, I can't really explain it. The delivery of it all just has a different meaning to me now. It's more weighted or something. Like, oh, wow, this move here, or when I turn to Derek and both of us just do the silliest thing like slam our instruments at the same time, that's going to be an image in that child's mind. They're going to remember that when they remember their first concert, or whatever. So suddenly, things are not weighted with pressure, but weighted with a little more meaning. The last show I attend is in Menominee, a small town in the far north of the state. The band is playing in the library central reading room. You couldn't make it up any better. It's a beautiful place with big picture windows looking out on the water and a skylight, rows of bookshelves spread out to either side. The crowd is the biggest age range I've seen. There's a couple of high school kids with the neo-ska punk look, several middle-schoolers. In the very front row, a kid who can't be more than four years old holding a huge deck of Pokemon cards in one hand and a stuffed bunny in the other. He's covering his ears with his elbows, but he's bouncing wildly up and down on his chair, and he's got a huge smile on his face. A lot of the kids in the audience have a look like that, like I can't explain what I'm watching, but I really like it. When I talk to them about it later, it's hard for them to articulate. "I like the way it made me feel," they say. Or "I like the way one of them will be going one way and one another." Or simply, "I like the way it vibrated on me. That was the funnest part." Of course, if you're selling teens on the library by saying now it's a place that rocks, then you pretty much have to keep booking rock shows. And Bill Harmer would be fine with that. He'd love it if rock and roll were as common in Michigan's libraries as story corner. His colleagues may take some convincing, though. During the show in Menominee, I went downstairs to the check-out desk. All the librarians had their hands over their ears, or shouting at each other to be heard. I asked them how many of these concerts could they stand each year. One of the youth services librarians, a balding man with a mustache, didn't even try to talk over the noise. He just held up his hand with his index finger to his thumb. Zero, he mouthed. Alex Blumberg is one of the producers of our program. The High Strung are on the internet at www.thehighstrung.com. It's been a year since Alex did that story. And this summer, The High Strung have expanded to a nationwide library tour: 60 libraries, 42 states. Coming up, Jonathan Goldstein and his own father. Quien es mas macho? 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, Image Makers, stories of people and institutions who are worried what the world thinks of them, and who take action, decisive action. In this half of the show, we have a son who wants to know what his father makes of him, and a father who needs a little image boost with his own son. Let's move on to Act Two of our program. Act Two, Goldstein On Goldstein. This second story's a subject that perhaps we don't get enough of here on the public radio: manliness. I find that even the men I know who you think would be least concerned with manliness are still completely concerned with it. I have this friend, Michael, who is constantly talking about what is manly and what is not manly. If you do something that he thinks is impressive, the way that he tells you that he thinks it's impressive is he says to you, very manly. He says it all the time. And he's gay. He's a gay. It's almost like being a gay has made him more obsessed with manliness than any of my straight friends. If you're a man, I think it just comes with the territory. Jonathan Goldstein's been thinking about his own manliness lately. He has this story. I've always assumed that my father, Buzz Goldstein, has never seen me as an especially manly guy. As a kid, I did not play sports. I had no interest in tools, and I did not dream of muscle cars. My father, though, was an old-school manly man. Growing up, I watched him charm his way out of traffic tickets, whistle for cabs, and say things like va-va-voom, all things I cannot now help but think of as being a part of a manliness from a bygone era. When he poured whiskey, it was always into a washed-out mustard jar, and it was always at least three or four ounces in a shot. Or the way he had of saying, "Listen pal" in his undershirt and flip-flops, his very extended finger, as rigid as a pool cue, aimed straight at your face, never failed to let you know, in no uncertain terms, who was the alpha-est male in the room. Even the random things my father did seemed drenched in a kind of casual, hairy-knuckled machismo. Like, the fact that he liked grape soda made that soda seem infinitely more barrel-chested than a gutless glass of strawberry pop or a [? fay ?] can of nectar. Another thing that I consider manly about my father is that he is a loud man. He is genetically incapable of whispering. When we go to movies, he will turn to me right in the middle and say, just like we were sitting alone, "Isn't that the guy who played the father on The Rockford Files?" My dad is now 70, and he still keeps curling weights beside his bed. I am 35, and my own brand of manliness, a gentler, less in your face and, dare I say, woosier form of manliness, is something I've always attributed to a generational difference between my father and me. My father grew up in the Bronx in the '40s, a time and place where threatening out your window to strangle someone's barking dog was merely a friendly morning hello. I wanted to talk with my father about the things that he holds to be manly, and maybe in so doing, figure out what it was that I lacked back then, and still lack to this day. Do you think there's certain things that a man should know how to do, like how to handle himself? Should he know how to box a little bit? Yes. Yeah. A man should know how to defend himself. In other words, a man should not have to take any guff from anybody. And my father doesn't. Whereas, above my head, there is a sign that reads, please deposit guff. When I was eight, my father decided to teach me how to box. We stood in the foyer of our apartment, knuckle to knuckle, the transgressiveness of it making me giddy and, as my mother would say, overheated. To my eight-year-old brain, the idea of play-fighting with my father ranked somewhere between eating a sidewalk-length roll of candy buttons and watching the Globetrotters on the Wide World of Sports. My father stood beneath the chandelier, dodging, weaving, and jabbing, like a young Willie Pep. I thought this was great. With my arms doing a kind of Dutch windmill, I leapt into the fray, and almost immediately, my mouth connected with one of his fists. My lip split and began to leak blood all over the powder blue, shag carpeting. I started to cry. Then I have this memory of my mother on my father's back, pulling at his hair in a crazed attempt to keep him from mauling me. I cried even harder. I was crying because I had never been hit in the face before, and the pain was so completely new and alien to me. But I was also crying because I felt so bad for my father. Here he was, just trying out his brand of father and son kibitzing with his kid, and now he had to deal with my blood on his hands. Even so, a few days later at a family get-together, with my father by my side, I couldn't stop myself from showing every single person I met my puffed-out lip. Then, excitedly, I would tell them that it was my father who had given me this puffed-out lip. Our brawl in the foyer would be the last time my father and I would ever play-fight together. Do you feel that smoking lends a man a certain kind of manliness? Oh, yeah. Don't forget, we grew up with a certain stereotype when we were young. You might not remember this, but I remember one time we were on our way to, maybe it was a bar mitzvah. We stopped at a gas station to get some gas, and you picked me up a pack of cigarettes. And you said that it's important for a young man to smoke at a social gathering. I did? How old were you at the time? I was probably about, maybe 19. Really? I did, eh? Well, because, probably, at that time, that was my way of thinking. Why did I start smoking? Not because I enjoyed smoking. The reason I smoked was because I was, first of all, I was never as tall as my friends. I was always shorter for my age, and it made me feel taller. It made me feel as if I belonged, and it gave me something to do with my hands. Wait. Just go back for a second. How did smoking make you feel taller? Because all the people, at that time, all the people were smoking. My father smoked. My brother was smoking. How old were you when you started smoking? 15. So I started at a pretty young age. Wait. If I was a taller man, would you have felt that smoking was as important? Probably, yes. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. But still, during my teen years, on the odd occasion when I did smoke, rather than taking my cues from Humphrey Bogart or Danny Zuko, gritting the butt between my teeth like I meant business and ashing often with forceful, deliberate taps, I chose to smoke like David Bowie circa 1972, allowing my cigarette to hang limply from my lips, pretending to be too whacked out on goof balls to care that my ash was six inches long. My obsession with David Bowie, a languidly, androgynous glam rocker, wasn't something that troubled my father so much as it simply wasn't anything he could understand. My father preferred singers like Joe Cocker, men who deliver their lyrics as though painfully screaming them from a locked toilet stall. In his day, liking someone like David Bowie would have been the domain of degenerate officers in black and white movies about Nazis. But to this day, whenever I'm over at my parents and Bowie's on Entertainment Tonight, my father will call me over and say, your pal's on TV. And we will both sit there in silence watching David Bowie, both of us wondering what the other one could possibly be thinking. The thing is, my father is much more forthright when it comes to letting my friends know what he's thinking. With my friends, he is forthright on a great many subjects. If we're downtown, and we're hanging around with one of my friends like, say, Howard, you'll be more inclined to point out a good-looking woman, or something like that, in a way that you probably wouldn't do with me as much. Yeah. I guess I'd feel more comfortable because you're my son. You know, these are things that you don't do with your son. But I've pointed out good-looking women with you, Johnny. I've walked with you. I mean, look, I've got eyes in my head. My father did it with me. He'd look at a woman and say, "Oh boy, va-va-voom!" There was one time I remember, where we were walking through, I think it was a parking lot. And I was, maybe, about 18, 19. And we were passing by this other young woman. And you turned to me. And you noticed that that woman looked at me, and you said, "You see that woman over there? I could tell that you could make her." Yeah. And then you said, "You see, I could tell these things. You can't tell these kind of things because you're more into books." You were more preoccupied, yeah. You were more preoccupied. These weren't the things that were of the greatest interest to you. And so you thought maybe I would miss something like that? Yeah. I guess I was more aware of these things. You know, as a young man, I went out with a lot of women. I had a lot of experience and I could instinctively tell these things. And so how would you characterize that difference between me and you? I was a different type. I wanted to wear nice clothes, and go out with good-looking women, and drive a nice car. And you were never interested in these sort of things. Mm-hmm. I've always taken my father saying that I was more into books or I was never into these kinds of things as being a polite way of saying that I just wasn't a regular guy. And I have to say, I've never felt hurt by that, nor have I taken it personally. From a young age, I've always believed that defying familial expectations is an important part of self-actualization. I learned that in books. Whining is unmanly, complaining and bitching a lot. So do you think there's a certain kind of stoicism, that that's necessary? I don't think. It can't be forced. It's either you have it or you don't. When you think of me, do you think of me as possessing a certain quiet manliness? Yes. No, I want you to be honest. I'm being honest, Johnny, because I feel that you have done a lot of things that I wish I had done when I was younger. You were more assertive with things that you didn't-- you see, I went along with things a lot, whereas you didn't. You see? Let me give you an example of what I mean. You know my mother was a very domineering woman, even after I married. I just accepted the decisions made by them, and that was unmanly, yes. My father's mother had talked my father into quitting high school so he could get a job and help support the family. It was a move he always regretted. I remember my father's mother as a small woman with a knack for getting my father to do whatever she wanted. Like, if she needed a lift to the hairdresser in the middle of the day, he would drop everything at once and go. The phone would ring. He would listen in silence, and he would go. Even once my father was married, his mother would still interfere in all sorts of small day-to-day things. For example, we were shopping one day on Kings Highway, your mother and I, and we saw a cute fireplace. It wasn't a real fireplace, it was an electric fireplace. And we fell in love with it. It was black metal, and we were ready to buy it. And I happened to bring up the topic to my mother and she just pooh-poohed, and just discouraged us, and discouraged me. And then I changed my mind as a result of that. It was impractical. And what do you need this for? And what are you wasting your money on garbage like that? And I'll be honest with you, that was unmanly. OK, if you want to talk about being unmanly, that was unmanly. I should have taken a strong position in saying, look, this is between me and my wife. We enjoy this. It's going to give us happiness, and it's none of your business. You know? I respect you. I could have said I love you, but you've got to keep your nose out of my business and what goes on between me and my wife. These are things that I never did. And, if I were like you, my mother would have never gotten away with the things that she did. I really didn't expect this. Of course, I've never doubted that my father liked me, but I always felt that it was in spite of what I wasn't and not because of what I was. And what I was was a man who was willing to ignore his own mother. By the time my father was my age now, he had already served in the Army overseas. He had already entered himself in Golden Glove boxing matches, had two kids, and was working two jobs. And me? When my mother tells me not to put my feet up on the coffee table, I continue to put my feet up on the coffee table. This is what my father is impressed by. This is what makes me a man. I don't want to say this disappoints me, but sometimes I can't help wanting to be manly in exactly the way that he's manly. When I was a child, my father had chronic back pain, and I was very proud of how loud he could yell in agony. So great was his pain and his rage about his pain, that, one night, he actually yanked the bed board off the bed. After it happened, I would brag to my friends about how strong my father was. From then on, whenever I pulled off some unexpected physical tour de force, like opening a stuck jar of Nutella, my face as red and squinty as a clenched fist, my friends would say that I was pulling out the Goldstein bed board. That's the kind of manly I want to be. That's when I feel at one with my legacy. Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the radio show, Wire Tap, on the CBC, and the author of the novel, Lenny Bruce is Dead. All right. Talk at the volume you're going to be speaking in. This is the volume that I'm going to be speaking in. Why don't we start off by giving me a real listen pal. Listen pal, when I speak, I like people to listen to me and pay attention to what I'm saying. Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you hear me? Give me a listen pal along with imagining that someone just cut in front of you in line. Listen, pal. Do you know there's a line? We've all been waiting here for quite a while. There's a line that goes in the back. You don't start here in the middle or go to the front, you go to the back. All right. Now you have to get a little bit more aggressive because he's not listening to you. Hey! What are you, dense? Don't you hear what I'm saying to you? You don't listen? Don't ignore me. Don't ignore me because I'm not going to let you go in front of me. Don't ignore me. That only infuriates me. And that's the last thing he wants to do. That's right. Act Three, Heart Shaped Box. Seven years ago, Doug Hill was diagnosed with a rare brain disease called frontal lobe dementia. On our show a while back, we had a story about Doug's son, Nick, who was very young at the time and struggling to understand the disease. His disease slowly shrinks your brain. Your personality goes, your logic, your emotions. It's pretty brutal, and it's fatal. About a year ago, Doug got much worse and his family started preparing for the end. And, as you might understand, it's been a long, slow, complicated goodbye over the years that he has deteriorated. The therapist said that, for Nick to find closure, for Nick, especially to understand his feelings when his dad finally died, what he was going to need is a picture in his head of who his dad really was back when he was well. Doug needed to be real if Nick was going to be able to let him go. And the job of producing this important biography of this person who Nick, kind of, didn't exactly really know anymore, fell to Nick's mom, Julie. My son is 10 years old. He's tall, and thin, and blonde, and freckled, and smart, and funny, and generous. In other words, Nick is his father all over again. Yet, Nick knows so little about his dad. He's too young to remember what Doug was like before he got sick. His father was far more than the early symptoms of the disease, like Doug constantly repeating himself, or compulsively eating every sweet in sight, or irrationally walking in front of moving traffic. So giving this complete picture of Doug, this hugely important job, falls to me. I'm 43 years old and both my parents are alive. That makes me supremely unqualified, not to mention overwhelmed. I married Doug 20 years ago. Where do I even start? Apparently, with objects. My friend Adrian lost both her parents by the time she was 19. She's told me she still yearns for stuff that her parents touched or carried around, that somehow they connect her to them. So when Doug got sick, Adrian told me to collect simple, everyday items, and that, one day, they'd mean the world to Nick. So early on, Doug's things started making their way into a box, a casket of memories. The box is about the size of a child's shoe box, and it's made of tin. The remnants of all the colors it once was, red, and green, and yellow, poke through its rusty patina. Long ago, it sat in Doug's grandmother's home in the WASP-y end of Indianapolis, and Doug loved it then as much as Nick does now. Now the box sits on top of a Barrister bookcase in our hallway. It's deliberately up high so that Nick has to ask a grown-up to get it down. Staying slightly out of reach keeps it precious. Plus, this way, the story that the box contains has a ready narrator. There's no master plan for what's been collected: eyeglasses, a press pass, a passport, pictures. Often I've wondered, how could these things be so important? For the first six years after Doug got sick, Nick didn't want to look inside the box. It scared him. But as his daddy got sicker, on Saturday afternoons I started bringing the box down, combing through the stuff myself. Slowly, Nick would tread to my side. And now he calls the box his treasure. But each time Nick and I go through the box, the discussion is different and surprising, never quite going the way I think it will. One of the smaller items in the box is a laminated work ID with CNN's logo. It has Doug's name and the title Video Journalist on it, plus an amazingly handsome picture of him at 22 years old. When Nick pulled it out, it seemed like a great opportunity to make Doug human. I told Nick how his dad was a studio cameraman there, and how, one night, the handle on the camera's wheeled pedestal hooked onto Doug's belt loop as he walked away. Doug's camera was live, so the anchorman and the whole newsdesk had to list to keep up with Doug's rolling shot. Nick laughed a little, but he steered the conversation in a totally different direction. "Did daddy ever work for Fox News?" "No, never." "Oh, thank God. Daddy was a Democrat." And while I thought Nick might want to know his dad was capable of making a goofy mistake, what Nick took away from the work ID was that his daddy leaned left. Nick loves looking at the pictures, pictures of Doug, especially when he was a kid, when he was 10 in Florida, and when he was 12, sitting at a birthday party with his namesake grandfather. And even more precious are the pictures of Nick and Doug together. There's one of Doug holding our very surprised 18-month-old boy upside down. And one shows Nick as a toddler sitting on his dad's lap as they steer a boat. Yet another shows them sleeping next to each other with Nick curled against his dad. The questions come again. "When did that happen?" I try to remember as many details as I can. "We were playing hide-and-seek in the living room when Daddy started swinging you around." "We drove a golf cart to the marina in Florida the day we went out on Uncle Larry's boat. And when you napped together, we were at a beach house near Charleston." At the bottom of the box hides Doug's wedding ring. It came off years ago when his hand swelled and the ring cut off circulation. Nick loves to touch it, sliding this metal hula hoop around his number two-pencil fingers. But some of the objects in the box aren't as popular as others. Nick has never put on Doug's eyeglasses. Cuff links and tuxedo studs sit untouched along with the antique pocket watch I bought Doug for our 10th wedding anniversary. But time and again, it's clear that my friend Adrian was right: sometimes throw-away items have the most meaning. A few months ago, Nick wanted new toys. The policy in our house is he buys toys for himself with his own allowance money. He'd been eyeing some Dungeons & Dragons figures and was short by $10. He was greatly disappointed, not wanting to wait a few more paydays. Then I almost saw the light bulb flash over Nick's head. "I know. I could use the money from Daddy's change jar." When Doug was well, each night he'd come home from work, drop his wallet on the table, and dump his change into a blue ceramic jar. Sometime after Doug moved to the nursing home four years ago, the change jar found a new job: it holds up a family portrait that had lost its easel. This jar has hid on my mantle in plain sight for years, forgotten, at least by me. I pulled it down. For more than an hour, our hands got dirty counting the change that once sat in Doug's pockets. We separated the pennies from the dimes and the quarters from the nickles. And we found things like a New York City subway token, and Canadian pennies, and a receipt for a haircut from 1998. The entire time we talked about his dad, the man I made this beautiful boy with. We counted up more than $50, a fortune to a fourth grader. Nick was amazed. "What would Daddy want me to do with all this money?" "Well, he'd probably want you to save some, then spend some on fun, like those toys you really want." Nick was thrilled, aching for his new toys. On Saturday, we made the trip to the bank and then bought his heart's desire. Back home, Nick ripped open the boxes, joyous for the score, but 10 minutes later he came to me with regretful eyes. "What's wrong, Nick?" He sighed, and swallowed hard, and began to cry. "Daddy's money isn't in the house any more." Pennies, dimes, and nickels, stuff he'd barely bend over to pick up. He felt he'd betrayed his father treating those coins merely as currency. I held him. I tried explaining that these toys, the money in the bank, these were like gifts from his father. But it didn't help. "Those coins were Daddy's, and they'll never be here again." We've lost so much of Doug already. Long ago, we let go of his humor, his writings, his displays of love and kindness. Inch by inch, we've buried him, with each day bringing yet another tiny, unbearable loss. So losing these little things, even just pennies, it's the last straw. It's why the box is so important. It's where these treasures from Doug remain safe for Nick, for Nick, but not for me. I have a different treasure trove of Doug's love, and he stands right next to me. He's tall, and thin, and blonde, and freckled, and smart, and funny, and generous, and he's 10 years old. Julie Hill, in Chicago. Three months after she put together this story, Doug finally died. Well, our program was produced today by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. 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 is actually sitting right in our studio today. For once, he's right here. Torey, why don't you just get over to this mic. Right here. Don't be nervous. Here, I'll open your mic. Dar! Flar! Figgy floo! Vee floogle ooh! Flogalo vase! I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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It's This American Life from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. OK, the first thing you need to know is that the nuns came to Todd. Todd did not go to the nuns. His wife worked with these nuns at a Catholic charity. The Todd in the story actually is Todd Bachmann, who works on our radio show. He's our production manager, which means that he sees the bills get paid and that the equipment works and everything runs smoothly. Anyway, a couple years ago, these nuns that his wife worked with asked him to help out with this big black-tie charity event that they were throwing, this annual event. Donors pay a lot of money. There's a meal in a big hotel ballroom. And at some point during this thing, there's a presentation on stage about what the charity does. That's the part that the nuns wanted Todd to work on. One of the nuns actually asked him to direct this part of it. And I remember I just had all these delusions of grandeur. I was so passionate about it and so ready. And I just had it in my mind where these people in their tuxedos, they're at this event, and maybe there'd be some activity like chinking of the silverware and some hushed, mild conversation that's like almost whispering. And then my work turns on, and then pow! Silence. People actually listen. And they're moved. Like, yeah, this is totally what I can do. In previous years of this event, for the presentation part of it the nuns had some of the people who the charity had helped-- elderly people and young mothers-- come up onto the stage and read these little essays. And apparently, it felt a lot like school. You know, they got real nervous. It just felt like class somehow. And Todd thought that he could do better. He had a vision. He had a vision, I'm telling you. He had just started working at our radio show at the time, and he thought, OK, you know he could do? He could interview these people on tape and then choose a couple of really, really great moments and play those to the crowd. And then people would come on up and take a bow or something. And on the tape, they would sound all relaxed and natural, and it would totally get to people. Maybe they'd even make more money out of it this way. And the sister in charge of the whole thing agreed with all of his ideas. But as the event got nearer, something strange slowly became clear. She kept on really overemphasizing, "well, you're the director. So whatever you say, you're the director." And what was funny about it is she never told me. It was so deft of her because she never clearly said, "no, no, no-- we're never going to do your idea." It was kind of like always hinted, like, "yeah, yeah, yeah-- we'll get to it. We'll get to it." But they never did get to it. And finally, after weeks and weeks of meetings, at the rehearsal, Todd's responsibility at the event were finally made clear to him, and they were not at all what he expected. It came down to there was a CD player, and she wanted me to just hit play on this CD song, which was 'Thank You," by Natalie Merchant. You got played by a nun. I got played by a nun. Here I thought that she actually wanted my input, and I remember being really frustrated and conflicted because I was really mad at this nun. And I just felt really guilty for being mad at this nun. And so I just felt really petty. I just think that if you can be used by a nun, man, you can be used by anybody. Yeah, exactly. I was coddled, like massaged, like, director, director. There's a whole of experiences like this. You're asked to do something, you think it's go one way, it turns out to be something completely different, and then you're stuck. You can't do anything about it. It's too late to quit. It's too late to get out of it. This can happen to you at work. It can happen to you with friends. It can happen on a plane. It can happen on a train. It could happen on a run. It can be caused by a nun. Today on our program we hear two rather dramatic examples of this phenomenon. Our program today, Not What I Signed Up For. Act One of our program, The Double Whammy, a story of someone who gets into two situations where things work out very differently than she thought they would. One of those situations with the president of the United States. Act Two, Small Fish, Smaller Pond. We have a story by Nick Hornby. Stay with us, and we will thank you. Act One. This story is one of those stories that starts off as a tragedy and ends up not exactly as a comedy, but it's one of those things where it just sort of sits there, you know, halfway between tragedy and comedy. It starts sad. Marian Fontana. Her husband was a firefighter. He dies at the World Trade Center. And then after 9/11, she finds herself embroiled in a series of political fights with the city. The first one is to see that her husband's firehouse isn't shut down by the city. And then it goes on to how the cleanup is going on at the ground zero site. And in the course of this she starts an organization with some of the firefighters' widows. And she talks a lot to the press. She talked about these issues. She talked about the conditions that firefighters were working under when the World Trade Center attack happened. Her husband was earning less than $26,000 a year. Anyway, so she's getting maybe 100 calls a day from all kinds of press. From Polish TV to Newark Radio. And she had to choose. My criteria for doing media was that I needed to be able to talk about the organization and the site recovery. And that's really all I want to speak to. I didn't want to go on any tabloids or talk shows or anything like that. Did you find yourself in the situation, though, where in order to actually get out the message that you wanted to get out that you would be doing shows and would be giving interviews where a part of the interview would be, "well, tell us your sad story," and then another part would be, "OK, so now, what are you here to talk about?" Yes, yes. In fact, almost all of them do that. Because a lot of them were focused on the fact that my husband died on our anniversary. It was our eighth wedding anniversary, and they wanted to kind of give them a blow by blow of the day and how-- and I could understand that. I mean, it's human nature, I think, to want to know what happened. But I can understand why an interviewer would want to hear that, as well. Another firefighter's wife, who was a PR person, helped her field the 100 press calls a day and figure out which interviews to do. Which leads us to this story, about a time when Marian ended up in a very different situation than she thought she was signing up for. I was usually running on the cell phone from one place to the next, and that's when my PR person called and told me that there was a news show that I had never heard of called E-Online, and would I want to go on that and speak about the organization. And I said, "sure," not knowing what it was. And what did you understand about E-Online? At the time, I just figured it was some kind of web news thing that I didn't know about, not being very computer savvy, and that they'd get their little byte about what I do and that would be it. And whenever I did these news shows, there would be a tiny little green room and a tiny little makeup room. You know, the new shows are all five minute interviews. You're brought into sometimes the newsroom itself, and they sit you in a chair and you talk to a camera, you never talk to a person. So I was very startled to arrive outside of these studios where there were about 100 Puerto Rican girls in down coats and giant earrings kind of lined up to go into the Fox studios. And I figured, "oh, they're probably going to see Ricki Lake or something." And then got ushered into this back room, and there was a huge maze of doors, and we stopped at this door that had my name on it. And that was in itself kind of startling and not protocol for what I was used to. I opened the door and there was a fruit basket and a phone and makeup mirrors. And I went, "my, my, my-- what is this?" And they said, "make yourself comfortable. We'll come in and get you into makeup." And I said, "OK." so I started making phone calls. I was supposed to be at an Eliot Spitzer meeting, and I was missing it. Eliot Spitzer the attorney general? Right. We were dealing with the victim's comp issue at the time. And so next thing you know, I'm being ushered into the hallway. And I start to hear the audience, and they're going "whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo." Like the Arsenio Hall Show used to do. And then I really started to get worried. I said, "what is this?" I said, "what is going on?" What is E-Online? Well, I misunderstood. It was the Iyanla show. They walked us from the back across the stage, and I saw these big giant letters spelling Iyanla. I Y A N L A. I quickly realized I was definitely in the wrong place, or completely misunderstood what the show was about. And so I leaned over to the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] woman next to me, and I said, "what is this?" And she said, "oh, it's Iyanla." She's like, "the late-night Oprah." And I said, "oh, oh, OK." And I'm trying to turn to the other woman on the other side of me and find out more when they ushered us to be quiet. And they did a countdown, and the cameras rolled. And out comes this very pretty African American woman with tightly cropped hair. How's everybody? [AS A GROUP] Good! Good! I know you! Don't I look gorgeous? Tell the truth. She's like, "today's show is about people who've been to hell and back." And I said, "oh, OK. This is going to be interesting." And you know, this was in December. And they had just found my husband, actually, on December 6. And so I had just had a funeral for him, I had just had a burial. And you know, I was really not back from hell, clearly. Today you're going to meet people who, when they were backed up against the wall, hmph! They learned something about themselves. And they've taken the scars and they've turn them into lessons, positive lessons. And so I was kind of sitting there, and they brought up the short, very fit guy first. And they showed this the video that he had made that looked like the lens had been smeared in Vaseline, you know. And it was this sad music, and they showed a close-up of a liquor glass. And they said, "Tim had a happy life until he fell into drugs and alcohol and was arrested for drunk driving." And you know, the sad music plays. "But he turned himself around when he started to do triathlons, and then teach other kids the power of being physically active." And you know, everyone starts to be very moved. And the girls, the Puerto Rican girls behind me who were outside start crying, and they're all very touched by this video. And then the lights come up and Iyanla introduced him about his role coaching teenagers. I'm always so grateful that God is god of a second chance. Any moment can be the moment. She was using all these platitudes. I just remember her saying, "you know you hit rock bottom because God made the rock." And I knew this time, that was it. When it's time, it's time. There was an insincerity there. I'm being inspired. I used to sit and I'd think, "I want to do that someday. I think it's neat." Wow. Did the thought occur to you, "I can just leave, I can walk out the door?" Well, we were sitting in the front row, and there were a lot of cameras on stage. And I guess we were [? miked up. And I kind of felt trapped. I really didn't feel like I was in a position to leave. And I couldn't even talk. They kept silencing us and telling us, it's "quiet on the set." We're back, and we're talking to people who've been to hell and back. Then we came back from commercial, and they brought up a very large woman with gray hair. And she also had a film. And she was from Boston, so she had this very thick Boston accent. She's like, "Mark was a shy and beautiful boy." But on Christmas Eve, 1997, my life as a wife and mother of three was tragically turned upside down when-- It's all about her son and how he went next door, and there was a gun, and he accidentally shot himself. So instead of celebrating the holiday, we were faced with picking out a casket and planning our-- It was very sad. And they showed all these pictures. And, again, the girls were crying behind me. And I was crying at this point, because it was just very sad. And she's crying on stage. And Iyanla was sitting, and she's still making all these platitudes. And the woman, the big African American woman next to me starts shaking and she's like, "oh, Lord, I'm so nervous. I'm next, I'm next." And I'm about to ask her, "what did you do?" And they start with a video of how her son was killed, I guess eight years before, and was shot in front of her. And she "couldn't get over the death of her son. And she started drinking, and she started smoking, and she gained 150 pounds." And then she interviews her, and she's crying, and, again, everybody's crying. And it's very sad, she can't get over her son. And Iyanla starts saying, you know, "why can't you get over Earl? You've got to get over, girl. You know you do, you know you do." And she's like, "I can't. I see his face. I see his face in my dreams, and he used to call me shorty." I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. Say it now. Tell him. You've got to say goodbye. I just don't want to. Well, you have to my darling. You know, they're having this very intense interaction, and everyone's crying. And then they cut to commercial, and she says, "when we come back, we have a 9/11 widow who's going to help Yvonne come back from hell." And that's when I really started to panic. And you'll hear about her brave battle through the grief, and we'll talk about her road to recovery when we come back. And the bring me up into the chair across from Yvonne, who's crying. Oh, my. You know, she's a mess. She just can't stop sobbing. The makeup people are running out and trying to reapply her foundation. Oh, my. Yeah. And I start trying to wave to the director, who is this kind of guy with a Caesar haircut. And him and Iyanla are going over cards, and I'm trying to get their attention, like, "excuse me, excuse me, I'm"-- you know. And at that point, are you trying to plan out something to say to her? Yeah, I felt like, you know, what can I possibly say to this woman who lost her son? And especially since I have a son. And next thing you know, we start, they go to silence and they countdown again. And she starts to introduce me as a 9/11 widow who started an organization, and her first question was, "Marian, what advice can you give to Yvonne?" And I completely froze. I was looking at her face, she looked so sad and heartbroken, and I was so sad and heartbroken that I just felt completely incapable of speaking. I felt completely inept, and so I really fumbled. And I said well, um-- I would just say reach out. Reach out to people who've gone through what you've gone through. I know it's hard to, you know, you think it's always going to be sad, but we tell funny stories of staying up at night and obsessing. And there's a lot of different ways to be with other-- and comiserating is just so healing. Well, let's call it group healing, not comiseratin'. You know, I could tell Iyanla was not happy with my response because she was flipping through her cards. And she actually stopped for a second when we went off air, and said, "I just don't know if I'm really clear on what I'm supposed to be doing here." And she's like, "well, I just want you to give her some advice." And I was like, "OK." And they go back on and I said, "you know, I just think maybe being active or joining an organization or"-- you know, so it was really clearly uncomfortable. And after a while, Iyanla just gave up on me and turned back to Yvonne and just said, "Yvonne, I'm going to give you an exercise," and made her start speaking to her as if she were Earl. Tell me what he would say to you. Right now. I think he would say-- No. Tsst. You say it, because you know what he would say. "Shorty,"-- I think, I know, I know that he would say that he's in a better place. So, "Mama, shorty, I'm in a better place." What else? Take care of his baby girl. "Mama, take care of my baby girl. But most important, Mama, I want you to take care of yourself. You know I don't like to see you like this. If you know I'm in a better place, and if you know I'm watching, do it for me." I think the whole time I was in there, this show, To Hell and Back, just kept echoing in my head, going, I'm in hell right now. Right here, right now, watching this play itself out. What's so crazy about that is you're saying you weren't sure what to say, but who would know what to say? It's a situation were, what can possibly be said to somebody, you know? Yeah. I really felt for this woman. She was so heartbroken. And yeah, it's hard. It's hard for people on both sides. I've been on both ends of it. At my husband's wake there were 3,000 people who came up to me. And there is nothing to say, and people feel so uncomfortable because, "I'm sorry" is all we have really. And that is all we have to say about death. So I don't think there's anything better to say. You know, one of the things about this whole experience you had that's so strange is that somehow, like, if you think about the people who they were bringing up, like, there was the guy who was the alcoholic. And then there was the woman who lost her son. And then there's the woman who had had both things happen to her. And then they bring you on as like, here's the very worst thing we can think of. Yeah, I didn't even think of it that way. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you're trumping all of these other tragedies because of 9/11, right? Right. And then you're going to be the expert who's going to step in and heal and solve the problem of the people who are sort of less expert than you because you've gone through something so much more intense than they could even understand somehow. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I do. And then ironically, I felt the complete opposite because they had the benefit of time passing so that they could heal a little bit. And I felt so fresh in my wound that I really felt like I was completely incapable of giving them insight. But I felt that way a lot about 9/11 in general. People really wanted to learn something from it or connect to in some way or understand it through us, and it was a very strange, and continues to be a very strange experience. At that point, you're sort of like a walking symbol. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Has that worn off over time? No, actually. It makes it very hard to date. [LAUGHING] It makes it hard to do a lot of things. Like what happens when you date? Well, you know, I've had guys say, "I'm never going to fill your husband's boots" and things like that. So I think it's hard to meet people, and who are not intimidated by that. So at some point in the weeks and months after 9/11, you really became a kind of spokesperson through a series of accidents, almost. Yes. Were there other times that you found yourself as a spokesperson in just very strange situations? Yes. I mean, I've always been outspoken. I have a very political family. We're all very opinionated people. Oh, wait, and you're New Yorkers, so you're probably Democrats. Right. Did you find yourself in a situation where you were meeting, like, high level administration officials? Did you meet the president? Did you meet-- Yes. Really? Yes. I met the president three times. And it was very surreal. I went down for a bill signing, which was a bill he was signing to help the victims families with taxes for that first year. And that is where I met Hillary Clinton, who then invited me down to the State of the Union address, where I met the president again. And then in the second anniversary, which I think was the oddest time for me to meet the president. My vice president of my organization, who, his name is Lee, and he lost his son, who was a firefighter. And he was a firefighter himself, so he was among all the fathers down at ground zero who were looking for their sons. And his best friend, John Vigiano, had lost two sons-- one was a police officer and one was a firefighter, and they had made a short film about him that won an Academy Award. And for the second anniversary, President Bush was supposed to come up to ground zero and do the whole anniversary thing and he couldn't, so instead they had a small viewing of this movie and a kind of party for John Vigiano. And I don't know why. And so I told Lee I didn't want to go down because not only was it the day before the second anniversary, but I did not feel comfortable with this administration at all and what they were doing. And so-- This was in the run-up to Iraq by then. Right. Oh, yeah. We were already in Iraq. And so I felt very uncomfortable. I said, "oh, you don't want me to go." He always teased me about having a big mouth and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. And he said, "no, I absolutely want to go with you because Governor Pataki is going to be there." And we just had a rally that day about the memorial and wanting ground zero to be sacred ground and it to be treated as such. Pataki had kind of backpedaled on some things he'd said before, so we had this big rally. And he was going to be at this small dinner party at the White House. And so once it was presented that he was going to be there and it was a chance to talk to him about this, then I said, yes, and we went down on the train. And the rally lasted so long we were literally running for the train, trying to make this dinner. Stopped at my friend's house. He told me it was formal, so I put on this sparkling blue gown. And we arrive at the White House and go through this elaborate security system, and I walk out into the Rose Garden, and everyone's wearing business attire, black suits, included the women in brown suits, and I am in this sparkling blue dress that I wore at my sister's wedding. And I just saw all the secret service men kind of, I could just imagine what they whispering into their lapels. Like, "whore in the blue dress has just entered the garden." And I was furious at Lee, who's, you know, he's in his late fifties and short, and I felt like I looked like his hooker, basically. So we went in, and-- Which is really not a good feeling in the Rose Garden. No. I was so self-conscious. I'm wearing completely the wrong thing. And I get a glass of wine, and all I really want to do is look at the White House, because I'm like, "wow, I'm in the White House, and so I want to look at the architecture." And literally, if I took two steps out of the garden, there were about nine secret service men following me. And so I was playing with the dog because Lee made me promise not to do anything inappropriate, not to talk to anybody about my liberal politics. And so I was just waiting until Governor Pataki came. And then, you know, I'm looking around this odd conglomeration of people including, Maury Povich, and Condoleezza Rice, and the Rumsfelds. And it was just a very-- and I felt so uncomfortable. I just wanted to go home. I really was feeling kind of emotional about the anniversary and feeling like a hypocrite being there. And so we got up to Governor Pataki, and he talked to us about how hurt he was that we had this rally. And I talked to Libby Pataki about some widows that she knew. And you know, we chatted for a while and said what we needed to say, and then I was ready to go home. But then there was a buffet dinner and a film to see. So we had our buffet dinner, and I sat all the way in the back of the garden at the farthest picnic table in the back. And I'm eating quietly, waiting for Lee to join me, and I hear someone say, "is this seat taken?" And I look up and it's Donald Rumsfeld and his wife, and they want to sit at the table with me. And I was like, "no, nobody's sitting here, go ahead." So they sat down, and Lee joined me. And, of course, Lee having served in Vietnam and having about 28 medals on his class-A firefighter uniform immediately got into a conversation. And Donald Rumsfeld has just gotten back home from Afghanistan, so they were chatting about all this stuff. And I decided I would be a good friend to Lee and just talk to his wife Joyce about his daughter's rock climbing. So that's what I was being good, but half an ear was listening to their talk. And I was getting more and more upset, and I could feel my face turning red. And then finally, Rumsfeld turned and said, "Marian, what do you think about all of this?" And I said, "oh, you really don't want to know what I think." And he's like, "no, no, actually, I really do. I'm curious what you think." And I look at Lee to get permission if this is OK. And he nods. And I said, "well, actually, I think you used the death of my husband to go into a country we have no business being in." It felt kind of like a cop-out at the time because there was so much more I wanted to say. Is there some more direct thing that you can say than, "you're taking the death of my husband and using to start an inappropriate war?" What is the mean version of that? What were you holding back? No, I think I was actually being good. I think if Lee hadn't kicked me under the table, I probably could have said more. And he just kind of-- everything kind of got quiet. Rumsfeld nodded, and he said, "thank you," and turned back to Lee and they continued their conversation. At which point they called us into the screening room to see the film that was made about John Vigiano. And we got up and President Bush and his wife were standing there kind of receiving like a receiving line. And Lee introduced me to the president and said, "this is Marian Fontana. She lost her husband. Tomorrow is also her wedding anniversary." And he said, "oh, that's terrible, you got the double whammy." That's what he said. "the double whammy." And I was like, "yeah, the double whammy. That's right." And what did you want to say? What does a person say to that? I just thought it was truly one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. You know, there were some politicians that I felt were very sincere in their compassion for the families, and then there were some that I don't think understood what we were really feeling. President Bush introduced me to Laura and I said, "Hi, Libby." Because I had just been talking to Libby Pataki-- kind of screwed the names up. And Lee elbowed me again, and we slid into the row behind the president in this tiny little screening room. And so then I was kind of up against the wall and Lee was sitting next to me. And Condoleezza Rice and some other guy. And then the film began, and I didn't even think about what the film was about. And the screen opens and it's the towers burning, and the shaky cameras filming it. And I lost it like I've never lost it publicly in my life. I just started almost like having an epileptic seizure of grief. I just couldn't-- I was hysterical. I was sobbing really loud, and I had to get out of there. And so I literally just stood up, like a hysterical woman, which I'm not but suddenly became, and started clawing my way out of the row. And I stepped on Condoleezza Rice's foot. And they had pulled a curtain over the door and I couldn't find the knob. And I'm at the door shaking the curtains, and Lee is behind me trying to find the door. And the secret service men are just, you know, "the whore in the blue dress is on the move." And I ran out to the hall and I was just sobbing. And I couldn't stop crying. They were following me down the hall, these secret service men. I was screaming at them to leave me alone. It was just really terrible. And they got some young intern to show me into a small bathroom that was, like, hidden behind a bookcase and I sat in there for about half an hour just sobbing my eyes out. And that was my last meeting with President Bush. [LAUGHING] And do you think it's just the combination of being in the most alien environment possible and then suddenly just like missing your husband so intensely, like it's all coming together once? Like, that's why? Absolutely. That's exactly what happened. And it was the anniversary, and I really wanted to be home with my son. And I had that feeling in my stomach like I made the wrong choice. I shouldn't have come down. Did you feel protected by your public role in that sort of situation? That is, you're there as somebody whose husband died, and in a way that it gives you a sort of protection. You know what I mean? Yes. I mean, I really have never in my life felt more free to speak the way I want to speak. Because I felt like I lost everything, anyway, so there was really nothing to lose. Marian Fontana. She's written a book about her experience called A Widow's Walk: A Memoir of 9/11. Coming up, who'd have thought? Two stories in one program where somebody meets their president. 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 and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program: Not What I Signed Up For. I was six or seven when I found out how small our country was. I was the last one to know in my class. The teacher pinned a big map of Europe up on the wall and show us the countries around us. France, Switzerland, Italy. And I put up my hand and said, "where are we? Where's Champagne on the map?" And everyone, even the teacher, laughed at me. "You can't see [? Champagne ?] on the map, Stefan," she said. "Why not," I asked. "Because we're too small." "But we must be there somewhere." "Of course, we are, but you can't see us," the teacher said. "How can you not see a whole country on a map," I asked her. I could feel my ears getting red. The other kids knew something I didn't, I could tell. "Do you know why we're called [? Champagne," ?] the teacher asked me. I shrugged. "No, I thought it was because we were champions of something." All the other kids laughed again. "And what would we be champions of," said the teacher. "No, champe is French for field. We're called Champagne because our whole country is no bigger than a field. [? Champagne ?] used to be a field until we built the village on it." "You mean we're the only village in the country?" I couldn't believe it. Our village is tiny. "The other side of the stream is France," the teacher said. "Italy is behind the fence at the back of the village shop, and Monsieur Petit's garden is half in [? Champagne ?] and half in Switzerland. You could walk across our country in less than a minute. You could do it while holding your breath if you wanted to. You could even throw a stone across it so long as you threw high and didn't hit Monsiuer Petit's bedroom window. "Why didn't you tell me we lived in the smallest country in the world," I asked my mum when I go home. "I thought you knew," she said. "How am I supposed to know," I asked her, "if no one tells me." "What difference does it make, anyway," she said. "I know everyone who lives in our whole country," I said. "Well, that's nice, isn't it," my mother asked me. I wasn't sure about that. "Anyway, don't countries have presidents and prime ministers and things?" "Of course," said my mother. "We're no different." "OK, so who's the president of [? Champagne?" "I am," she said. I looked at her face to see if she was joking, but she wasn't. "You're the president of [? Champagne? ?] You?" "Yes," she said. "I thought you knew that, too." "You don't-- you don't do anything. You just make our sandwiches and do the washing." "I go to a meeting once a month in Monsieur Gramonde's bar," she said. I knew about those meetings. All the grownups in the village talk about litter, and mending the fences so that the cows don't wander into the road. "Well, what about saluting soldiers," I asked her. You have to remember, I was very young. "We don't have any soldiers," she said. "And what about putting people in prison?" "We don't have a prison," she said. And we went on like that for a little while until I understood that [? Champagne ?] isn't really a country in the same way that Italy is a country, or France, or America. It doesn't have its own stamps or money or television or prisons or soldiers or air force or navy. Anyone could invade us tomorrow if they wanted to, but no one wants to. There wouldn't be any point. No big countries need an extra field, a shop, and a cafe. But even though we didn't have most things you'd kind in normal countries, we did have our own soccer team. My dad broke his leg because of soccer. He wasn't playing, though. What happened was that he was watching a game on TV and the TV suddenly started flickering and then smoke came out of it and the screen went black. I wasn't watching. I was reading on the sofa. I hate all sports, especially soccer, because soccer is the one that people talk about the most. He was really annoyed that the TV was broken. He stood up and he kicked his chair. "What about the old one," my mother said. "The little one worked perfectly well." She was angry when my father bought a new TV. She said we didn't need a big screen, but that's because she only watches programs where people talk. She doesn't watch sport. If you need to see a tennis ball or a soccer ball, then a small TV is no good. "Where is it," my father said grumpily. "It's in the attic," said my mother. He was in too much of a hurry because he didn't want to miss any of the game. He got the ladder, climbed into the attic, and then fell when he was trying to carry the TV down again. We all heard the crack. We knew straightaway that he had broken something. Three days later, when he was pushing himself into the kitchen on his crutches at breakfast, he said to me, "you know what this means, don't you?" And I pretended I didn't, but I did. It was the first thing I thought of the moment he fell out. "What does it mean," I asked him. "It means you have to play," he said. I didn't say anything. "You have to," he said again. "I don't," I said. "There's no law that says so." Including my dad, there are exactly 11 men and boys in [? Champagne ?] who can run up and down a soccer pitch, and they all play for the national team. No one has ever refused, even though it's torture. We should be playing against other villages, but because we're a country, then we play against other countries. They're not big countries. We play against San Marino and the Vatican and places like that. But all these places have more than 11 players to choose from, and they all beat us hollow. San Marino, for example, usually lose their games against Italy or France by 9 or 10 goals. But when they play [? Champagne, ?] they beat us 30-0. No one had ever asked me to play before because I was too young, and because I wasn't any good at sports anyway. And, I'll admit it, I was a little bit fat. Not gross, just chubby, I suppose you'd call it. I spent a lot of time reading books and playing chess, and not so much time running around like a lunatic, which is how the other kids around here behave. But now I was 14, and I knew that if anything happened to any of the other players, I was the next in line. And now something had happened, to my dad, of all people. "How many kids of your age can say they've played soccer for their country," my dad asked. "It's not really much to boast about, is it," I said. "You're only asking me because there's no one else. If there was one other boy or man of the right age in the whole of Champagne, you wouldn't be asking me." "Everyone plays," said Dad. "Nobody has ever said no. It's your duty, Stefan, your duty as a citizen of [? Champagne." "You always have to have 11 players in a soccer team," I asked him. "I mean, everybody does?" Dad looked up at the ceiling and rolled his eyes. "I can't do it, Dad," I said. "I'll just make an idiot of myself." "But if you don't, none of us will be allowed to play," he said. "There are rules about this sort of thing. Anyway, we'd look bad. We'd be the country that didn't have enough players for a soccer team. "We're already the country that didn't have enough players for a soccer team. I'm not a player." "Play as a favor to me," he said. "To make me feel proud of you." "But that's just the thing," I said. "If I play, you'll be ashamed of me." And then I went into my bedroom and shut the door and read a book. A few days later, I was at home watching TV when there was a knock at the door. Mum and Dad were in the cafe having one of their meetings, but in [? Champagne ?] it's safe to leave your kids at home without a babysitter, and it's safe to answer the door. You'll always know the person standing on the other side. It was Monsieur Gramonde. "The president wants to see you," he said. My mom was still the president. No one else wanted the job, so people kept voting for her. There didn't seem to be any rules about how long you could stay president. I laughed. "I'll see the president later," I said. "It's not funny," he said. "She wants you to come to the cafe. Immediately." "She can talk to me when she comes home." "She'd be your mother then," Gramonde said. "This is presidential business, not family business." "And what happens if I refuse?" "Then I'll have to take you there by force. The president has given me permission to do so. She was worried that you'd be unhelpful." I didn't want to be dragged down to the cafe by Monsieur Gramonde, so I put my shoes on. All the grownups were in the cafe. My mother was sitting on her own in the middle of the room like the teacher used to do in kindergarten when she read us a story, with everyone else arranged around her. "Ah," she said. "Stefan, take a seat." Someone got a chair for me and put it inside the circle so that everyone could watch me talking to my mother. "This is so stupid," I said. Somebody tutted, probably because I'd been rude to the president. "I'll ignore that last remark," she said. "Is it right that you gave Monsieur Gramonde permission to bring me here by force," I asked. "I knew he wouldn't have to," she said. "You're a sensible boy." I looked at her. I didn't want to have an argument in front of everyone, but I wouldn't forget it. "You know why we've asked you to come here," she said. "I wasn't asked. I was ordered." "I'll ignore that, too," she said. "Do you know why you're here?" "I guess because of the soccer," I said. "You guessed right," said my mother, the president. "Because of the soccer. You've been given the honor of representing your country and you said no, is that correct?" "That is correct." "And you're aware that if you don't play, nobody can play?" "I suppose." "And you haven't changed your mind?" "No! I hate soccer, and I'm rubbish at it, as you know," I told her. I noticed my shoelace was undone, so I spent as much time as I could tying it up again. "Sometimes," the president said, "we have to do things we don't want to do. In wartime, young men have to go to war but they don't want to." "This isn't a war," I pointed out. "It's a dumb soccer match, and soccer sucks." "Right," said my mother. "OK, then. Will you wait outside for a few moments, please, Stefan? The council needs to talk in private." I stared at her, saw that she was serious, and left the cafe. They closed the door behind me so I couldn't hear anything. When I was let back in, I could see that my mother had a very serious expression on her face, and for a moment, I almost believed she was a president. "Stefan," she said. "We respect your decision not to play for our national team, but you must understand that living in our small country-- well, as a citizen of [? Champagne, ?] you are entitled to many things, things you probably take for granted. You attend our school. You use this cafe. You buy candy and cookies in the shop. You walk on our roads and paths. Those rights are now withdrawn." For a moment, I couldn't understand what she was saying. "You mean, I can't go to school?" "No." You might think that was no big deal, but it was. The only library was in the school, for example, and if I wasn't allowed to borrow books, I'd go crazy. "You're not joking?" "No." "You're not going to let me walk on the roads?" "No." I'd been given a prison sentence. I'd be stuck in my house forever. "I'm sorry if this seems unkind or unfair," my mother said. "But when you live in a small place, you have responsibilities. What you choose to do or choose not to do has much more of an effect than it would in a bigger country. We don't think you should be allowed to take without giving something back." My other shoelace had come undone. I tied it up. "OK," I said. "I'm in. I'll play, but only because no one gave me a choice." They didn't hear the last part, though, because they were all clapping. I didn't have to train. I told him that I wasn't going to, and that was the one thing they let me get away with. The rest of the team met every Tuesday evening. They always ran a couple of miles first. They usually jogged up the hill into Switzerland. We can't even go for a run inside our country because it's too small, unless you want to run random round the field. I mean, I know I should have gone to training. I hadn't kicked a ball since I was about three, and anyway, it wasn't like I was super fit. But I didn't want to have to think about soccer until I actually played the stupid game. When you play for a team for the first time, they call it your debut. Well, I made my debut against San Marino, is if you couldn't have guessed. [? Champagne ?] hardly ever played anyone else. The last time we played them we had lost 28-0, but the general feeling was that it might be even worse this time. No one said this was because of me, but I could tell that's what they were all thinking. It was a home game, which meant that we changed in our homes. The San Marino players changed in the toilets of the cafe. My father gave me his red and white striped shirt, and I found a pair of white shorts. I didn't have any boots so I wore sneakers. Then I put on my denim jacket and walked down to the field with dad. "You might enjoy it," he said. I laughed. "You don't have to watch," I told him. "It's going to rain. Why don't you go home?" "Everybody watches," he said. "The whole village, the whole country." "I've never watched before," I told him. "No," he said. "You were the only one." That made me feel bad. I felt bad that I didn't know everyone else always watched the team, and I felt guilty that I'd never made the effort. It wouldn't have killed me to do something everyone else did once in a while. When we got to the field, Dad patted me on the back and wished me luck, and I went to stand with my teammates in the middle of the pitch. I was the youngest player, and Monsieur Gramonde, who was a bit younger than Dad, was the oldest. The only one who really looked like a soccer player was Monsieur Blanc, who worked at a fitness center in Italy. He was tall and slim, and he could do that thing with the ball where you keep kicking it and you don't let it touch the ground. He was our captain. "Stefan," he said. "Welcome." He shook my hand. "We thought we'd play you midfield, wide right." I didn't understand a word, and I stared at him with my mouth open. "Well, you know your left from your right, don't you?" "Yes, of course." "So you see Michel, there?" He was pointing at Monsieur Flammeny, who's a painter and gardener. "He's the right back. Stand about 20 meters ahead of him and try to help him if he needs help." I nodded. I didn't think it was a good idea to ask any more questions, though, and in any case, it was time for the game to start. We let in a goal after about a minute. It wasn't my fault because everything happened over the other side of the field. The tall chap who played in the middle of their defense sort of wandered forward with the ball, and then gave it to another man who was standing right from the edge of the pitch near where my dad and the rest of the country were standing. And this edge man ran very fast with the ball towards our goal, passed it sideways, and someone else, a little guy who didn't seem to do much apart from score goals, kicked the ball into an empty goal. About three minutes after that, the same thing happened. Tall chap to edge man to little goal-scoring going guy-- goal. And then again and again. San Marino scored 13 times in the first half of the game, and nine of these goals came in the same way. I only touched the ball once in the first half. Monsieur Flammeny got the ball and passed it to me very gently because he knew I wouldn't be able to do anything if he kicked the ball hard. I stopped it with my right foot. Well, I nearly stopped it, anyway. And the next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground and every single part of me was ringing as it I were a bell. My head hurt, my back, both my legs, one of my arms. I knew that in a soccer game, people could sometimes be told they weren't allowed to play anymore. It seemed to me that this man, whoever it was-- I hadn't seen him coming or going-- might not be allowed to play football ever again. He would probably have to go to prison for a week or two. I almost felt sorry for him. But when I picked myself up and looked around, no one cared. Everyone was just playing on as if nothing had happened. When there was a break in the play, I said to Monsieur Flammeny, "did you see that?" "What?" "What happened when you gave me the ball." "Yes. You lost it. You gave it away." "I didn't give it away. Someone came in and smashed me to the ground and took it from me." "It's called a tackle, Stefan. Get used to it." "So that's what it's like being grownup," I thought. "People can just knock you down whenever they feel like it and no one says anything" It made me wish that I was getting younger every yearn, not older. At halftime we stood on the pitch because there was nowhere to go. Monsieur Blanc gathered us round him. "Well," he said, "it's obvious what's going wrong-- we have to stop that little guy from scoring all the goals somehow. We're not marking him properly. He's got too much room." I didn't say anything. I just listened. "I know what we should do," he said. "We'll have to stop worrying about the left side and pull Michel into the middle." Michel Gaurde was an accountant who lived in the village with his mother. I suddenly realized that even though I was the worst player in the team, the rest of them didn't understand what was happening in the game. They really couldn't see it. So what was I supposed to do? I was new to the team and useless at the game, so nobody would listen to me. But if I kept quiet, we'd let in even more goals. If I kept quiet, we could lose by 50 or 60 goals, and everyone would say it was my fault. There was something else I'd noticed. Monsieur Blanc was our captain and our best player, but he didn't do anything. He was always standing too far away from the action with his hands on his hips. I couldn't understand it. He was 26 and tall and very fit, and he was happy to watch everyone else do all the work. He saw me looking at him. "Something on your mind, Stefan?" "Not really, no," I said. "Any tactical changes you want to make?" Everyone else laughed at his joke, and that annoyed me. "Yes," I said. What did it matter? The worst that could happen was they wouldn't ask me to play again. "It's not the little guy who scores all the goals we should be worrying about," I said. "It's the edge man." "The edge man," he asked. "Who's the edge man?" I looked over to where their players were standing chatting and laughing and spotted him. "Him there, the one drinking out of the water bottle now." "Why is he the edge man?" "Because he plays on the edge of the pitch." "The winger," said Monsieur Blanc as if I was stupid. "What about him?" "He's the one that gives the goal scorer the ball. Without him, the goal scorer couldn't do anything." Monsieur Gaurde nodded. "He's right. He's been running past me all game, and I can't stop him. I need help." Monsieur Blanc looked annoyed. He thought I was going to say something ridiculous, and instead, I'd seen something he hadn't. "Anything else, Stefan, seeing as you're the expert?" "I'm not an expert," I said. "I just noticed some things." "Oh, well, tell us some other things you've noticed." I shrugged. "OK. I'm not being rude, but what do you do in this team?" "I'm the striker. That means I'm supposed to score the goals." "But we're never going to score a goal," I said. "We never have the ball, and we're never at the right end of the field." This time a couple more people nodded, and I saw Flammeny smile to himself. "But if you wanted a job to do, you could stop the tall man." "Which tall man?" "The tall man who plays in defense. He's the one that gives the ball to the edge man every time. So if you, I don't know, got in the way or something, it might make it harder for them." It was weird, I knew I was right, but there was still no reason for Monsieur Blanc to listen to me. Just when I was about to give up and tell them to forget it, my mother, the president, walked onto the pitch to give us some encouragement. "Bad luck, lads," she said. "Your're playing well." We all looked at her as if she was mad. "Any plans to change things in the second half," she asked. "We're going to double up on the right winger," said Monsieur Blanc. "And I'm going to work harder to close down their center back, cut off his supply." It took me a little while to work out that these were my ideas because I didn't understand the words he was using. But when I understood, I looked at him to see when he'd tell her that these were my ideas. "Very good," said my mother. "Sounds very sensible." And then she walked off again. I tried to catch Blanc's eye, but he wouldn't look at me. The second half was really exciting because we didn't let in another goal for ages and ages. Every time the tall defender got the ball, Monsieur Blanc went over to him and stood right in front of him, and quite often he had to turn and give the ball back to the goalkeeper. And even though San Marino were winning 13-0, the longer they went without scoring again, the more embarrassed they became. The tall defender and the winger even have an argument. And we all started to run faster and jump higher and tackle harder. The crowd got excited, too, when they saw things had gotten so much better. They knew we couldn't win, and they knew that they weren't even going to get a goal, but as we went 15 minutes and then 20 minutes, even nearly 30 minutes of the second half without letting the other team score, you could tell that they were proud of us. They even started chanting and clapping. We made three stupid mistakes in the last 15 minutes and let in three goals. But when the referee blew the whistle for the end of the game, there were a lot of smiles on our team. Losing a second half three to nothing was [? Champagne's ?] best ever international results. "Just think," said Gramonde. "If we could play like that in the first half and the second half, here we'd lose every game 6-0 [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Flammeny." I knew what Gramonde meant, though. 6-0 felt like a soccer score. Good teams, teams you've heard of, lose 6-0 sometimes. Nobody ever loses 26-0, though. As we walked off the pitch, the whole crowd, the whole of my country, cheered us. And then my teammates did something I will never forget. They walked quickly to the side of the pitch, stood in two lines, and clapped as I walked between them. Even Monsieur Blanc joined in. That was the last time I ever had to play. The next game, they used Gramonde's 10 year old son Robert in my position, and he was better than me. I was told to watch and tell them where they were going wrong. I became the coach. "You've got brains," Gramonde said. "We haven't." In my first game as coach, we lost 12-0. At the end of the game, the team did a lap of honor. Nick Hornby. Hi lives in London, and normally calls it football, not soccer. His story appears in a collection of stories for children and young adults that is a fund raiser for the literacy program 826NYC. The book is called Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't As Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures in the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish so Maybe You Could Help Us Out. That would be the name of the book right there. That's the entire name. Lemony Snicket's in the book, too. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself without Alex Blumberg, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], Diane Cook, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production from Todd Bachmann, the Catholic. Ladies and gentlemen, this is very last week when you can call in and get on the radio by telling us your true, honest to God, it really happened scary stories for our Halloween show, which is just around the corner. To get on the radio, call our hot-line. 1-866-66-SCARY. 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 from Mr. Torey Malatia, who came up to me earlier and asked, [VOICE OF NICK HORNBY] "OK, I'm not being rude, but what do you do in this team?" I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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In the coming weeks and months, we're all going to be hearing so much about Hurricane Katrina, and why the government's response was so abysmal. And already, the blame shifting is like this prize fight that's already in its third or fourth round. Already we've heard officials try to shrug off any attempts at accountability by saying that it's too soon, by saying they're not going to play the blame game. And before the million details and arguments and counterarguments start to make all of our heads woozy, I would just like to repeat here something that was talked about very briefly this week. One of those things that seems so fundamental, that seems to cut through a lot of the supposed debate that's happening and end it definitively. So much so, that when I would see people on TV posturing and trotting out their talking points, I kept wanting to go back and say no, no, no, no, no, don't forget this thing. It has to do with the biggest argument out there right now, whether the federal government was, in fact, supposed to be in charge of rescuing people and getting food and water and all that into New Orleans, which has come up a lot. Like when the head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, was asked by Tim Russert on Meet The Press, since you knew the storm was coming, why didn't you get buses and trains and planes and trucks in there to evacuate? Chertoff said it wasn't his job. Tim, the way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, rests with state and local officials. This idea, that it was state and local officials who are the ones who blew it, not the feds, this idea is all over the place, from the talking heads on TV to Rush Limbaugh. What we had down there was an eminent failure of state and local government. We had incompetence in the mayor's office, incompetence in the governor's office. And sure, it is clear, even this early, that there are plenty of things that state and local government did to screw things up. But here's this thing that I read this week, this thing that I kept thinking about all week. It really comes down to a couple of basic facts. The Governor of Louisiana declares a state of emergency the Friday before the storm hits, calls on the federal government to step in. Then President Bush officially declares a state of emergency in Louisiana the next day, Saturday before the storm, and authorizes the Federal Emergency Management Agency to act. You can read the paper where he does this on the White House website. Basically, that should have settled who was in charge. After that happened, there was plenty of authority. There was all the authority in the world. We checked out this idea that, from that point the federal government was in fact in charge. We checked that out with several different experts and consultants on these issues this week, and they all agreed that the law is unambiguous. This particular guy is William Nicholson, author of the books Emergency Response, and Emergency Management Law and Homeland Security Law and Policy. And if you're into Homeland Security policy, you might want to check those out. He says that once the governor asks for help, and the President declares a state of emergency, the feds basically have the broad powers to do what's necessary. And, he says, even if the President hadn't declared a state of emergency, the Head of the Department of Homeland Security, Chertoff, could have acted. There's this whole newfangled way for him to take emergency powers under something called The National Response Plan. Well, basically the way it works is, the Secretary of Homeland Security designates this as a catastrophic incident, and federal resources deploy to preset federal locations, or staging areas. So they don't even have to have a local or state declaration in order to move forward with this. In other words, it doesn't matter what the governor says, it doesn't matter what the local people say, basically once that happens, they can just go ahead and do what needs to be done to fix the problem? That's correct. It's utterly clear that they had the authority to preposition assets, and to significantly accelerate the federal response. And they didn't need to wait for the state? They did not need to wait for the state. Remember, you heard it here first. Remember you heard it at all. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, we have stories in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. One of the things that all of us who work on the radio show thought we could do today during this hour is give people who were in the storm more time than daily news shows could give, to tell their stories and talk about what happened, talk about what they're thinking now. We have somebody who was at the convention center, who tells, among other things, the story that her mom wants you to hear, plus one thing she says is being widely misreported and misunderstood in the coverage of the convention center and what happened there. We also have somebody who police prevented from leaving the city. And we have a teenager who explains just what it actually feels like to go without water for two days, and more. Stay with us. Act one, Middle Of Somewhere. Well, when Denise Moore finally made her way out of New Orleans, she had been at the convention center, she was surprised to see the coverage. I kept hearing the word animal, and I didn't see animals. We were trapped like animals, but I saw the greatest humanity I've never seen from the most unlikely places. Denise Moore eventually ended up at the convention center with her mom, her niece, and her niece's two year old daughter. But the day before the storm, because Denise's mom worked at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans, and because hospital employees are allowed to stay there during hurricanes, all of them went to the hospital. They were given a room to stay in, but later they were kicked out of the room for two white nurses. Yeah, so I got really mad. So I went home. So I went to the house. I set up my twin bed in the hallway. The hallway, supposedly structurally, is the best place to be if the building is going to be moving around if there's high winds. And good thing I did. Somewhere around 5 o'clock in the morning, I jumped up out of bed. The ceiling started crashing down around me. I was riding that bed like a horse. I was so scared. I had never been that scared for that long. We lived on the second floor, so I was scared it was going to fall through. That even in the hallways, that the building was swaying so much that I'd fall through the floor and end up injured down there, and nobody would find me. Next thing I know, the water is pouring through the ceiling. And people were calling on the phone, you should have stayed at the hospital. It was ridiculous. I was scared fearing for my life for eight full hours. My heart was in my throat. I was like, when this is over, I'm going back to the hospital. And so I went back to the hospital. Can I ask you, before you tell what happens next, why not just evacuate? Well, first of all, my Mom is essential personnel, so she couldn't leave. I don't have a car, so I couldn't leave. My niece was going to go with her mother, but we didn't want them to get trapped on the highway in the storm with the baby. So we thought it would be safer to just stay at the hospital, because we rode out the last hurricane at home, but we sent my niece to the hospital with her baby. That's just been the way it goes, the hospital was the safest place to be if you were going to stay in the city. So you walk back to the hospital, and what do you find there? Well, there's a lot of people roaming around with their kids, and we're sharing food, and we're having a good old time just waiting for a chance to go back home. Then the levees broke. And the next morning, I was able to go back to the house, because I wanted to pick up my degrees, I earned them. I wanted to make sure they weren't wet. And frankly, I was looking for a carton of cigarettes that I knew was in that house somewhere. And so did you find the cigarettes? I found the cigarettes. And were they dry? And I found my degrees. And I grabbed my vital papers, my social security card, my-- none of that was wet, because it was in a little purse. And I brought my vital papers back to the hospital, and my mom is saying, we're going to go back to the house to go get theirs. But the water started rising, so within a couple of hours, you weren't able to get back to the house. It just kept rising. We thought, OK, now we're trapped in here, and we don't know how high this water is going to get. So it finally covered the basement, so the generators went out. It covered the first floor. And when you say cover the first floor, was it actually coming inside the hospital building? Yeah. So the heartbreaking thing was watching them turn people away who had waded through that water to get to the hospital for safe haven. It was amazing. It was heartbreaking. How often do you see that? That happened over and over again. The person who sticks out most in my mind is a man who had his wife and his two children, and his baby-- his daughter was so dehydrated. The people were yelling at him, you can't come in here. We were on the smoking patio, which is on the second floor, so we saw them. And we were yelling at them, man, leave the baby. Man, leave the baby. And he was like, I can't leave my baby. We don't have a house. How am I going to find my baby if I leave him with you? I don't know where you're going to take him. I've been in this water for two days. It was just devastating to just see that. We knew that nobody was going to be able to come up in there. And so the people on the smoking balcony, we would throw them water, and we tried to throw them food. And where'd they send him to? I don't know. We don't know where he went. But I did find out later that they were letting in people with gunshot wounds and snake bites, so it wasn't like they turned everybody away. It was just that, I guess they were thinking we got 3,000 people in this hospital we have to evacuate, we cannot take on any more responsibility. So I understood why they had to turn them away. It was just heartbreaking to see. So you are in hospital until-- and there's no power in the hospital, but there's water, and it sounds like there's food too. We didn't have water after that first night. Oh really? Yeah, we ran out of everything, because people were sharing with each other, and we just thought we'd be able to go home in a minute. That's the thing. It's like, you survived the hurricane. I was a happy camper, because I'd been more scared than I'd ever been in my life, and I walked out of there. So who knew? So how long were you in the hospital? How many days? When did you get out? Two days, and then we were transported to that corner. And what we heard is that we were going to be dropped off by boat to a corner, and the buses will pick us up, and we'll be heading to Texas. That's what we were told. And then the buses come in and they take you where? It wasn't buses. The police had to commandeer vehicles. They were asking people in the crowd if they knew how to drive trucks and buses. They were stealing them. The police had to steal vehicles. And so it was totally different than what we anticipated. So wait, they're just taking any random truck and hotwiring it? School buses. Yeah. And so what was the vehicle that you got to the next place in? What were you in? There was a key and lock van. Right, a locksmith? Yeah, that happened to be driving around, and the police made him start taking us. And then you go to where? We go to the convention center. And when we arrived, there were people all over the street, under the bridge. And we're like, why are these people on the street? Why aren't they in the convention center? And when we got there, people were saying, you don't want to go in there. Did you go inside at all? Not until the next day. What did you see? Inside? Yeah. A sewer. A sewer, literally, because I had to use the bathroom, and I was like, where's the bathroom? So I went inside, the whole place was a bathroom. I was stepping in feces, stepping in urine all over the carpets. I used to work as the convention center. That was hard to see. It was a beautiful building. It was a toilet, and people were sitting close as they could to the doors, but the smell was overwhelming. So then what do you do? What's the best you can do? I actually stopped eating the minute we got there. I wouldn't eat or drink anything, because I figured if you don't put nothing in, nothing's coming out. I was in the Army. But even after that, I still had to use the bathroom. It was ridiculous. So what I ended up doing was getting a cup, going behind a partition, having a guy guard me while I was relieving myself in a cup behind some partition at the convention center. And I got all kinds of stuff on my feet. Thank God it started raining, because I have a really sensitive nose. I was sitting down, and I could smell the crap on my feet. And where did you all sleep? We slept on the sidewalk. This place, there was trash all over the ground outside, and I was thinking, how are the girls going to even lay down with their babies? There's not a spot that's clean, nothing. There's nowhere to lay down. And then my mom wanted me to make sure I tell you, what they kept doing the whole time was tell us to line up for the buses that never came. It was like they were doing drills every four hours. You all have to line up for the bus. And if you bum rush the bus, they're just going to take off without you, and nobody is going to get to go anywhere. You have to line up. You have to be in a straight line. We're talking about old people in wheelchairs and women with babies in lines, waiting for buses that you know God damn well aren't coming, like they were playing with us. I figured it out early in the morning, but what am I supposed to do? Make an announcement? The buses aren't coming. And so I walked up to the so-called head guy in charge of our section, and I told him, I said, why do you have these people sitting out here in the sun, and you know these buses aren't coming? The buses are coming. I said, you're just playing with us. Who gives you the authority to keep lining us up like this, to stand in this heat? He was like, well, I know the guy who can make the call for the buses. I said, well, why hasn't he called them? People are dying. He said, I wish I could tell you what you wanted to hear. I said, I want to hear the truth. Are the buses coming or not? We need to get these old people and these babies out of this heat. And he just walked away, and we were left there, without help, without food, without water, without sanitary conditions, as if it's perfectly all right for these animals to reside in a fricking sewer like rats. Because there was nothing but black people back there. [BLEEP] disposable. And then, the story became they left us here to die, they're going to kill us. You mean that's what people were saying to each other? Yes. And is that what you believed? I was almost convinced, because I kept having a vision of them opening that floodgate on us, of my niece and her baby floating away from me screaming. And I just knew it. And then the next morning, I heard from somebody that they actually were going to open that floodgate. So by the time the rumor started that the National Guard was going to kill us, I almost halfway believed it. And so people were saying, basically they just brought us here, they're going to leave us here to die? Yeah, that's what we thought. The police kept passing us by, and the National Guard kept passing us by with their guns pointed at us. When you see a truck full of water, and people have been crying for water for a day and a night, and the water truck passes you by, just keeps going, how are we supposed to believe that these people were here to help us? It was almost like they were taunting us. And then, don't forget they kept lining us up for buses that never showed up. We thought they were playing with us in a best case scenario. In a worst case scenario, they wanted us to either kill each other or die. Or they were going to kill us. So we keep hearing in the news about violence inside the convention center, and people getting killed, and women being raped. Did you know about any of that when you were there? The convention center is section A through J, I believe. We were about at H, and we could hear kind of craziness going on on the further ends in either direction. But where we are was mostly old people and women with children, and I didn't see anybody get raped. I did see people die. I saw one man die, and I saw a girl and her baby die. But I didn't see anybody getting hurt. And talk about, there were men just kind of like roaming with guns, packs of men. They were securing the area. Criminals, these guys were criminals, they were. But somehow these guys got together, figured out who had guns, and decided they were going to make sure that no women were getting raped, because we did hear about the women get raped in the Superdome, and that nobody was hurting babies, and nobody was hurting these old people. They were the ones getting juice for the babies. They were the ones getting clothes for people that walked through that water. They were the ones fanning the old people, because that's what moved the guys, the gangster guys the most, the plight of the old people. That's what haunted me the most, seeing those old people sitting in them chairs, and not being able to get up and walk around or nothing. And so these were just guys from the neighborhood? Mm-hmm. What else were they doing? They started looting on Saint Charles and Napoleon. There was a Rite-Aid there. And you would think that they would be stealing stuff that, you know, fun stuff or whatever, because it's a free city, according to them. But they were taking juice for the baby, water, beer for the older people, food, raincoats so that they could all be seen by each other and stuff. And I thought it was pretty cool and very well organized. And did you see this yourself, these guys? Yeah, I was right there. And so basically, they went off to this Rite-Aid, they got the stuff, they brought it back and started distributing it? Mm-hmm. Like Robin Hood? Yeah, exactly like Robin Hood. And that's why I got so mad, because they're calling these guys animals. These guys. That's what got to me, because I know what they did. You're calling these people animals? Come on. And I saw what they did, and I was really touched by it, and I liked the way that they were organized about it, and that they were thoughtful about it. Because they had families they couldn't find too, and that they would put themselves out like that on other people's behalf. I never had a real high opinion of thugs myself. But I tell you one thing, I'll never look at them the same way again. Why didn't people just walk away? That's what I don't understand. We weren't allowed. People kept trying to go up the bridge, so they could go to Algiers, and they'd be turned away, and they'd be sent back down. And literally, they would just like go a couple streets away, and somebody would send them back? They'd go up the bridge to go across to the West Bank where it was dry and lights were on. And the National Guard was up there with guns. They turned them back with guns, and the Governor gave orders to shoot to kill. You couldn't get through them. So people would go up the bridge. Every time they lined us up for the buses, and buses wouldn't come, people in groups would go up the bridge, trying to get across the river. People who had family across the river couldn't get across the river. They were not letting us out of there. They wasn't letting nobody in. So we were trapped. I can't even express it. The tears get close to my eyes, and I have this feeling in the pit in my stomach like if I start crying, the sobs will kill me. I guess someday it'll calm down, and I'll be able to just cry like a normal person. But I feel like if I started crying, I'd never stop. Denise Moore, she's now in Baton Rouge, she's OK, she's just found a new job there. Act Two, Forgotten, But Not Lost. Let's return to that bridge. You know that bridge that Denise talked about in act one, that people got to the bridge and they were turned back by armed police officers? What exactly happened on that bridge? We wondered about that, and so in this act, we return to that bridge. People in this story were in New Orleans for a paramedics convention. They're out of towners. They were staying at a hotel in the French Quarter. And as the storm approached, there were no flights out of the city, there were no rental cars available. And so they stayed in their hotel, luckily their hotel let them stay. No electricity, eating boxed cereal, canned soup, whatever they had there in the hotel. And then three days after Katrina hit, one of the hotel managers actually decided to take matters into his own hands, and took up a collection from his guests to raise $25,000 to charter a bunch of private buses to get these people out. And so all that day, guests are getting reports that buses are coming, and all these reports. And they were told to line up and wait for the buses. And then five or six hours after they were told to line up and wait, around midnight they heard word that no, the buses had been commandeered by the military as they entered the city. OK, so the next morning, the hotel is out of food, they're out of water. They basically said, everybody, you got to go now. Lorrie Beth Slonsky and her husband Larry Bradshaw, they're both paramedics from San Francisco, they set off with about 200 other hotel guests that morning for the command center that the police had set up down the street at Harrah's Casino. They go there and they asked the police, what should they do now? Lorrie Beth talked to producer Alex Blumberg. They said you can't go to the Superdome. You cannot go to the convention center. We said, where can we go? They said, we don't know. You are on your own. And that's when we decide, let's camp in front of the police command center in front of Harrah's. There'd be protection, we'd have each other until the next day. Then the police command center realized they had an issue on their hand. They have 200 tourists in front of their command center, so he said, wait, I just heard word. If you cross the bridge, there are buses. And a big cheer went up, but Larry, being the realist that he is, said wait a minute, wait a minute. We have been lied to. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, today is Thursday. We really would like some guarantee that this is true. And he looked us in the eye and said, I swear to you. There are buses on the bridge. I just got word. Now where is the bridge at this point from where you're standing? It's two miles through town. It's called the Pontchartrain Expressway. So the 200 of us little tourist types, with our pull along baggage, made our way through the rainy weather. And you're all carrying your pull along baggage? I'm still carrying my pull along baggage, with our laptop, and our little Palm Pilot, and our little extra food, and everything. So we are going through town, and people saw us and thought, hmm, here comes some folks. They must know something, so our numbers doubled from probably 200, and then it doubled again, so we were probably about 800 to 1,000 people marching up to the bridge. When we got to the bridge, there was the armed Gretna sheriffs, and they had formed a line at the foot of the bridge. So even before we could even explain what we wanted, or what we had heard, that's when they began firing the weapons. Gretna police shot at us and said, get away, get away. You cannot come on the bridge. This bridge goes across the Mississippi River to a town called Gretna in neighboring Jefferson Parish. The entire region across the river is called the West Bank. Debbie Zelinsky, a 24 year old sales agent from Boston, was another guest at the Monteleone. She'd been on vacation in New Orleans with a group of five, her friend Sharon and Rashida, Rashida's mother and 13 year old brother, and Rashida's brother's 15 year old friend. The cops were just firing into the air to get people back. They had guns pointed in people's faces, telling them to get back down, or they will shoot you. And what was your thinking at that moment? What did you make of that? What were you thinking? At that point, it was pouring rain. We were soaked through. I thought, I'm never getting out of here. If I am getting out of here, it's not going to be alive. Tears started rolling down my face at that point. It just sounds so crazy to me that there's like a bunch of tired people trying to walk out of a city, and people are shooting. Did it just seem insane to you? It did. I mean, here you have a six lane highway bridge, and there's barely any traffic going out, and you won't let pedestrians cross it? Why? What did I really think? Or do you want--? Yeah, what did you really think? What I thought was are they serious? They must be mistaken. They could not be shooting at a group of desperate ass people. But apparently they were serious. But we were so desperate. We got to get out of here. This is our only way out. We can't go to the Superdome, we can't go to the convention center. We're scared to death for our lives, and for the people around us lives, that we had to approach them. So my partner Larry had his badge with him, his fire department badge. So he would raise it up, lay it on the ground, put our hands up, and walk backwards and say, may we approach? And when we approached and had them in conversation, the sheriff informed us that there were no buses, that the police commander had lied to us. And when Larry questioned, it's like, can we just ask you why we can't cross the bridge? Because there was no traffic. There was very little traffic on this six lane highway. And they said that you are not crossing this bridge. We are not turning the West Bank into another Superdome. And to us, when they said that was absolutely these are code words for, if you're poor and you're black, you are not getting out of New Orleans. You are not coming to our territory. It does seem hard to avoid sort of talking about race here. Yes. We're white, and everybody else that might-- most every other person was African American. And that is what they saw, and that is what they were responding to, that this group of people of color were not going to come into their neighborhoods. Lorrie Beth is kind of a take charge person from what we saw. And we were like, well, we need to stick with someone. We don't know our way, what we're going to do, so we decided, hey, we're sticking with you. We're not leaving you. And glad we didn't. Our small group of eight, and then other folks as well, we retreated back down Highway 90, and we were trying to find some shelter in the overpass. And then we had these discussions, God, what are we going to do? And what we decided to do was, there was this concrete embankment. If you go onto the middle of Pontchartrain Expressway, there's a center divide. But with the center divide, there was two hunks of concrete that sort of make a nice enclave, and we thought, this will be perfect. It's safe, and we'll be visible to everyone. And certainly, someone's going to come rescue us, and that we'll have security by being on this elevated freeway. And then we can wait for these buses that were certainly going to come get us. This group turned into about, I'd say about 60 or 70 people. And we cleaned up the area so it was safe for the children. And someone had a bag, and we cleaned that up. And I said I had water, and someone else had water, and we kind of made this community. And this is when somebody-- blessed are the people who loot-- got a huge water truck they had stolen. And he had a man and his wife and child, and they were African American, and they unloaded all the water that they had. So wait. So a guy came up? A guy just came up to you? A guy was escaping New Orleans. And that's what it felt like, people were escaping New Orleans. And he drove up to the middle of this Pontchartrain Expressway, drove right up to our encampment, because he saw like 70, 80, 90 people. And he just took all the water out and gave it to us, and then filled the truck up back with human beings, as many older and children that we could get on with their parents on to this, and they drove away. And that is how we got water. What did he say to you? That's incredible. What did he say? Good luck, brothers and sisters. Good luck. We wish you the best. We can only take what we can take. And we thanked him, and off they go with the families. And then up the street quite a way, there is a National Guard truck that apparently took too sharp of a turn. And you can just see the food fall out of the-- c-rations fall out of this truck. So I mean, it just felt like it was phenomenal. We commandeered a couple of the strong young guys and gals to run up there in the shopping carts that people had and gather up the boxes of food and bring it back. So you're set. We were set. You have food. You have water. We were set. We had food, we had water. We had some sort of shelter. We had a safe place for the kids. And then the kids took the plastic that the water was in, those big plastic containers that hold five gallon drums of water, and brought it over to like a storm drain, and set it up to make bathroom with privacy. And we took one of the five gallon containers of water, and the kids made a sign-- because we still had luggage at this point, in crayons and things-- and made a sign, please keep the bathroom clean. And we had toilet paper and handy wipes. So you started with a group of eight, and then it grew to 70. Who were some of the stories of the people who are in this little encampment with you? Well, there was this older woman who was diabetic, and had soiled herself. But people came forward with a makeshift Depends diaper type thing. And then there was just the cutest ding dang kids that would call me Auntie. They would be, Auntie wants the coffee. And they were very strict about the garbage, because we hung garbage bags on the rebar. So we were set up brilliantly, until just as it started to turn dark. A Gretna sheriff came up and just had that crazy look that, as a paramedic, when I see that crazy look, you just find a way to not come in front of that energy. Because he had a gun, and he was pointing and screaming at us, get the [BLEEP] off this freeway. Get the [BLEEP] off this freeway. Like the most insane, crazed, frightened person ever. And we had to leave this place of safety, and went into the dark. And it was martial law by this point, and we had heard it was a shoot to kill policy. So everyone grabbed what they could, and we didn't know where we were going. As we were walking, we turned back and looked, and then you saw a helicopter come very close, and everything that we had had in there actually went flying, as the helicopter's wind took off. So like a police helicopter literally came down to where your camp had been and blew everything away? Right. And you think that was on purpose? Oh yeah. So we walked down the bridge, off the highway, and we actually found a bus, an abandoned bus. We had to actually boost someone into a window, because the door was locked. And he unlocked the door from the inside. We all got in. It was right at dark. It was becoming dark outside. We all were told to lay down on the seats and do not lift your head for anything. Who told you that? My friend's mom. She's like, don't sit up, don't lift your head. I don't care what you hear. What was the fear? The fear was you could hear gunshots getting closer. You could hear people walking. It was a fear of the gunshots. It was also a fear of the police. We were afraid they'd come. They would probably kick us out, and we didn't want to be out when it was dark out. You could hear the-- I don't know if they were rats or what they were, but they were outside. You could hear them. I think I maybe slept 5 or 10 minutes. The minute the sun came up, we were out of there. We left the bus. We left a note in the bus saying thank you, we're sorry. And we left. We went up to the bridge to see if they'd let us cross. Larry had contacted the president of our union and said, OK, we are at the fire department, John Meade and said, OK John, honest to God, it is now dire. We need to get out. And somehow John, through the other union, through a guy who works at Menlo Park, who was working for FEMA, somehow one of those connections happened that the FEMA person got to tell the Gretna police or sheriff to yes, let us eight people go through. It was so early in the morning, but we could see the people starting to come up, because people are trying to still get out. And as people were coming up, one of the sheriffs walked down the ramp a bit and shot up past some people and said, do not approach. We got past that. We got the permission. We walked across the bridge. That must have been a very-- I mean, on the one hand, you must have been thrilled to be getting out, but was it a little hard? Very demoralized. Very sad. Very unfair. It's really wrong. This makes no sense. All of us should be walking across that bridge. And it's only by this connection, that connection that we were able to get across. How did I feel? I felt really incensed and anger that other people weren't allowed to pass. And at the same time, I felt so fortunate and like I won the lottery that us eight were able to cross. There's one more hurdle actually. In their group of eight, three were white, four were black, Sharon, Rashida, and her mother and brother, and her brother's friend was Puerto Rican. But the authorities had told Larry that only his immediate family was allowed to cross the bridge. So Larry said, this is my immediate family. I was his daughter. My friend's mom was his sister in law with her three kids, and my friend's brother's friend was his foster child. And that's how we had to play it off, in order for us to cross the bridge all together. Debbie Zelinsky and Lorrie Beth are now back home in San Francisco and Boston, respectively. They talked to Alex Blumberg. Coming up, Fox TV versus a New Orleans 18 year old. 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. Today's program, After The Flood, New Orleans stories in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We've arrived at act three of our show. Act Three, Social Studies Lesson. TV talk show host Bill O'Reilly stated rather directly this week the lessons that he thought conservatives and everybody else should take from the devastation. First he said you can't rely on government. And second he said, the problems that we saw in New Orleans weren't about race, they were about class. If you're poor, you're powerless, not only in America, but everywhere on Earth. You don't have enough money to protect yourself from danger, danger is going to find you. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina should be taught in every American school. If you don't get educated, if you don't develop a skill and force yourself to work hard, you'll most likely be poor. And sooner or later, you'll be standing on a symbolic rooftop waiting for help. Chances are that help will not be quick in coming. Well, our producer Alex Blumberg decided to run this by somebody who is actually in an American high school, 18 year old Ashley Nelson, who is our act, and who lives in the Lafitte housing projects in New Orleans, in one of the neighborhoods that got flooded. That's what he said? Yeah. On TV. To you, what's the thing that stands out most about that? Basically, he said if you're rich, you live, if you're poor, you die. I had no idea that it was a crime to be poor, and the punishment was death. What was the first that you heard about the hurricane, and what preparations did you make? When I heard about the hurricane, it was Saturday, and you know what's supposed to come next, Sunday night. So when I heard about it, I went over to my grandmother's house. My whole family was over there. And I'm like, y'all come on. I'm just so amped up. I'm like, y'all come on. Let's go rent a car. We got to evacuate. There's a hurricane coming. Then everybody looked at me stupid. They're like, all right, you're going to go rent a car, because we have that kind of money to go out of town and we got that kind of money to do that kind of stuff, like being sarcastic about it. And I'm like, man, I forgot we poor. I promise you, that's what I thought in my head. I forgot we were poor. And were there people who were able to get out, who had a car? Yeah, because I remember that day I was standing outside, and it was a lot of people running from their house to their car, from the house to their car, just throwing stuff in there, throwing stuff in there, trying to hurry up and get out before the traffic gets too hectic. There was a handful of people, and everybody else is just sitting there watching how people leave, and they got to stay. I know that's what I was thinking, when I seen people leaving. I'm like, they leaving and I got to stay. And there's not even an option, I have to stay. Ashley rode out the storm at her father's house in Jefferson Parish, across the river from New Orleans, where the rest of her family was. There wasn't too much flooding there, so the next morning, they went out and found all the scrap wood they could, blown down branches, old fences, and started a fire to cook the little bit of meat they'd been able to buy at the store before the storm came. They figured that would hold them until rescuers got there. But one day past and no one came, then two days. They had no TV. They didn't know what was going on. I thought just like my daddy. I thought like my daddy, somebody was coming to help us. Nobody came to help us. No Red Cross trucks, no nothing. I mean, at least they could have dropped us some water. Do you know what it's like to not have water? You get a taste in your mouth that's just horrible. Your mouth is all dry, and you can't even think right. You start getting delusional and hallucinating about things. Did you actually have hallucinations? Yeah. What did you hallucinate? Water bottles, four water bottles, big Kentwood gallon jugs. I'm serious, I went crazy. I mean, I would just sit down and rock and think about is the world going to turn to hell and we're all going to burn? I mean, I just started going crazy, really crazy. Did it make you realize, like so this is what it feels like? This is what it feels like to be starving? I thought that when I was in Jefferson Parish, I thought, man, I'm starving. That's what I said to myself, I'm like man, I'm starving. Like you know how your stomach growls? Uh-huh. When you're starving, you get cramps in your stomach, and you feel like your stomach just bit into your back. I mean, the best bet is for you to lean forward. How scared were you? I thought I was going to die. I look at it like this now. 9/11 was bad because it was terrorists. It's no surprise people hate the United States, it's no big surprise. But New Orleans was worse, because it was our own government who betrayed us. They betrayed us. They betrayed us. They left us there to die. And then you hear George Bush telling the FEMA man, you're doing a good job. What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? Because I mean, people are dying there. So you're telling him he's doing a good job, what are you saying? That's good that people are dying? I never understood that, and I really wish I can meet him to ask him, what do you mean by that he doing a good job? 18 year old Ashley Nelson talking with Alex Blumberg. Two days after that interview, the head of FEMA, the FEMA man, Michael Brown, whom President Bush said was doing such a good job, was removed from all duties relating to Hurricane Katrina. Act Four, Diaspora. While hundreds of thousands of Gulf residents evacuated after the storm and followed the whole thing from afar, Cheryl Wagner left for Gainesville, Florida. From satellite photos, she could tell her house is flooded. She hears it's seven feet of water. Over this past week, we've gotten dozens of emails at our radio program from people in this situation, and they all pretty much say the same thing, how bizarre it is to be indefinitely exiled from their homes and normal lives, and now to be an evacuee in the larger world. We've been advised that when we go back to New Orleans, my boyfriend and I need to get guns, mean dogs, or both. Which seems ludicrous to me. But people where we evacuated to over here in North Central Florida have offered us a shotgun. We got offered a shotgun before we got offered a generator. One of the people calling to tell us to get a shotgun is a normally laid back musician friend who used to have a weekly gig in the Quarter, singing Cuban love songs in falsetto. A few days ago, he bought a shotgun in Baton Rouge, where he evacuated to, and is now calling my boyfriend and advising us to do the same. I have five dogs, and I'm bringing the meanest looking one back, he says. I just bought a shotgun with a sweet pistol grip. Last week he also called to report rumors that people from New Orleans were raping and looting in the mall in Baton Rouge. You're a person from New Orleans, I thought, but didn't say. Right after it became clear we were not getting home, I predicted the totally predictable. That people in Baton Rouge would immediately start cringing in the face of what they considered to be the black mongrel hordes and loose people of New Orleans. I say this knowing the people of Baton Rouge and the rest of Louisiana have been breaking their backs with generosity and hospitality and kindness. I know many white and Cajun people and fishermen with air boats helped rescue their black and white New Orleans neighbors from attics. People from Baton Rouge are showing up at hotels and sweetly paying strangers from New Orleans' bills. My mother in Hammond was asked to open up her washing machine to state troopers' underwear. Still, some folks are giving with one hand and holding a gun with the other. Seems nobody wants a bunch of poor people, black, white, Cajun, whatever, moving to their neck of the woods. Seems it is fear of the have-nots and poor, as much as racism, which of course it also is. So now we're here in Gainesville, listening to New Orleans ex pat news radio and webcasts through tinny computer speakers, squinting to see my watery house on satellite photos, getting crappy emails from friends crying because they killed their cats, and watching TV. Someone desperate called us and said, can you please text message Stan and make him get off his roof? He's up there with Luna and another dog, and won't come down unless they'll take the dogs too. It's strange to think of all my New Orleans people spit out by the storm, all over the South in country, in Diaspora, getting terrible phone calls and cable TV migraine too. Before the flood, New Orleans was a place where Southerners sent their laid back people who can't, or won't get with the program. Artists, gay relatives, eternal optimists, funny hat wearers, and intellectuals. I'm one of the above, and we're in New Orleans for a reason, to get away from the baptists, but still get to live in the South, where we're from. But where are Southern outsiders supposed to go who are exiled from their place of exile? I didn't want to arm myself with a gun or a leaf blower to face the future. People ask what it's like to lose your house and your friends and your life and your town, and begin to look scared when you answer. They want to care, but they can't. They look at you, and worry for themselves. Drenched in the compulsory cheer of the college town of Gainesville, I feel like a leper from Carville, or the bereaved at a Southern funeral. Family friends slide you white envelopes with money in them, then everyone around you puts on an ugly orange and blue outfit, straps on their foam fingers, and heads out to the Florida Gators football game. Cheryl Wagener normally lives in New Orleans in Mid-City on South Cortez Street. She asks, if someone there has a canoe, please go and check out her house. Act Five, Displaced Persons Camp. Last August, a category four storm, Hurricane Charley, devastated parts of Florida. And FEMA built a big trailer park for people whose homes were destroyed. It was near an airport outside Punta Gorda. At one point, over 550 trailers were there. And when our staff looked into it this week, we were surprised to find out that a full year later, over 500 trailers are still there, with more than 1,000 people. And also just this week, we read that in the New York Times, a FEMA official was saying that these kinds of mobile homes, like in Punta Gorda, outside Punta Gorda, may be the standard for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Our producer Lisa Pollack called down there to see what it's like. Like almost everybody I asked to describe the FEMA mobile home park, Bob Heibert starts with the disclaimer. It is better than no housing. But for some folks, it's very unsettling, it's depressing, it's deplorable. Heibert is the director of hurricane recovery for Charlotte County, Florida. Like everyone else I talked to, he described a dreary mini-city, nothing but endless rows of identical white trailers in a vacant lot by the county airport. But it very much is just like a trailer park, a storage place. It's like a manufacturer where they're just all lined up waiting to go, except these are actually occupied and hooked up, and it's a village by itself. It looks kind of like some military camp in the desert. This is Jennifer. She didn't want to give her last name. She, along with her husband, three kids and a dog, have lived in a FEMA park since just before last Thanksgiving. There's no grass, there's no trees. It's all white, gritty sand. And the wind will whip through the trailers, and you'll just get pelted with sand. The FEMA park wasn't supposed to be homey. It was functional. After hurricane Charley destroyed 11,000 residences in the county, lots of people needed places to live, and fast. For that, the trailers were perfect, says Heibert. Because they got a lot of people in there in like 30 days, people that were just kind of living in cars because there were no other places for them to go. They were on the streets, or they were living with other people, or whatever. So I mean, it was a lifesaver when it happened. Someone called me from FEMA and said, are you still interested in one of the mobile homes? I say, yes I am. And he said, well OK, you need to go down there to the site tomorrow to sign your paperwork. They have a house for you. That's Kim. Last December, when she got that phone call, she was desperate and out of options. She, her husband, and four kids rode out the hurricane, huddled in the shower stall at their rental house, the ceilings crumbling above them. After the house has condemned, the family spent two weeks in a crowded homeless shelter. Then came three months in an RV, the kind people tow on vacation, 30 feet long, all six of them living there. So by the time they got the FEMA mobile home, 70 feet long with three bedrooms, it seemed like a mansion. They could live rent free, paying only utilities, while they look for a place of their own. The problem is, nine months later, Kim's family is still there. Every month a FEMA agent comes by to ask her what she's done to get out. To keep her lease, she has to prove she's been working on it, and every month she gives the same answer. She's called public housing. She's combed the ads. But in Charlotte County, there's not much that she and her husband, a Wal-Mart manager, can afford. So far, the government's let her stay, but the pressure's getting to her. These people that come to our house, and they are on us about what are you doing to get a place? And what are you doing to do this? And what are you doing to do that? It really just irritates a lot of us, because we didn't ask for this, and we're stuck here, and there's nothing else that we can do. And the way they talk to you, it almost makes you feel like you did this to yourself. The real problem we have is that most of the rental properties were lost in the storm. That includes almost all the low income units, says Bob Heibert of the county government. The ones that survived suddenly became more expensive and unaffordable, because other people that had the means to pay for them rented those properties. So it's a very long term problem, because unless we can find a way to house those folks in some housing that they can afford, they're going to have to move somewhere else where they can get a house and they can get a job. Some places don't want kids. Jennifer's had problems finding a place too. We have a dog, and now finding a place that will let us have the dog-- I mean, I know some people don't understand, like, oh, just get rid of the dog and move into one of the apartments that accepts dogs. But after everything my children have been through, moving to two different schools, moving four times in the past year, with everything else that's lost, I couldn't imagine taking their dog away too. Crime and drugs have been a problem at the FEMA park, and there aren't many places for kids to play. Lots of people stay only because they have no choice, and others, everyone I talked to agreed, aren't really trying that hard. It's easy to imagine that this is what Louisiana could look like a year from now, thousands of people warehoused in trailers, stuck in makeshift camps on the edges of towns. I asked Bob Heibert if he worries about the idea of more FEMA trailer parks like this one, and he says he does. I think what needs to happen is that if they're going to do that, which they will, and it's a good short term solution, they need to think about what happens next month or the month after, like have a phase two plan. They got to very quickly start working on a strategy to break that down and move people on, just for the sake of the people. I mean, what we're really talking about is humanity here. We're talking about human beings that need to get back to some normalcy before they can get over this. So how long is FEMA willing to keep housing hurricane victims? In Punta Gorda, they're giving residents until February, 18 months after the storm. Then, FEMA says, they'll stop funding the trailer park. After that, what happens is up to the county, which is still figuring out what to do. It might help people buy the trailers and relocate them, and it might keep the park open and let people rent. It's not clear exactly how it'll work, or where the money will come from. It's not going to be easy. Lisa Pollack. Our program was produced today by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig, and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollak. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachman, Chris Ladd, and Laura Bellows. It is Laura's last day on the program, which is a very, very bad for us, because she's done such good work here. Laura, we all wish you the best. Guest DJing for our program today from Mr. Nick Spitzer, who's music show American Roots normally broadcasts out of New Orleans. He chose songs for us from his exile. Other musical help from Jessica Hopper. Special thanks today to so many people, Margie Rockland, Stephen Elliott, Alex Kotlowitz, Kristy Krueger, Lisa Moore, Richard Burkhurt, Harry Scheiber, Davy Rothbart, Eve Warmfeldt, Abram Himmelstein, Anya Borg, Justin Lundgering, Kirsta Kurtz Burke, Aaron Zimmerman, Anjali Rasperry, and Michelle [? Gibeaumot, ?] and really too many people to name, friends of the program, and strangers who emailed us with stories and suggestions this week, thank you to you all. 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's had favorites here at the radio station who were not me. Just the cutest ding dang kids that would call me Auntie I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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In Houston it's Tuesday at the Astrodome complex. We still had thousands of evacuees from New Orleans at that point. There were these tables with hand-lettered signs on poster board-- they read Florida, New York, Colorado-- basically offering to relocate evacuees to those states. This wasn't the state governments doing this. This was private charities and churches from those states, and they're making some incredibly generous offers. I think that people should come to Colorado because we've got the best deal going. Andrea [? Ames ?] was manning the Colorado table on behalf of three different charities there. And the deal she's offering? It's free housing that's been donated by citizens of Colorado for anywhere from six months to a year. They've also promised to furnish the houses, fill them with groceries for that six-month time, job training, and a job. But incredibly, even though this deal did seem to be the very best deal going at the Astrodome complex, people from New Orleans don't want this deal. For the first two weeks our team was here, there was no one going at all. There was no one signing up. It took me three days-- I had one specific offer-- it took me three days to give away one free three-bedroom, two-bathroom house, free car, free insurance for a year, free schooling for the kids, one job at Coca Cola, one job with Wal-Mart. It took me three days to get someone to take it. And why? Everybody said, if I come to Colorado, I'm going to freeze to death. Everyone thinks they're going to die. Everyone thinks we all live in Alaska and it snows every day all year around and that we're all going to freeze to death. They really say, I can't go there, I'm going to die. We aren't like you. We don't live like that. That's been the biggest conversation I've had probably the most. Which is all hard enough for Andrea to deal with on its face, but then there's the added indignity that her candidates then go two tables down and get snapped up by Florida. Actually, we had a young lady-- as a matter of fact, the family just left today-- that we just flew out of here today. Kevin [? Lillibride ?] at the Florida table. And they were considering Colorado, and that was the issue. It was the difference between snow and sun, and we just looked at them and said, really, what's holding you up? We have sun, and they have snow. So it helps us out when they go talk to Colorado, because then they come down here to talk to us. It works in our favor. The only problem with Florida, of course, is something that everybody from New Orleans pretty much has a low tolerance for at this point: hurricanes. Still, as of Tuesday, the guys at the Florida table got 43 families to relocate. You're listening to This American Life from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. So this past week, somewhere between 400,000 and a million people, including an entire city, New Orleans, were scattered across the country, the biggest mass resettlement in our country since the Civil War. And we went out to document some of what was happening as these people tried to figure out what happens next in their lives, where they're going to live. Two producers from our radio show, Lisa Pollak and Jane Feltes, and I flew from our home base in Chicago to Houston. Houston is where between 150,000 and 200,000 hurricane evacuees went after the hurricane. One man I talked to down there who was looking for housing said that he felt like he was living in a gold rush town, so many people scrambling for all the same things all at the same time. Today, we bring you stories from the Astrodome, and of people simply trying to find places to live. Plus, back in New Orleans, certain business owners in certain areas are being allowed back this weekend. Nick Spitzer drives through deserted streets to his own house, where he feels like a stranger and a looter. Stay with us. It was actually Jane who talked to people at the various state tables, and she says eventually Colorado did actually manage to get some people to relocate. They got 35 people after two weeks of trying. And the reason people finally said yes was desperation. FEMA let everyone know that the temporary housing was ending, hotel vouchers were ending for families that were in hotels, and people were being moved out of the Astrodome. First in line for the bus to Colorado were twin sisters, [? Coquin ?] and [? Kayla. ?] They're six. And here's what they know about the place they're about to move. I know that it's beautiful. It's a beautiful place, and it has lots of mountains. And I know that it's so beautiful, anybody will want to go there. Where did you hear that? I heard it from a snow movie, like Snow Dogs. You know Snow Dogs? It took place in-- what's the name of the place again? Colorado. In Colorado. Colorado. How's the last couple of weeks been? It's like [INTERPOSING VOICES] adventure. Let me say it. It's like an adventure. We been almost everywhere. We had so much fun. We went to Baton Rouge, went to the shelter, and then Alexandria, then back to Baton Rouge, then to Houston. We had to live in a hotel, the Scottish. Yeah, the Scottish Hotel and Suites. That's what it said. When I talked to their mom, [? Coquina, ?] she said that they overheard her talking on the phone telling a friend that the last few weeks have really been an adventure. She was being sarcastic, but the girls picked it up. And just as well. It took a little more convincing for their mom. I saw that New York, the cost of living is too high to start there. And I thought, I don't want to go to Florida by any more storms, so Colorado seems safe. And why not Houston? Well, I was trying to establish in Houston, but like I said, I only had 14 days to get everything done. Otherwise, we'd be on the street trying to get it done. So when I heard Colorado, I jumped on there. Oh Jane, you ought to be ashamed, you let a boy kiss you and you don't know his name. At this point, the girls decided I was done talking to their mom, and they wanted the microphone back, which they suddenly realized was real, and I actually was from the radio, and they had business. About the hurricane and our sister and brother, we can't find them. You can't find your brother and sister? No. When Katrina hit, we never heard from since we left. If [? Kiana ?] and Jamal is listening to this, we love you and we miss you. We met lots of people at the Astrodome who were still missing friends and family. There's an office that reunites families, with lists of survivors and their locations, but their moms says the last time they saw Jamal and [? Kiana ?] was when she dropped them off with their dad and grandparents in New Orleans before evacuating, just before the storm. She's acting confident that they're OK, so the girls are acting confident too. Act Two, There's No Place Like Dome. So what was it like this week in those huge buildings that were housing evacuees in Houston? Well, the first thing you noticed when you walked into the Astrodome or the Reliant Convention Center, where people were living, was the noise. James Scott, James Scott, pick up at the front gate. Tyrone Scott is waiting for you. PA announcements went on all day and into the night. In the center of the Astrodome, the area there where the cots were, because you were right under the center of the dome itself, it echoed like crazy. Please call Auntie Harry. Her number is 7067. Thank you. Louis [? Llewellyn ?] told me that you get used to it. He's a New Orleans evacuee. Yeah, I take naps through the announcements. Yeah, you have to take naps. I'm not as young as I used to be. Yeah, the announcements won't stop me from taking a nap. One thing about living in a big room with thousands of people that you don't really think about until you're there is germs. There are little free bottles of antibacterial scrub all over the place that people were advised to use, but that didn't stop bugs from spreading. I caught the virus that was going around. I had diarrhea, and I was vomiting, trying to get to a dumpster, and I couldn't. I couldn't make it. And I just vomited right in the middle of the floor. Bad place to get sick. Yeah, bad place to get sick. Or maybe not such a bad place, since just a few feet from his cot was a 24-hour medical clinic. There was also a pediatric clinic and a pharmacy. He got better in just a day. The lights were on all the time, though they dim them at night. It was so calm and orderly that the soldiers you saw inside the Reliant Convention Center were mostly on duty guarding the bathrooms, mainly, one said, to be sure that men and women weren't getting together in the bathrooms for some adult privacy, or, dare I say, domo-sexual activity. In the late morning, the big convention floor where everybody was living looked like an apartment complex where all the walls had been lifted away. A little girl skipped around her family's cots, a teenager walked through bouncing a basketball. There was a free phone bank, and places to sign up for college, and all the offices to get insurance and government benefits, a big computer center with lots of volunteers ready to help you get online and navigate government websites. Most of what was so striking was the overall competence of the whole thing, the care with which it was all put together. And nobody thought that more strongly than the people who were there who had been trapped at the New Orleans Convention Center, or the Superdome in New Orleans, after the flooding. The Superdome was like, it was just total chaos. Rapes went on. One of the young men stole one of the soldier's gun and shot in the leg. This shooting, this was something you saw? Yes. They killed, and killings were going on. It was just like, just horrible. This is Phyllis Thompson. I talked to her just as she and her son and her daughter and her grandkids were packing up their stuff to move into their new housing. The kids had one of those big plastic trash bags full of new stuffed animals that had been donated. Phyllis and her son both told me that after what they went through at the Superdome, they don't ever want to return to New Orleans. I'm not going back. I don't want to even see it no more. Uh-uh. I ain't going back to that. His mom, Phyllis, says that after the flood, the moment on the bus that they crossed the border into Texas, she felt safe for the first time. She felt peace. Texas has opened their heart. The state troopers, the organizations that work here, the Red Cross, it's just everybody has just showed so much love and so much kindness. And all I can say is that I just thank God for it. Even the clean-up people are so nice and just kind, and just considerate. Not everybody was feeling quite as positive. I ran into Tony and Tiffany Davis as they were leaving the Reliant Center. An incredibly wholesome-looking young couple, they wore the color wristbands that get evacuees into the Astrodome complex, and they dragged a leopard print wheelie suitcase that had been donated by Wal-Mart, and a beat-up olive suitcase that came from an airline. Continental I think gave it to us. Just like somebody's lost luggage that never like-- I think it was lost at the airport. Lost, yeah. So that's where it ends up? Yes. It's ours now. They're taking the free plane tickets offered by Continental and FEMA and moving to New Jersey, where Tony's brother has a house. So far the housing people in Texas haven't been able to get to their case, so they're leaving. So how's it been here? Like, do you come out of this experience feeling kind of impressed with what they've done here in Houston, or--? I think when we first arrived, that everything was pretty organized, and I think afterwards, I think they kind of got tired of us. Why? Why? What was the sign of that? Like, we went to the mall, and I think that they see us with the bands on, and everybody's like, oh my gosh, here they come, here they come, here they come, they're coming to steal, they're coming to do this, they do that. And it's not everybody. Everybody's not like that. And I think that it's partially the media's fault. They did portray us in a bad way. The news is showing us looting, and they're showing this, and they're showing that. And I think that it just adds to the fire, and I think that that's how everybody's judging us. In a shop at the Galleria mall, she says, a store employee followed her wherever she went. And just walking through town, she says, a man stepped completely off the sidewalk to avoid her and Tony. And in fact, white Texans did raise the issue with us, with me and Jane and Lisa, of what the presence of all these people from New Orleans would do to the crime rate. And the fact that it hadn't affected the crime rate was big enough news to be a front page story in the Houston Chronicle on Tuesday. But at the same time, what's most striking as you go around Houston is how many people are putting themselves out for days and weeks at a time for strangers from Louisiana. At Grace Community Church, for example, the congregation not only came up with over $200,000 for relief supplies and gas cards for Katrina victims, over 1,000 of them volunteered day after day, some working 12- and 14-hour days, sending out faxes to every hotel in the area offering assistance to survivors, calling apartment complexes all over the city so they could compile every day a daily list of available apartments, specifying which ones were giving special breaks to Katrina survivors. They were serving a huge population that barely made it on to the news, and didn't make it into the Astrodome. That is, people who evacuated before the hurricane, who had some resources of their own. Lori Buxton works at the church. Yes, primarily the people that we experienced were people that left when the storm was approaching, came here, got their hotel rooms, expecting they'd be here for three to four days while the storm went through. Of course, that turned out to be a very different situation. A week later, 10 days, 14 days later, they started running out of money. They started running out of places to stay. I had a call the day before yesterday, and I quote, "I have to be out of here in 20 minutes, and I have nowhere to go and no way to get there." Exactly where all these evacuees are going to live is the next serious question that this exodus is going to face. And though the Astrodome officially emptied out at the end of this week, several thousand people are still in the Reliant Arena just next door, with no particular end in sight. And beyond that group, it doesn't seem like anybody knows how many tens of thousands of people are staying in Houston paying for their own hotels, or on two-week government hotel vouchers that are now running out, or with family or friends, who are going to need permanent housing, and may need government help to help pay for it. There's a voucher program that the city of Houston has set up that gives you six months free rent, no security deposit, two months utilities, furniture for your apartment, stuff like a shower curtain, in pre-selected apartments that have been inspected to be sure they're OK. Which of course sounds great, but matching the apartments with all the people who need them is complicated. And that is actually the subject of Act Three of our show. Act Three, Land Grab. Lisa Pollak, one of our program's producers, went to the housing center at the Reliant Arena this week. It's 3:00 PM when we get to the housing center, and it's not a happy place. There are hundreds of people here, slumped in folding chairs, jostling in lines, pleading for volunteers to help them. Tense-looking cops are everywhere, and soldiers in camouflage fatigues. It makes the DMV look like a day spa. In the section of chairs where we're standing, there's this sudden wave of movement. People stand up, and there's some yelling. It turns out an official with a bullhorn just told a whole group to leave and come back tomorrow. They won't get apartments today. And one of the women standing near us has clearly reached her limit. You should have apartments first before you bring the people in. You're bringing the people in before the apartments is available. Now we stand in line. Her name is [? Ida Mae. ?] She's been here since early this morning, she says, just like she was told to be, looking for a place for herself and her teenage sons. And at this point, the only way to manage her frustration is to share it with everyone she sees, including, apparently, one of the less-tolerant cops in the room. The police just told me that they will arrest me and put me out. Put me out where? Where they going to put me out at? That's a threat. Why did the police threaten you? Oh, if we get loud and all this kind of stuff, they going to put us to jail. If we have any problems, they going to put us in jail and all. Man, come on. Give us a break. Man, give us a break. If we get loud, we not going to let you holler at us. Well, I feel like screaming. What you mean, holler at you? I could scream to the top of my-- do he understand the pressure I'm under? Well, right now, mister, you holding me up right now, because the people-- I'm getting in line. Ida Mae goes to stand in another line, the line to sign up for tomorrow's line, which turns out to be the wrong line. A volunteer points her in the right direction. Excuse me ma'am, the two-bedroom line is this line. There is the four-bedroom. I am sorry, OK? It was confusing, yeah. Thank you. I don't know what happened. As soon as they walk in in the morning, we're getting buses, and we're taking people out to their homes. It is a success story beyond their imagination that you may need to print or say something about on radio. This is Guy Rankin, the man with the unenviable job of running this place. When I stumble on to him in the middle of the arena, he says things are actually going pretty well here, and he means it. There were 25,000 people that are in dome. Now we're down to 3,000. They had to go somewhere. We housed most of them. We had 3,144 people taken to housing over the last five to seven days right off the dome floor. 800 seniors we took right off the dome floor, provided transportation, social services, and a full aspect of training, nurses, doctors, and all of that. I just got back-- If all these numbers don't quite match up to the chaos around us, it's for a reason. The housing voucher program, like so much of the Katrina aid, is a work in progress, being assembled on the fly. At first, when hurricane victims showed up, they were told to sign up, and then they'd be called when housing came available for them. Lots of people never got calls. And because that system was moving too slowly, it was changed midstream. Now how it works is what we're seeing today. People come to the housing center and wait for buses that will take them directly to the apartments that had been chosen for them. But the system is still messy. Ida Mae, for instance, needed a three-bedroom apartment, and not enough of those were ready today. But the one- and two-bedrooms, we didn't have enough people to fill the one- and two-bedrooms. It was empty. I know, I see that look on your face, but we've been housing people day after day, minute after minute, taking buses out, full buses. Those are the stories you need to tell the world, and what we're housing, and those are the units you need to go see. Well, how can we come out and see some of it? I know there was a bus just leaving now that we were hoping we might come along on. Yeah, you missed the bus. Did I? Yeah. All right, I'm going to call y'all when I make it in and I know how it looks. They told me they are lovely. It's the Timber Ridge Apartments. As it turned out, the bus he said we missed was running late, and we caught the last one just as it was loading. The people lined up didn't really know where they were going, just that they'd have an apartment when they got there. There were seven families, mostly couples, one little boy, and a very, very pregnant woman named [? Lashawn ?] Price who said she didn't want to have to bring a new baby back to the Astrodome. I ask her when she's due, and she says any day, which turns out to be an understatement. Do you have a doctor here or anything? No, I'm too far along to get a health care doctor. I just have to wait it out. And they'll just tell you to go to the ER when you go into labor? Yeah, I'm already three centimeters, so I'm just waiting on the next centimeter. You're in labor. But they can't keep me until I'm four. We all get on the bus. Lashawn, still completely calm, is having contractions at this point, and the housing official who's coming with us hands out the voucher forms. We drive for a while on the freeway, and people are starting to get nervous. We seemed really far from the Astrodome. Finally, after 45 minutes, we get there. Is this it? [CHEERING] It's a nice-looking townhouse development, with garages and tidy landscaping and new brick and siding. And for the first time all day, there's a sense that things are getting better. Boy, we got lucky. We got lucky. We got so lucky, because they have to [INAUDIBLE] Well, the inside looks very, very beautiful. We're in the clubhouse now. It's big, kind of like the lobby of a Hampton Inn, and there's a loveseat and wingback chairs and a fancy flower arrangement on the front table. Out the back through the glass doors, you can see a pool and basketball courts. The families line up as if out of habit. They all stand there looking around, flipping through the brochures. A few minutes go by, a few more. In the back corner of the room are two young women. They obviously work there, and they see we're here, but they don't come up to us or even say hello. They're talking about what to do, and everyone knows it. And [? Lashawn ?] says what everyone's thinking. Is there a problem? But the women don't hear her, and the waiting continues. Finally, after 15 minutes, one of them comes forward. She's the assistant manager, though she doesn't introduce herself. She asks everyone to get out their social security cards and birth certificates, and she gets some incredulous looks. I don't have a social security card. We just came from a flood in New Orleans. Where are you going to put that at? That's just so stupid. She hands out the applications. Everyone can get an apartment tonight, she says, as long as they have no previous evictions and a clean criminal record. There's an awkward silence in the room, and then the questions begin. So if the people have a bad criminal check, they just have to be homeless? If you know that you have a criminal background, and when I say criminal background, I mean no felonies whatsoever, no matter what it is or how old they are, misdemeanors for any drug-related, sex-related crime, or violence against person or property. So that's what I mean by criminal. So if those four things do not apply to you, or if you do not have an eviction, or if you do not owe a property any money, then yes, you will be in. Lashawn ?] turns to me. This is BS. This is straight-- Do you have one? Do I have a conviction? Yeah, I have a conviction. But a felony or misdemeanor? It's a felony, but it still doesn't stop me from working. I picked up a charge for my sister. That's not fair. Now it's getting really tense. The Housing Department guy is arguing with the assistant manager. People are pulling out their cell phones. There's some yelling. In a way, it's no different than things have been for weeks now. The rules keep changing, and no one tells them, and nothing ends up quite how it's supposed to be. Remember last week, when the big story was the FEMA debit cards? Some people got them, others didn't. Next to me, [? Lashawn's ?] getting more agitated by the minute. I can't believe she's not four centimeters dilated by now. Her old life, with her own apartment and her job as a medical records assistant, seems as far away as ever. That's the part that you're about to go insane behind. You're not in your right frame of mind no more, because if you think about everywhere you go, you're standing in the line for six, seven damn hours to get up there for somebody to give the damn runaround. After a while, it's starting to be-- then you can't even go home to somewhere and relax. You're going back to the damn center with 15,000, 20,000 people in it. You can't even sit out and have a peace of mind for a second. I wish I had an answer for it myself right now, but I don't. Lisa, the assistant manager, seems a little overwhelmed. And basically what happened is that they were supposed to be here earlier in the day, and they came five minutes before we were supposed to close. And then the bus driver's giving them 15 minutes to get back on the bus, and that's just not adequate time enough for us to be able to get them in and out. I feel really bad. A regional manager shows up, promising to help people, but it's too late. Everyone feels discriminated against. Here's [? Lashawn ?] and another woman as they get back on the bus. Them bastards looked at us like we was misfits, and y'all negroes ain't getting in here. That's not right You're coming from nowhere. You have nothing. They know you don't have nothing. And then for you to turn around and try to makeshift throw little stepping stones in front of you like that? That's not right. That's not right. The housing official, he's back on the bus too, tells me he doesn't know why this has happened. It's his first day, he says. But there's another complex open tonight which also accepts the vouchers. So the bus gets back on the freeway and drives to a neighborhood on the northwest side of the city. Out the bus windows, more and more of the store names are in Spanish. Someone spots a man pedaling a little food cart, and a bunch of people snicker. By the time the bus stops in front of a weathered two-story apartment complex called Villa del Sol, most of the passengers seem a little freaked out. One thing's for sure: this isn't Timber Ridge. For starters, when we get inside they're ready for us. We have a really nice kids center here. We have a great kids center here that has five new computers in it. We crowd into the rental office. It's more basement rec room than Hampton Inn, with mismatched furniture and no slick brochures. But it's clean and comfortable, and a table in the center of the room is piled high with food: pizzas, sodas, chips. Pick as much as you want, people are saying. On the wall is a photo collage: the neighborhood kids at summer day camp. It's a big party. I'm going to need your initials right here please. Lashawn sits down at the manager's desk and picks up a pen. She looks exhausted. And right here, right there, one more, right there too, and I'm going to need your signature here. It was that simple. She had an apartment, six months rent free. So how were you feeling while you were writing that? I don't know. It's just, whatever. Whatever. It's got a roof and a door, and I can sanitize it and have a new baby. That's all I'm looking for now. No one else from our group even fills out the paperwork. They eat the pizza and drift back to the bus. They'll find something better, they say. I grab one of them. Can I ask you why you don't want to stay? Why I'm not staying? Because look how far we are from here. Just look around you. You see yourself. Ain't no good environment. Mexicans are the only people around here. It's hard to miss the fact that some of the same people who were complaining the loudest about discrimination at Timber Ridge were the quickest to say they didn't want to live around a bunch of Mexicans. One of them told me later, if you were in our shoes, wouldn't you feel out of place? It's a different community, a community you're not a part of. Our kids might get picked on or ridiculed. They'll be outsiders. You've got a kid, right? Yeah. Laura Rodriguez, the assistant manager, is going to give [? Lashawn ?] a tour. Jane, my co-producer, walks over to the apartment with them, and halfway there [? Lashawn ?] grabs Jane's hand. Going to feel a contraction? You're having one? Yeah. Now? This is your apartment. This is a two-bedroom apartment, and one bath. It's real nice. It has a walk-in closet. Let me show you. They're nice and big. You can fit a bed in there. I think you're going to be happy here. People here are very friendly. I've been in this property for five years. People is nice. It's nice. I'm glad. Thank you. To their credit, the people running this housing program are still working on it, still adjusting it each day, still trying to figure out how to get more people into apartments more quickly. The next morning, we go back to the housing center. Things are a lot the same. Telling us to come back tomorrow. I was here yesterday with my proof. This is my proof. I was here yesterday. I try to talk to Guy Rankin, the guy in charge, but he's busy. He's walking around the arena, going from section to section with a bullhorn, listening to people's complaints and trying to answer their questions. But let me first explain the Housing Choice Center. Some of you may have heard it before, but we need to do it again for everybody who's here. The system's still got some problems. Lots of people are asking why they just can't rent their own apartments with the voucher money instead of taking the places chosen for them in neighborhoods they don't know and don't feel comfortable with. It might sound picky, but when I talked to a New Orleans mom whose son has already started elementary school here and is happy there and doesn't want to move again, I'm reminded of how complicated this all is. I listen for a while to Rankin. He tells the crowd he's heard that complaint, and that maybe soon there will be a way to let people choose their own places. It's still being worked out, he says, even as he speaks. Later today, he says, there might even be a line for that. That system will be set up today, and we'll be lining up for that, lining up for that. I can only take one more question from this group, and please be patient with us, because we're very, very busy. I know you've been here 17 days. Some of us have been here 17 days with 20 hours a day. I'm going to answer each of your questions. Lisa Pollak. In the few days since the middle of the week when she left the housing center, they've made other improvements, like they've given people wristbands to keep their place in line. The biggest hold-up is still finding acceptable apartments, inspecting them, and then getting people out to see them. That will continue to be slow, especially for people who want three-, and four-, and five-bedroom apartments, which are scarce. By Friday, the number of families that the city had put into the six-month free apartments had climbed from 3,100 to 4,800. Right outside the housing center, on the parking lot between the Astrodome and the Reliant Center, the YMCA set up a huge recreation area for kids and adults. Basketball courts. There's blow-up things that little kids bounce on at fairs. There's one tent of arcade video machines, and Dance Dance Revolution for kids, and a second tent of arcade games for adults, all set up so no quarters were needed. On one machine I saw a message that I had never seen before: game never over. At a plastic table in the tent, two kids have drumsticks, and one was teaching the other how to play. Volunteers from Seattle and North Carolina and all over the place walked through, tending the kids and chatting happily like they'd known each other for years. On the Ms. Pac-Man machine, I see a man take a break from standing in line for government help by playing the fastest, greatest game of Ms. Pac-Man I have ever witnessed in my life. Yeah, when I was at my house in New Orleans, yeah, I used to play it on my TV. So I got a little bit of skills behind this thing. Outside, a cool late afternoon breeze starts to kick in, and I watch as a pediatric doctor in scrubs, a volunteer who flew in from Baltimore, tries to cross the playground, and gets stopped first by a six-year-old who has to borrow the doctor's camera to take her picture. You know how to do it now right, because you're a professional photographer? Let me fix it for you. And then she lends her cell phone to an older girl who needs to call a parent, even though she's having trouble. It's his phone. Do you want to try it again? Same number? Is it not ringing? 823-- As the sun started to go down on Tuesday, it was hard to believe that this whole complex would soon be gone, this city built in a day, like Brigadoon. 27,000 people were just two weeks ago, down to a few thousand this week. The past few weeks have been horrific for people here, traumatic, and the next six months are going to be incredibly hard, too, as people set up new lives, and homes, and jobs. This place was a waystation where sometimes it was possible to pause and rest. Coming up: yes, the streets of New Orleans are still restricted. So what's it like to drive around there right now? 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 and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, This is not My Beautiful House, stories about the hundreds of thousands of people sent into exodus since Hurricane Katrina. We've arrived at Act Four of our show. Act Four The Long Way Home. Well, the mayor of New Orleans has announced that this weekend certain parts of New Orleans will reopen, first to business owners and then to residents, this weekend and in the coming week. Nick Spitzer is part of the New Orleans diaspora. He's also the host of the Public Radio International music show, American Routes. He's living now with his wife and his two little kids in Lafayette, living with friends. He has a press pass, so it's actually been legal for him to drive through the city of New Orleans. The streets are restricted, of course. So he finally tried it. This is, I think it's September the 7th. It is September the 7th, in downtown New Orleans, sitting on Canal Street right now inside my car. I'm about to take a ride uptown, and I'm just going to narrate what I see as I go. So I've been told to go by way of Tchoupitoulas Street, and I'm told that it's fairly clear going up Tchoupitoulas. It makes sense. It's the old high ground in the city. So here we go. Certainly there are a lot of security guards everywhere who aren't very friendly, lots of guys in black with Kevlar vests and different things that say Security ICE, and security this, and security that. And then of course there's just the good old garden variety New Orleans cops. And then there's cops from all over, which is really, really strange: cops from Dublin, Ohio, cops from New Mexico. I'm going to see-- there's no traffic lights working. I think I'm going to cut through here. I think I can do it. Yes, I can do it. And I'm off and running. And no one's shooting at me, for which I'm thankful. There's a guy with a machine gun there. I think actually there's a corpse up this way. Somebody told me. I'm heading up Tchoupitoulas Street here. Everywhere you turn there's just garbage lying everywhere, garbage and old signs. There's electric generators running on diesel. Place reeks of diesel in addition to the smell of corpses and dead animals and rotting vegetation, and this stinking water everywhere, just oil, toxic crap. Boy, here we are on St. Joseph and Commerce, and there's just garbage in all directions. Shopping carts-- oh, this must be where all the looting took place. That's exactly what this is. Oh, it is so strange and so sad. There's the D-Day Museum. Jeez, looks like they've looted the D-Day museum. That is really strange, looting the gift shop of the D-Day museum. This really smells bad out here. Unfortunately, it's because there are quite a few bodies over there by the edge of the Convention Center. Oh God, this is just awful. Now we're heading uptown on Tchoupitoulas. Jeez, I've got to be careful for these tires, too, now that I think about it. I do have another tire back there, but I'm told there's a lot of roof tacks in the street. There's a lot of glass everywhere, a lot of metal shards, and just the streets are in bad, bad, bad shape. Wow, there's people walking. Maybe I can even talk to-- Hey man, how you doing? So you working with? FEMA, FEMA. We was working across the river today. As you can see, we cleared up all of St. Charles. We cleared out all Louisiana. We clearing up everywhere. We're just cleaning up, man. And it's giving me something to do, keep me from thinking about my family most, sitting down, just concentrating on doing something constructive. I've found that by putting your mind on work, you don't feel bad about anything else going on. They was trying to run us out of the houses and stuff, talking about evacuating. But why shall I leave? They got people coming in from out of town working. I talked to a guy before I got the job where I'm working at now. This guy was from Houston, Texas, a temporary worker working on it. Why the citizens that live here can't stay down here and work? It doesn't make sense. They got so much money coming up. Let the locals rebuild the city. Yeah, let the locals rebuild it. And he want to run us out. And then, I didn't want to leave this animal here to die. I didn't want her to die. I didn't want to leave her out on the street to get hit or none of that. I couldn't leave her, and my daughters never would have forgiven me. When they come home, Lord blessed me to still be here, I'm going to surprise them. I'm going to hide that dog. I'm going to say, Destiny gone. I couldn't keep her. And I'm going to come out with her. And I know how they're going to feel. I know how they going-- I got it all planned too. I'm going to see my family again. When do you think you'll get your family back in town? Oh, I don't know. They're talking about like two to three months, something like that. It's going to be really hard, because I shed a few tears because I miss them, but I know they in a better place than where I'm at. But I don't know where they at. I don't know where anyone at. And you can't even talk to them. I can't even talk to my mother. She left before the storm. The day before the storm she was in Mississippi. I haven't talked to her since. Well, you take care, man. It's a pleasure to talk to you. You have a safe trip. Watch yourself, because the army people just told me they got some bad guys running around. Running around uptown here? Yeah, he say they in the area. Guys with guns, huh? Must be. I got to go a little further uptown. I hope I don't see any. Bye-bye. Hmm, those guys look a little suspicious in that truck. It's a little spooky up here. It's about 5:45 in the afternoon here, Wednesday afternoon. Coming up to the intersection of Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon, famous for the Tipitina's nightclub. I had heard there'd been some musicians sleeping here. I don't know what the deal is, though. Oh, here's a landmark: Hansen's Sno-Bliz, the snowball shop that I love so much. And it looks OK. Now I'm coming to Magazine Street, which is, of course, a major thoroughfare. I don't want them to think this microphone is a gun. There's some cops kind of eyeing me, but I'm going to wave to them. Hey, guys. See my house in the distance, just can barely see it in the distance now. There's a SUV going by it. Jeez, I'm kind of nervous just coming back, worried. A lot of trees down right near the house. Oh God, it's my house. Looks like one window might have blown down in the dining room, unless somebody busted in there. I don't know. I'm going to go in the house with a-- drop the cargo. Go in the house with a flashlight. I got to be the first one back in the hood. This is really strange. There's those insects in the trees. It's so bloody quiet. [KNOCKS] I don't think anybody's in here. I sure hope not. The alarm was left on. Doesn't look like anybody's been fooling with this place. Ooh, doesn't smell too good. Hello, anybody home? I always keep this little bell here by the door. [BELL CHIMES] Service. It does smell a little bit of rotten food in here. I'm almost afraid to open the refrigerator, because it's been about-- Phew. Oh. Oh. Oh God, that will make you puke. We're back in the back downstairs bathroom. There's my little boy's stool. Gets up to wash his hands. Yeah, I heard the water was on, but-- The whole window is beautiful. The window pane is an ovular window pane with with stained glass. I'm just going to take the damn tape off. It saved it. Let's assume there won't be another hurricane here anytime soon. I am so lucky. I am just so lucky. Real question is will we ever live here again. Let's go into my son's room. This is Perry's room. The doors seem to be sealed shut. It won't-- there it goes. This is his brother Gardner's room. He hasn't moved into it yet, because he's only four months old. And it looks like it's OK. No one living here, and it's just incredibly sad. If I started thinking about it, I'd get upset. It's better just to keep moving, get the list, pack, and leave, I think, at this point. I don't want to stay here. It's too creepy. There's just nobody around for miles. Margaret's given me a list here. Hope I can do all of it. Guest room, quilt on the guest bed: I got that. The LP records, jazz boxes, her Elvis Costello collection. I don't know if I can carry all that. In the bathroom downstairs, I'd better get that Wiggles towel for my son, Perry. He misses it. The scuzzy, I think it's called, or snuggly that goes into the jogger for little baby Gardner. Maybe I can get that jogger out. There's the old Mardi Gras flag, Muses flag. I don't know why she wants that. She didn't even ride that yet, but who knows? Thomas trains, videos, Dora, Ringling Brothers circus, and the little blue jacket. Upstairs in the sun room, all the memento boxes and pictures. Running shoes, Nine West shoes. I haven't even gotten anything on the list for me, but I'll figure it out. Just about got the last stuff in the car. Now I'm using the light of the tape recorder to find my flashlight. Well, I'm back in the car. It's really dark. I feel like I've been a looter in my own house. I came to get possessions to last how long? A month? Two? Three? It's just hard to know what to take. You just take bits and pieces. It's like your whole life was just washing by you, and you feel like a cat burglar walking around, and every sound is pretty scary. Well, I'm going to go back down to the compound for the night. So I'm all alone on St. Charles Avenue. It's very dark. It's like being on a country road going through the middle of a very big city. Yeah, here comes a car. He's turning across my bow. Let's see what this guy is. Let's hope we don't have a problem here. It's like a military kind of a guy. That's what they told me to be careful about was, when you come down the street, that if somebody turns in front of you in a large vehicle, they could block you. You've got to be really careful. Hi, gentlemen. Don't come creeping up that fast again, OK? Sorry, I didn't see you. That's fine. When somebody does that, you stop. Yes, sir. We don't know who you are. Yeah, I understand. I appreciate that. No problem. Seen anything that we need to know about around here? Not really. I've been up at, basically, Prytania and Jefferson area, and I have not seen or heard a peep. All right, we appreciate it. Just be safe, all right? Yeah, man. Wow. Well that was fun. Those guys were on some kind of operation looking for the thieves, because they had all their lights down. And I don't think they were too happy that I showed up. Their guns were drawn. I think that jogging stroller up top probably makes me look pretty nondescript. They bought my story, anyway. Now I'm cutting back over to Prytania, and there's a big rat crossing the street here. Oh, jeez [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Oh, there's a kitty cat. Oh, that's so sad. He's alive, but barely. The animals are starving in this city. Nick Spitzer. You can hear his great music show, or find out what time it's on the radio, at www.americanroutes.org. Act Five, Water Bed. Well, we have one last story about homes and houses in New Orleans. Louann Mims is 78 years old, and never paid much attention to the annual hurricane and storm warnings in New Orleans where she lives. But this year, this year was different. The morning of August 29, the day the hurricane hit, she got everything ready to pack her car to go to the Superdome to take refuge from the incoming flood. From a temporary housing facility in Maywood, Illinois, where she is now, she talked to Alex Kotlowitz about that day. I got up in the morning and I looked out, and it looked fairly ordinary. I said, well, I'm going to have a bowl of cereal and a banana. I put the cereal in and poured on the milk and had two bites, and I looked, and the water was just coming in from the patio. So I got up, looked to the front part of the house. Water was coming in the front door. Oh, my God, what do I do? But then it came so quickly, and within five to eight minutes there was almost five feet of water in the house. So I'm now, God, what am I going to do? And everything is floating. I sat on the top of the ladder, and I realized then it was getting a little later in the afternoon, and I had better just see if there was anything that I could sleep on that night, because I couldn't get out. I couldn't go walking in all this water. Your house is one story? Uh-huh. It's a 10-room ranch. So I walked past the spare room, and the mattress is about to go under, so no sleeping on that one. I go to my bedroom, and my mattress was floating. I say, hey, I'll go get my ladder. I can climb up there. And I did, and that's where I was for eight days and eight nights. And this mattress is a Stearns & Foster, and I had just received it the end of April. I bought the extra firm, so it must have a lot of wood in it. So you're sitting, you're floating on your mattress. King size or--? A queen size. Are you lying on your bed all day? Well, I had no choice. You're just reclining, or sitting on it, or? I was just lying. Now, I had two pillows, and they were very wet, but that was all right. I was used to that. Up to where on your body, the water? Well, there was times when it was about mid-thigh. There was one time the first day, my chest of drawers turned so that the back was up, and I stepped on it in hopes of climbing on the bed. And it just flipped me right into the water, and I went under the water for a second. And I just held my breath a little bit and floated right on up. My refrigerator in the kitchen went belly-up. I couldn't open the door. My refrigerator had that little door outside that has the water and the juice and the milk on the door. So I opened that, and I was able to get some orange juice out. And then I took off my meat cleaver, and I kind of broke one side of that little thing. I got some raisins, some cheese, and each morning I have a few bites because I didn't know how long I'd be there. And I said, I have to have a few bites every day. And then, late in the day when I got hungry, well, I just kind of ignored it. And to my great disappointment, when I came here and I had my physical, I had not lost one ounce. I was really disappointed there, because I was counting on, at least I want to get something out of this. I want to lose a few pounds, but I didn't. What did you do about water? Well, I had a full gallon. I decided 12 ounces was enough for the day. I'd have 12 ounces of water, and that kept my kidneys healthy enough. It sounds like you had survival experience. How would you know? Well, the reason-- I was in nursing for 42 years, and I kind of knew how some things would be. People say, weren't you frightened that this was happening to you? Not really. It's just the will to say I will not succumb to this. But I wasn't even thinking like that. I was just thinking of all practical things, because I knew eventually someone would find me. Sounds like you were awfully calm. What else would you do to keep your spirits up? When I was just lying there, I just kind of said, well, Louann, you know, you have this furniture, some of it about 40 years, and time to get some more anyway. I watch garden and-- what is that HGTV thing? And I watch that a lot. I enjoy that. When I'm bored with something else on TV and there's stupid stuff, I go to that. So they're talking about color all the time, beautiful colors. Oranges-- well, I wouldn't want red or anything like that, but maybe a pale orange or a pale yellow. And then I thought, well, now I have a chance, and I never really liked the Formica they had on my countertops, so I thought, now I'll get marble. And I did not like the floor covering they had on it, now I'll get ceramic tile. The carpet, of course, has got to be thrown out. But I said, now I'll have hardwood floors, because that's what I want anyway. Saying, oh, that looks pretty good. So you're on your mattress every day, just lying there, and you're thinking about redecorating your house? Well, yeah, I did. That's the way I was motivating myself. If I was going to say, oh poor me, I might die here of this or that, or why don't somebody come and get me? I figured they would eventually make rounds, and they would find me. During those eight days, what did you miss the most? I have so many TVs in my house, because I love television. I have six. I had one in each bedroom. In the great room was like two in there, because I had a very large one, 53, for sports. I'm an avid sports fan, so I love all the tennis, all the golf, and all the basketball. So I enjoy that on my large screen. But I never missed it one time, and I could not understand why I didn't miss it. I really did not miss it. And what were you wearing during all this time? A bra. That's all, because everything else got so wet. I mean, I didn't have anything anyway. I had that old muumuu that I wore outside. I had that on the first day of the storm, and that was wet. After that, through these eight days, I just had on a bra, nothing more. Did you learn anything about yourself that you didn't know before? Well, always my upcoming, I was terribly, terribly, terribly poor when I was growing up. And I thought that there was a white world and a black world. I thought white people had things that black people didn't have because of the two worlds, and blacks were not permitted those things. Well, when I grew up, and I left Louisiana when I was 17 years old and ended up in Michigan, I discovered, oh, money was the problem. So when I discovered that, then I said-- I don't know, I can say I set out to prove that I could be equal. And so I educated myself. I set out to improve myself. I was the kind of person, I have so many clothes. No one woman ever needed as many clothes as I've had in my life. I had pajamas that I had never worn: silk, beautiful pajamas. I have two full-length mink coats, and I have a beautiful Persian. It was just ironic that, when I arrived here, I came here in an old muumuu which I didn't notice that was on the wrong side. I had no underclothes on, and I had no shoes. I've had 100 pairs of shoes in my lifetime. So I never want to own all that stuff again. So you realized you just didn't need all of that? Right, I didn't need all of that. After her rescue, Louann Mims was put on a plane to Chicago wearing only the muumuu she was rescued in and a pair of socks that a relief worker gave her. She's currently at a facility run by the state of Illinois, hoping to get a new apartment somewhere near her daughter. The daughter plans to write a thank you letter to the mattress company, Stearns & Foster, at some point. She talked with Alex Kotlowitz, author of Never a City So Real, There Are No Children Here, and other books. Well, our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder, and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollak. Julie's also our senior producer. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Chris Ladd. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to any of our programs for absolutely free, or buy CDs of them. Or you know you can download today's program, or 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 most weeks has this reaction when he hears our show: Phew. Oh. Oh. Oh God, that will make you puke. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Marti was 22, just out of college, working as a waitress, living in LA, with vague ideas of getting into the film business, but no idea of how to do that, when a customer hooked her up with a job in the movie business, on the kind of fringes of the movie business actually, at a product placement company. These are the people who help companies get their name brand products into Hollywood films. And this was a job I didn't even know existed. But our big client was Budweiser. And I think one of the reasons I was really impressed with this job was that they took me to the breakroom, and they had a giant refrigerator shaped like a Budweiser can. And I just thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. You were 22. I was 22. It was full of beer. It was the kind of job where you could drink as much beer as you wanted on the job. It was the kind of job where somebody regularly injected fish oil, which stank, into the upholstered chair of a boss that everybody hated. Marti had never actually worked in an office before, and she just thought, well, I guess this is what all office jobs are like. And she got to read scripts of movies before they were made, which was exciting, to look for places where characters could be drinking Budweiser or using other clients' products. And things went along like that for a while. And one day, the office manager tells Marti to wear a dress the next day and show up on time because auditors from Budweiser were going to be coming to the office. And I showed up the next morning, and there's this guy in a suit sitting in my office at my desk. I think he introduced himself. And he said, I'm going to pretend to be your boss today. And you're my secretary. I guess at that point it was explained to me that my boss-- the big boss, the guy I never saw-- had been cooking the books and that, according to the books, there were 15 more employees over in our office than there actually were. So somebody's solution to this was to hire a bunch of actors to come in and play the employees who were supposed to be working there, including the person who was supposed to be running the quote unquote, "script department," who was someone who was not me, who was paid a whole lot more than me. In fact, Marti was told, she was doing, for $200 a week and still keeping her waitressing job, the work of three people, an entire department, that her company was actually billing Anheuser-Busch for. And, 22 years old, Marti never thought, OK, that's it, I'm walking. In fact, she was all, let's go, best day of work ever. Now we're comrades. We're in on a scheme together. So I'm like, hey, I'm Marti. And he introduced himself. And I believe his name was Gary. And Gary was like, yeah, usually my gig is I'm a regular extra on All My Children. And I was really impressed. I just thought, wow, this guy is on TV. And he's all, so tell me how things really work here, and what should I say when they come in, and how does this computer work? And it was like we were getting ready to do a little play. Did it seem like it might work to you? Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. Well, they were actors. They were a day player on Days of Our Lives. It was really impressive to me. I couldn't believe they'd hired the caliber of performers. I thought, wow, I can't believe they got people-- There were a bunch, one of whom was the cue card guy usually for Wheel of Fortune. They were on real shows. They were on real shows. They were on television, and they were here in our offices. And then the office manager gives the word, the auditors have arrived. So yeah, she's all, they're here, they're here. And everybody started looking efficient. And at that point, people start bustling around, boxes are being carried from place to place. Yeah, in my mind, it was like we're busy, happy employees. And everybody got busy because they were all those guys in the stockroom. And Gary is typing. God knows what he was typing. We're trying to look busy. And I remember they walked past us first. And your heart kind of skips, like, oh, they're coming to see us. And so all of a sudden, there's like four or five people standing around the door of this little office-- These are the people from Anheuser-Busch. --kind of looking at us like we were an exhibit, the story department exhibit. And the guy who was pretending to be my boss was telling them about our projects. But he kept stopping because he'd sort of forget. And I would, of course, couldn't help myself. I'd start jumping in and going, bu-- ah-- ge-- and no, that's a Spike Lee project and stuff like that. And I remember he was talking and fumbling his way through some explanation and looking at all these guys-- there was probably two or three men and this one woman-- and this one woman was looking at me. We kind of locked eyes. And I knew that she knew. It was this look like, I'm very disappointed in you. This is pitiful. And yeah. The auditors left without saying anything at all. But within weeks, the company was coming apart. Paychecks were bouncing. But what's so crazy about the whole scheme is that it's the sort of thing that somebody would do in a sitcom. Do you know what I mean? Oh, I know what we'll do. We'll hire actors to pretend to be the office workers. No, it was like somebody had seen The Sting and thought, genius, I've got the plan. I'm surprised that they didn't just wheel the walls away of the whole place afterwards because it was just like that. It was a con. Which brings me to today's radio program about people doing some pretty extreme things to make money and some less extreme things to spend money. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today, a program about getting and spending and the things that people will do, as in Marti's story, because they feel they have no choice. Act One of today's show, Mothers of Invention. In that act, Alex Kotlowitz and a half dozen people on how they felt they had to act to survive. Act Two, That Guy. In that act, we hear part of the psychology of spending money that is rarely discussed. Act Three, Mall Rat. John Hodgman and the alleged secret tunnels under the Mall of America. Stay with us. And let's begin with Act One. Alex Kotlowitz has found that lately when he's been talking to people about money, what everybody seems to be coming back to is how money changed them, and how they feel ashamed of that. And how they feel all sorts of other feelings that they aren't so proud of. Here's Alex. Not long ago, I got taken for $250. I know it's not a huge amount of money, but it's embarrassing. We all like to think we're too savvy to be had. But here's why I really hesitate to share this story. I was had by a minister, a man of God. This pastor has a storefront church on Chicago's South Side, and he kept some of the money I'd given him to help bail a mutual friend out of jail. I don't know that he planned it. He was clearly struggling financially. He'd been a terrific mentor to my young friend, helping him through some tough times. But the opportunity presented itself, and too often, money gets in the way of even our best intentions. It exposes us. I've been talking to a lot of people lately who thought money exposed them. Like my friend Marty Oberman. He was a Chicago Alderman for 12 years, and he got into politics out of a 1960s idealism. He'd been involved in the anti-war movement, and he earned a reputation as a reformer, as an opponent of the city's political machine. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, money began to change him starting when he first took office. Two or three weeks after I was elected in 1975, a neighbor of mine-- I was out walking my dog, and he came up to me. And he was a good friend and supporter. And he said, boy, you have really offended so and so. And I was stunned. I didn't know what he was talking-- I said, what are you talking about? He said, two days ago, you walked right past this guy on LaSalle Street and didn't say hello, didn't even acknowledge him. And he gave you $100. I didn't know what he was talking about. I'm sure I did walk past him on LaSalle Street. I was probably in a conversation or in thought. And this friend of mine really chewed me out. Well, that doesn't have to happen too many times before you reflexively start smiling and shaking hands and sounding phony to everybody you meet. You don't know if they gave you money, if they're going to give you money. You become a glad-hander, but you don't have a choice. This is what it does to you. One time, a real estate developer had $1,000 check delivered to Marty. The developer needed a favor. The check sat in Marty's desk for a month before he finally decided to tear it up. He eventually ran for statewide office and had to ask people for contributions of $10,000 and $15,000. He always feared what favors they'd be asking in return. Then one day, he found himself asking someone for $50,000. Why would a person write a check like that? One had to assume that he didn't give the $50,000 not thinking that someday, he might want to ask for something. And I knew then that I did not want to be doing this. Marty told me he thought he could be a politician unaffected by money, that he could do it differently. But instead, he got out of politics. Ted Fishman thought he could do it differently too. For nine years, back in the 1980s, Ted, now an accomplished journalist, was a trader in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. There, money is everything. But Ted figured he'd always be able to keep his perspective. I remember just before I traded for the very first time, I had a meeting with the head of my clearing company, which is the organization on an exchange that acts sort of like your bank and does a lot of your bookkeeping for you. And this was an experienced trader, a pretty glamorous guy. He had a big shock of hair and was always wearing Italian suits. And he invited all the new traders in who were going to use his clearing corp, and he gave us a little talk. And his message to us was that we should fight for every single dollar. Don't give anything up. Out on the street, he said, people kill for $5. You should act like every $5 means something to you. And I was duly charged. My first day on the Merc was humbling to say the least. People who hear my voice know that I have kind of a high voice, kind of a Topo Gigio type voice. And it can be really grating. Well, when I screamed in the pits for the first time, the other traders around actually held their ears. And because I was trained to just keep announcing prices of this and that, and where I would buy, and where I would sell-- I'll pay 100 on 12, 30 at 1,000, I'll pay 12 on 100. Then you'd have to check it. You'd say, I'm checking, 12 on 100, 12 on 100. And so here I was with my loud, screaming voice. And a guy came up to me, and he said, why don't we just write you a check, and you can shut up and go home. And then actually, a guy who I had befriended on the exchange came up and made the first trade with me. And it was kind of my initiation. The hazing was done, and I made that first trade. Once I made the commitment to trade, I had the most grandiose visions of my future. I would be one of the rich guys with a big mansion. I would earn enough money to run my own philanthropy because I was a do-gooder. And I made a lot of money. I made more money than I knew what it was really. I would go to Neiman Marcus and buy two Armani suits after a good day and fantasize about all the other things downtown that I would buy. And I did pretty well for a while. One thing that happened that was very sobering for me was waking up one morning to the news on the radio. And the news that morning in April 1986 was that there had been a terrible nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union. And this was the Chernobyl disaster. And I just heard about this irradiated cloud that was floating over Europe, and I didn't want to get myself to work. The news was too sad. But when I did get to work, I noticed that there was more energy on the floor than usual. And I thought, well, what's going on here? Is there something I don't know? What was going on was that the whole exchange was giddy over the prospects of this nuclear disaster. And I was in the cattle pit at the time. And one of the first things somebody said to me was, well, all the pigs in Denmark are going to be dead. So the cattle price went sky high. And that's when I learned the dictum that disasters are good for commodity trading. As soon as I got in the action, all of that sadness disappeared. And I just jumped into the game. And that disaster made me more money in one day than I had made in my entire life up to then. It was like you show up every day to work hoping that everyone in your pit dies, and you get all their money. At the exchange, you create these castles of rationalization for your job. You've come to think, along with everybody else in those pits, that you're doing something essential to the operation of the world. But the truth, of course, in the end is it's all about money. Several years after I quit trading, of course, the United States was attacked by terrorists in 9/11. And the exchanges in the nation were closed. But my brother was still trading on the CBOE at that time, Chicago Board Options Exchange. And I went back with him to help him out on the day that the exchange opened for the first day. And there again, I saw the very same giddiness that existed after the Chernobyl disaster. Here we were with the worst domestic attack in the United States history, and the traders were running around as happy as could be. And they would stop each other in the hall saying, you know, I don't feel good for what happened, but I'm doing great. You hate to be doing great, but I'm doing great. And they may be doing great, but I was pretty glad that I wasn't doing great that day. The bottom had fallen out of everything in my life. So I'm thinking, well, where can I walk in where there's a cash register, where they have a couple hundred bucks so I can make my car payment? Bill Thompson was desperate. Like Ted Fishman, he had traded commodities. And though he wasn't as successful, he made a pretty good living at it. He bought a home in Winnetka, a tony suburb north of Chicago. And when he was in his mid-30s, he married for a second time and had a son. Things were going pretty well. But then he lost his job, and he didn't bounce back. He tried all sorts of things to make ends meet. He sold home security systems. He put up a 976 line for a guy, so he could talk to girls on the phone. He worked sales jobs on the phone, earning $8 an hour. He half-jokingly would say he was part of the working poor, but still living in Winnetka. Soon, the bank began threatening to foreclose on his home. He got behind on his gas bill. And his relationship with his wife became volatile. Then his seven-year-old son got hit by a car. As I go and try to get his medical bills paid for, the insurance company says to me, it's contributory negligence, we don't owe you anything. You're on your own. We were virtually empty. I've got no money. I've got $3,000 in hospital bills at the emergency room. I've got probably another $3,000 to $4,000 for his dental. All his teeth were cracked, and they didn't know how they were going to put them back together. And there was a reminder every day of his injuries when I saw him. To see this kid suffering like he was, the pressure that I was under and the guilt I felt for not providing for him and not knowing what I was going to do about that, that was the part that really put it over the edge for me. So Bill Thompson made a plan. He finds his son's plastic toy pistol, which he and his wife had taken away from him because they didn't want him playing with guns. He steals a license plate from a parked car and, with magnets, attaches it to the rear of his van. And he puts on his Burberry raincoat and a Chicago Cubs cap. The first time, I was just scared to death. And I went into a dry cleaners. And I wait 'til everybody leaves, and I pretend like I've got some garment or something. And I say, "I've got a gun." And she looks at me, and she just looks quizzical. And she goes, "what?" And then I realized she doesn't speak English. She calls somebody up to the front of the register that speaks English. And now, the whole thing's blown, so I turn around and walk out. Well, nothing happened to me at that point. I said, well, next time, you should stick around to get the money. So the first one that's successful, I walk into a cleaners. I said, I had a gun, open the drawer. It was sort of like a learning process as I went along. It was scary. You could tell I was nervous. I didn't use any voice. I didn't act like I was going to jump the counter and pistol whip the guy or anything like that. It was more like I was panhandling. I think I got $180. It was enough to placate my wife at the time, as I recall. And it was just that simple. It wasn't simple emotionally or anything. But physically, it was a very simple thing to do. I think I did two cleaners, a bakery store, and a cigar store. There was all sorts of things that can-- what they call-- go wrong. One time, I went in a dry cleaners down on Fourth and Linden in Wilmette. And I saw my neighbor in there. And I just ducked my head and walked out. Of course, Bill could have sold his house or his van, but he didn't. He was a doctor's son, raised with lots of money. He didn't want to disappoint his wife. And at the time, frankly, it was hard to imagine living anywhere else, which, in hindsight, he acknowledges was crazy. It's totally irrational. My thinking is so twisted that I'm thinking that I've got to do it, or everything's going to come tumbling down. It doesn't really matter what happens to me. If I get caught, I get away from this terrible situation I'm in. What do I have to lose? To me, it was never really about money. It was just about surviving. And survival, then, meant maintaining a certain lifestyle that I couldn't maintain. So I decide I'm not getting enough money, so I'm going to stick up a bank. I'm looking for something where I can pay the bills for a couple of months instead of $150 to go down and buy groceries. There's this bank in Wilmette on the corner of Ridge and Lake. It's a storefront bank. It's not really a bank with big pillars and all that stuff. It's in a strip mall. And I go in there. And I walk up to the teller, and I hand her the note. The note says, this is a bank robbery, I have a gun, put the money in the bag. And I had her put the money in the bag. And I walk. I'm not running or anything like that. I'm trying to be as calm as I can be. Nobody stops me. I walked out and drove away. And I think it was something like $900, which gets it so that I can pay some bills. And I remember, at that point, right after that one, I remember being a little bit happy. But the pressure is still on. So I got to go do another bank. So I go, and I find a little storefront bank. And so I finally muster up enough courage to go in there. And I make out the note and everything in my cryptic handwriting. And I walk in to the teller, and I hand her the note. And she looks at me, and she goes, "don't be ridiculous." She laughs at me. She says, "I'm not giving you any money." And so I'm just totally shocked. I said, well, aren't these people supposed to do what you say when you're robbing a bank? And this woman says, "dpm't be ridiculous, get out of here." And so I leave. I was told what to do, so I just leave. And so I get out, and I started driving, thinking, well, that was bad. And so it's only about four blocks away from the police station or five blocks or whatever. Evidently, they spotted the van. And so I was arrested, and it was over. I was just relieved that my life was going to change at that point. And I didn't know whether it would be for the worse or the better or anything else. It was one of those things where I was just relieved. Bill Thompson spent four years in prison, where the gangbangers nicknamed him Homer because they thought, with his pot belly and bald head, he looked like Homer Simpson. Bill's now trying to get on with his life. He got divorced. And last I spoke with him, he was involved in a business, exporting sporting goods to China. He's ashamed of this episode in his life, though he does mention it on his resume, presumably because employers will eventually find out anyway. But the hardest thing has been trying to rebuild his relationship with his children. To admit what he did without having it define him forever. When I spent a couple of years in a Chicago housing project researching a book, I was struck by the power of suburban status symbols. Even there, the local gang's car of choice was a Chevrolet Suburban Blazer. At the time, teenagers were wearing Tommy Hilfiger and Guess. Hush Puppies and Coach wallets came and went. But while there was this yearning to appear prosperous, what was also clear is that for those without money, a little cash-- and I'm talking $10, $20, $50-- can go a long way to making life bearable. People come to me, they need money. If you have nowhere else to turn, if you need $50, you can't go to your bank and get a loan for $50. You can't go to your mother or your sister or your cousin or your friend. If you got nowhere else to go, I'm your last hope. This is Dan Lebo. He helps run the family business, Chicago Pawners and Jewelers. It's in a pretty rough neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. Here's how a pawn shop works. People bring in items to pawn, like jewelry or stereos, and then, to retrieve them, they have to pay back the cash they originally got for their item plus interest, which is regulated by the state. All transactions are reported to the police so that stolen goods can be detected. The stereotype is 90% of my customers are criminals. Everything we take in is stolen. It's dark and dim, and it's a seedy place, where people do seedy things. People don't know that 80% of my customers come back to get their stuff. People don't come to pawn once. Sometimes they pawn the same item 20 times. Sometimes they pawn it 50 times. Sometimes they pawn it once a week. Many of my customers are repeat customers. They come once or twice a month over a course of years. I get to know them pretty well. My name is Mike. I do a lot of business with these guys over here. I've been dealing with them for about 30 years, maybe, 30, 40 years. Michael is in his 40s. He's got a wife. He works in the maintenance department at public schools. I am his Sears Roebuck. He buys a television if he needs it. If he needs a birthday gift, if he needs some money, he buys his jewelry from me. There's a lot of people who use my store almost like a convenience store. It's close. What's up, Vernon? Hey, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Golden, right? Yeah. Vernon. I know that. I know Joe is a bus driver. I know Steve works in the public schools. People come to my window, and I would hear their stories. I'm going just down to a funeral down in Kentucky. And I just figured I needed some gas money. I ain't getting paid yet. Now how much would you give me if I sell this back? What is that, an Uzi? No, it's a violin. Don't play with me. Today is Precious' birthday. I need some money. I'm want to go buy her some bookbags, one of the roller caddies that you put the books in. They would tell me, this is what I need, this is my problem. My car broke down, or my lights are going to be turned off. Or my son is in jail, I have to bail him out. I need clothes for my kids to go to school. I'm going to National Louis University. So today is the first day of class, and I need to buy a bus pass for school. And the financial aid hasn't kicked in yet. Hi. I wanted to know how much I will get for these. How much you trying to borrow? I don't know. What's the most I can get for them? Those were one of those instances where it tugs at your heart a little bit. A woman came in at first, and there was a pair of hoop or little cluster earrings that they had. The question was, well, how much do you need. And she had no idea. It was one of those things. She's never done this before. Well, I won't make you an offer. I like to have an idea of what you're trying to borrow. Give me an idea. I'm going to tell my boyfriend to come in here because he's the one who paid for them. She just goes, let me go get my husband. Well, you need money. Do you need it for a bill or whatever? It's for a funeral. Oh. Basically, how much more money do you need for that? And the husband comes back in. How much did you want to borrow? He says he needs $800. I don't know, $800 maybe. But I want to see how much-- I don't know how much you could borrow. And they were something that I would sell in my store for probably less than $200. I'm thinking this in my head. What'd you say? $800? Yeah, I was. I just tell them, I'm sorry, I can't help. That's OK. Thanks. OK? Sorry. Thanks a lot. Those are the things that hurt because you can't help them. Because they were just nothing of substance, nothing that I could really loan money on to help them or get them anywhere close to what they needed. And they went on their way. And I don't think they came back. Let's see, you had $50. You had $80, is that right? Please, could you spring me another $10? Please? I'm coming back to get it in two weeks. What'd you want? Another $10? Yeah, give me another $10. I'll work with that. I love you. Thank you. All right. She gets more than most people do just because she's been coming here for 1,000 years, in and out. But I know my stuff's safe. You know what I'm saying? Can't leave it at home. I'll walk around with the stuff in my purse. That's bad. I find all too often that people don't like leaving their jewelry or their valuables in their house. For them, they think it's safer to be in the store. It's almost like a safety deposit box. Unfortunately, in the business, a family member taking from another family member happens all the time. Some customers, their son has a problem. Their son's friend has a problem, their nephew, their cousin. This was probably 8, 10 years ago. This particular gentleman would pawn a guitar. Didn't think anything of it. But a couple days later, an older gentleman would come in with the pawn ticket and pick up the guitar. He would pawn it and be picked up, pawn it and be picked up. This would go on. And we would say, who's the person who pawns it? Well, that's my son. Oh, he stole it from the church, and I'm getting it back because we need it. And part of the question we would ask the father, we'd say, well, what would you like us to do? Because we could say, we don't have to take in the guitar. Because what ends up happening, the son gets the money. The father then has to come in and pay his money to get the guitar back. And the father would say, you have to take the guitar. Because otherwise, my son will sell it to some guy on the street, and then my guitar is gone. Take the guitar. I'll get it back. And that's pretty much the way it went. You remember the story I told you about the minister who took me for $250? Well, I conjured up ways to take revenge. I thought maybe I could publicly humiliate him by writing about the episode. Or better yet, I could show up at a Sunday service and expose him to his parishioners. I thought about leafletting outside his church. I even went so far as to write the material for the leaflet. I shared all these possible tactics with my wife. But she rolled her eyes. Because in the end, I did nothing. I just walked away. Part of it, I was just too ashamed. I'm too easy a mark. Why advertise that? But the worst of it, I began to feel sorry for the guy. And I thought his stealing from me shouldn't nullify all the good things he did for my young friend, which brings me to my final story about money. This is not an easy story to tell about myself because I fancy myself as one of those guys who is not taken easily. I should've seen this guy coming, and I didn't. Because I wanted to believe this was it. This is my friend Tony Fitzpatrick. He's a successful artist who draws and paints these exquisite, boisterous prints inspired by his experiences in Chicago. You may be familiar with his work. He's done the album covers for Aaron Neville and Steve Earle. Well, early in Tony's career, when he was still struggling, Tony got seduced by a big time art dealer, a man named Vrej Baghoomian. He owned a gallery on Broadway in New York. Boy, he was smooth. He smoked Dunhills. You know what I mean? This guy was European. I thought, this is it, this is my shot at making the majors. So I worked, and I worked, and I worked. And I kind of pushed away everything except the show. It was very difficult because my wife was more and more pregnant. And she was alone all the time. My big New York show was more important than anything. Because in my own rationalizations, that was what was going to take care of our newborn son and help buy us a home. And that's what was running through my head the whole time I was making this New York show. That all of a sudden, this chunk of dough was going to make me more respectable. So the show opens. Vrej isn't there. All of his staff, instead of being out in the open, talking to people, helping to sell stuff, is standing around Vrej's fax machine, staring at it. My Philadelphia dealer was there. And he said, let me take a look in the back room. So he went by the back room, looked in there. There were no paintings. There were no pieces of art back there. It was empty. That's when I knew the whole thing was circling the bowl. And we saw it coming. There was nothing we could do. Now, in the meantime, me, my wife, and my Philadelphia dealer sold 21 pieces out of the show, probably about $50,000 to $60,000 worth of work. We flew back to Chicago. And three days later, I got a call from a kid named Eric who worked at Vrej Baghoomian as just an art installer. And he said, look, the federal marshals are coming to padlock the gallery. Vrej has fled the country. All of the checks and all of the money that was paid for your work was taken by the staff and by Vrej. By this point, we had a three-week-old baby. I had to go home on a Saturday evening, and I had to tell my wife we didn't have any money. We were broke. I was out $40,000. And I let it be known to anybody who cared or anybody in the art world that eventually I was going to catch up with Vrej Baghoomian. Five years ago, I'm on Green Street in New York with my buddy Mickey [? Carton. ?] And this kind of older, Middle Eastern guy walks up, and he goes, Tony, Tony, good to see you, Tony. Shakes my hand, gives me a little European hug, and walks away. It took me about 20 seconds to realize, that's Vrej. Now, I've been telling everybody in the art world, when I see him, I'm going to kick his ass, I'm going to pound $40,000 worth of misery out of his hide. I didn't do any of those things. I said, hey, Vrej, wait up. And he turned to me, and he looked really old. I was the least of his problems of guys he owed money to. He had borrowed money from loan sharks, guys who were barely legal in that business, guys who would send guys if you didn't pay up. He was really beaten down, and he looked it. So I said, Vrej, how are you? And he said, I've been ill. And I said, I heard that. And he said, some day, we should really talk. And he shook my hand again and ran off. So I got back to Mickey. And Mickey said, yeah, there's your pal. There's Vrej Baghoomian. Yeah, this is the guy you're going to kick his ass, you're going to pound him up one side of Broadway and down the other. And you didn't do anything. And I didn't. The more and more I thought about it, the more my anger was tempered by just feeling stupid for wanting those things, the grand prize, the big New York art world. I can never, ever again let this be about money. I learned that the real value of making art is everything you go through while you're making it. And the long and short of it, I still had the show. I was still the author of all those pieces. I still had an opening night full of the best work at that point in my life that I'd ever made. When I go to the Art Institute, I run to one place. I go to Gallery 236 and 237, and I look at the Joseph Cornell boxes. They're these tiny things with little glass pipes in them and star charts and sand and dolls and cutouts of birds and chicken wire. He took all of this inert stuff and made these magical, little environments. And I have never-- never once when I looked at that work did I ever wonder what it costs. Tony Fitzpatrick. Alex Kotlowitz is a reporter. Amy Drozdowska-McGuire, the producer. Alex is the author of many books, including There Are No Children Here and now, most recently, Never a City So Real. Versions of these stories originally appeared on Chicago Public Radio's series Chicago Matters, which gets funding from the Chicago Community Trust. Executive producer of that series is Julia McEvoy. Coming up, John Hodgman gets on the wrong side of an entire mall. 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 show, Getting and Spending, stories about what people think they have to do to make their money. That was the first half of the show. And in this half of the program, what they think they have to do to spend their money. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two-- That Guy. Now, I think about this next story as a story about spending money. Though I have to say, the person who did this story, one of our producers, Diane Cook, hates it when I say that that's what this story is about. She points out, and I guess I agree, that this story is about so much more than just how you spend your money. It's about a phenomenon that she notices all the time with people that she knows and people that she doesn't know. Here's Diane. When my boyfriend, Jorge, was a teenager and started to use deodorant, he had to choose which kind to buy. He tried a bunch of different brands. But Old Spice reminded him too much of sailors, Right Guard made him feel like he needed to be playing basketball all the time, and Arrid Extra Dry was way too intense of a name for the moderate climate he lived in. So he settled on an innocuous, nondescript brand, Mitchum. It's old. It's been around forever. And the reason it's been around forever is because people use it. And not enough people use it that there's a kind of person that uses it. And not too few people use it that you're making a statement. It's just deodorant. It doesn't make me feel cool. It doesn't make me feel uncool. Makes me feel like I'm putting deodorant on. Fast forward 15 years. Jorge lives in New York. He boards a subway car one morning. And with nothing to read, he turns his attention to an ad on the train. I start reading it, and it's just this ridiculous ad. It's a ridiculous message about being able to kick in the windows of a train in an emergency. And it's like, you're a tough guy if you can do this. I'm reading it. I'm like, this is stupid, this is stupid, this is stupid. And so I get to the punch line or whatever. This is about Mitchum. What it actually says is, if you're pretty sure you could kick in a window in the event of an emergency, then you're a Mitchum man. And you look around, the entire train is plastered with ads. And they're all ads for Mitchum. And they're all like, if you've ever vaulted over anything in order to catch a train, you're a Mitchum man. If you are a total prick, then you're a Mitchum man. It's just completely and utterly embarrassing because I'm not that guy. I don't think that. I think, shoot, I missed the train. You know what I mean? Everyone stay seated and remain calm while there's an emergency. I'm sure we'll be moving soon. There must be a reasonable explanation for this. So OK, his deodorant has a lame ad campaign. So what? And it didn't matter to Jorge until he found himself standing in the deodorant aisle at the supermarket a week later and staring at the Michtum, unable to reach his arm out, pick it up, and put it in his basket. I thought that if I bought the Mitchum, I was going to take it to the checkout line, and I was going to put it there, and the person at the grocery line was going to think that I was trying Mitchum for the first time because of the advertising. There's nothing about Mitchum that it would be obvious to somebody that, hey, he's been using Mitchum for 10, 15 years. You know what I mean? If it was-- I don't know-- Old English shaving cream, and I'm wearing a top hat, and I'm 70 years old, and they started a marketing campaign, they could be like, oh, that guy has been using that stuff forever. The beauty of the brand is that there's nothing associated with it. So as soon as they make this whole Mitchum man campaign, all of a sudden, you cannot help, but be like, anybody you see buying Mitchum is just going to instantly be like, hey, they must love those Mitchum man ads. He left the store deodorant-less, which in and of itself is pretty embarrassing. He doesn't want to be the guy who buys Mitchum because of the ads. But does he really want to be the guy who boycotts Mitchum because of the ads? How far do you want to go to make sure you're not that guy? I think of this as the that-guy phenomenon. It starts with someone you're repulsed by or simply never wanted to be. And then one day, you realize you are that guy. My friend Mike was a troublemaker in school, and he hated the authority figures who caught him breaking the rules. Now he's the vice principal in charge of busting kids like him. And another friend of mine, who I hadn't heard from in years, emailed me to let me know that she was getting divorced. She's young, 29, and she couldn't believe the course that her life had taken. The last line in her email was, I can't believe I'm that girl. Or take Brett. He has steadfastly resisted one of the travel industry's greatest inventions, wheeled luggage, because he doesn't want to be a wheeled luggage guy. The people who have wheeled luggage are assistant sales managers going to conferences someplace or old ladies, and they're not real travelers. For Brett, the only thing a real traveler needs is a backpack. I don't need no wheels. I can carry everything. It was years and years that I would be lugging this huge backpack through airports, sneering at the people who were wheeling their thing behind them. If you can breeze through the airport, pulling your thing without breaking a sweat, somehow you're not having the full experience. The backpack he used was the backpack of his youth. He had taken it on trips to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Every scuff or stain on it had a story. He'd even slept on it. It's not going too far to say that from Brett's perspective, his backpack is what made him an individual. He was different from the sea of look-alike businessmen, running through the airport with their wheeled luggage. And he liked being different. But then, at age 30, he realized, the thing that made them different from him is that they were getting everywhere faster and without leg cramps. If this dilemma sounds a little ridiculous to you, remember, for a moment, your own attitude, once upon a time, about cell phones. You were never going to be that guy yapping away on his phone. But now you are. And why? Because at this point, the only reason not to have a cell phone is to be that guy who refuses to join the club, which isn't cool. At some point, the embarrassment of becoming that guy who worries about becoming that guy outweighs the ego of carrying your thing. Because we're talking about the wheel. It's the most basic caveman technology imaginable. It's like saying, I'm not going to use fire to cook my meat because it's too bourgeois or something like that. A monkey can figure out that it's easier to use a wheel to pull something than it is to carry it on your back. I've had a lot of that guy moments. But possibly, the most sobering one went like this. As a kid, I spent a lot of time in model homes and open houses. My mom would drag me to them every weekend. We'd wander through, surrounded by other women my mom's age and their unfortunate children. But none of it ever made any sense to me. I knew for a fact we weren't moving, totally not in the market for a house. And yet, we were there, my mom running her hand over the newly upholstered sofa or marveling at their gleaming, white kitchen. I hated these afternoons. The houses were so different from ours. And I knew that my mom thought that they were better. We were there to covet what they had, and we didn't. I vowed to myself I'd never be the kind of person who did this. Then one sunny day, at the ripe age of 26, driving down my street past a condo for sale, I spotted an open house sign. And for reasons I can't explain, I was overcome with delight. I squealed. I actually squealed, an open house. Then turning to my boyfriend, let's go in and see what it's like. Then I froze. I had become that guy, and that guy was my mom. You can only fight so much what you're going to become. It's going to be there waiting for you in the end because it's just true, some of it. Wheels are better. Although I have to say, it's a little embarrassing. But I still don't have the classic, black pull-along. Mine are cooler. I've got some kind of flaps or color on it or something like that. So I haven't entirely given in. I've been battling my own little open house problem too. But it's useless. I'm too ashamed to bring myself to actually walk through an open house. So instead, when I need to blow off a little steam, I just look through the online real estate section, at all the pictures of ornate bathroom faucets and sunny, colorful living rooms, pouring over it like it was ladies' porn. Diane Cook is one of the producers of our program. Act Three, Mall Rat. And we close our program on Getting and Spending with a trip to a place where gobs of that is happening. To take us there, here's John Hodgman. Some years ago, I was a contributing editor to a national magazine of men's fitness and adventure, where I wrote about food, drink, and cheese, which is a kind of food. In my several years as a professional food journalist, I wrote exactly two stories the magazine refused to publish. The first was on ultra-hot hot sauces. An example of an ultra-hot hot sauce is Dave's Insanity Sauce, which I ate on a little cracker once. And then my head hurt, and then I had to lie down. And then I was crying for a day or so. Dave's is actually on the milder end of the ultra-hot hot sauce spectrum. There is an entire category of ultra-hot hot sauces that promises death. I recognize that death is a part of life. Still, I could not bring myself to endorse death by ultra-hotness, which is perhaps why my magazine found my piece quote unquote, "overly gay." The second article of mine that was never published was about the food court at the Mall of America. I was excited to visit the nation's largest mall, but what I discovered there shocked me. It also apparently shocked my magazine, which refused to publish it on the pretense that quote, "Most of it was made up," and that quote, "It did not involve perfect abs, or sea kayaking, or the best hamburgers ever, or incredible sex tips for having sex with Jessica Alba, or the fighting of polar bears," unquote, which I knew was their nice way of saying, overly gay. But you, dear listener, shall not shy from what is revealed in this, my unedited private diary of the secrets of the Mall of America with all of the made up parts intact. Day one, at 200 million square feet, the Mall of America is the largest mall in the United States. In addition to 520 shops, 2/3 of which are devoted to the sale of FDNY and NYPD baseball caps, it has a chapel, and a school, and a post office, and an amusement park, called Camp Snoopy, inside of it. It is not, I should point out, the largest mall in North America. That distinction belongs to the West Edmonton Mall in Canada, which contains 7,000 baseball cap shops, and a sausage factory, an entire medieval castle, 12 monorails, and the entire township of East Edmonton, preserved like Pompeii at the exact moment it was devoured by the West Edmonton Mall. Still, the Mall of America is large enough that I can see it from my hotel room, literally hundreds of feet away. Its phosphor lights obliterate the Minnesota evening. It is so bright, I don't know how they get the giant bats to keep circling it. Day two, the Mall of America is filled with elderly people, always walking, circling the mall like sharks, they say, for exercise. When they collapse, mall security discreetly removes them and props them up in the booths at Johnny Rockets. One elderly woman has agreed to show me her favorite places to eat. Her name is Elaine. She takes me into the Odyssey Cafe. It is a restaurant with four dining rooms, each decorated in the style of a lost civilization. I'm not very impressed by the Atlantis room, which is just a blue room with pictures of fish on the wall, not a single porthole, which, to me, just seems obvious. But the Machu Picchu room is stunning with beautiful murals of mountain tops and very thin air, which makes it hard to breathe. And all the hard boiled eggs are undercooked. Also, the room is staffed by actual Incas, looking sad and doing their sad little math with knots of string when they are not serving you omelets. Elaine says, this is all that remains of their once-great civilization. Day three, The Minnesota Picnic is a stand run by three brothers, all of them Egyptian. They serve traditional favorites of the Minnesota State Fair, pike on a stick, corn dogs on a stick, fried cheese curd, and bamya matboukha, the famous Egyptian okra stew, which unfortunately cannot be served on a stick. The brothers implore me to try their new invention, deep-fried cheesecake on a stick, a stunning breakthrough in food-on-a-stick technology. Then they admit they are sad, sad like the Incas are sad. After 10 years, the Mall of America is kicking them out, and they don't know why. Suddenly, this reporter smells more than frying oil. He smells a story. I ask if they think they are being discriminated against. Oh no, they say, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Day four, I call the mall PR people to ask why they are exiling the Egyptians and also to ask about the secret tunnel I found that leads from Camp Snoopy to Pottery Barn and is lined with human skulls. This is when the Mall of America stops returning my calls. It happens sometimes when professional journalists ask the wrong questions. I'm frozen out. From here on in, I'm going rogue. Day five, Elaine takes me to Cereal Adventure, which is a mini theme park run by General Mills, makers of Trix and Lucky Charms and Cookie Crisp. There is a mini golf course there, as well as an interactive exhibit on how Lucky Charms are made. Here it is shown how the leprechauns are first flayed and then pulped to be turned into marshmallows. Off to the side is a waist-high pile of abandoned little green hats that will be shipped back to Ireland under international treaty. "Am I the only one here who finds this a little creepy," I ask aloud. Elaine ignores me. "You can have your picture taken and put on a box of Wheaties," she says. "That's insane," I say. I can't be aroused by a picture of myself. Where are the Mary Lou Retton boxes? We then go to the Cereal Adventure Cafe which claims to have all of the General Mills cereals for sale. They have the monster cereals, Boo Berry, Count Chocula, Frankenberry. But I am surprised to learn that they have never even heard of Fruit Brute, which featured a werewolf. They have never even heard of Yummy Mummy, who was a mummy that was fruit flavored. I wonder if they really have any business running a cereal adventure cafe at all. Day six, my last interview is with a Minnesota woman who has just opened a pastry shop using her grandmother's original cheesecake recipe. The shop is called Granny's Squeeze Cakes. I ask her if she's tried the deep-fried cheesecake on a stick that the Egyptians serve at The Minnesota Picnic. And she just smiles in a sort of sinister way that makes me think she knows that their days are numbered, and soon, she will be the cheesecake queen. Day seven, by day now, I roam the halls. By night, I drink from the log flume in Camp Snoopy, the water all coppery tasting from the pennies. I purchase nearly nothing. Commerce suddenly seems the least interesting thing about the Mall of America for I have seen its greatest attraction. Like barnacles growing on a rock, somehow an actual living community has clung to this barren thing. Every time I went by the Minnesota Picnic Stand, the Egyptian brothers were smiling, waving at Elaine and her fast-walking elderly cronies as they walked by, or getting some cheese curds ready for a regular, or gossiping with one of their favorite customers, an Hispanic gentleman in a puffy jacket with epaulets, who stopped working here years ago, but later told me he drove here once a week just to hang out with his old friends at the food court. I check in with one of the Egyptian brothers on my way out of the Mall of America. "Did you ever discover why they are kicking us out?" he asks. "No," I say, "the mall officials are stonewalling me." "I have gone rogue," I explain. And he nods as only a sad Egyptian about to lose his deep-fried palace at the Mall of America can nod. "Perhaps this is for the best," he says. As I go, he gives me something fried on a stick, and I promise to eat it someday. But for him and for me, the Minnesota Picnic is over. John Hodgman. A version of his story about the Mall of America appears in his book The Areas of My Expertise. The paperback edition is out this month. Well, our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Chris Ladd, Seth Lind, Steven January, and Cathy Hoang. Special thanks today to Dan Pipski. Our website www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free or buy CDs of them. 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 is constantly trying to buy me out of my contract here. Why don't we just write you a check, and you can shut up and go home. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week. Until then. PRI, Public Radio International.
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It's one thing to go through something so horrible that you think you're gonna die. And it's another to go through something so horrible you think you're going to die, and it's exactly what you always expected. I've always been scared of flying. I have several different scenarios in my head that I imagine. Some involve collisions with other planes. The plane stalling and plummeting. You know, just precipitous nosedives. Alexandra Jacobs was on that Jet Blue flight a couple weeks ago. The one where the landing gear turned perpindicular, and they made an emergency landing on live national television. She was six and a half months pregnant, taking one last trip to the East Coast from LA before the baby be born. I'm usually most scared on take off, and then once there's a little ding ding and it's now safe to use portable electronic devices, I'm pretty much fine for the duration of the trip. This time, that comforting ding ding did not occur, and we just weren't ascending at the normal rate. And the pilot got on. And he said, "Well, folks." And you know, I have this joke that whenever a pilot says "folks," it's never good news. The pilot tells everybody that he's getting a signal that the landing gear won't retract. And really it might just be that the signal is screwed up. The landing gear may have retracted just fine. Technicians on the ground are using fancy satellite communications gear to check the plane's systems, which Alexandra found reassuring. It all sounded routine. Sounded high-tech. But then he said that we were going to do a low flyby, and that people on the ground were going to inspect the underbelly of our plane with binoculars to see what was wrong with the landing gear. And I thought, my God. Like that's how they're going to, you know, check out the safety of the plane? With binoculars? Like the ones my husband uses for birdwatching? You know, it just didn't seem-- it seemed very retro, you know, to have someone peering at our plane. I don't think people began to sort of panic and cry and get upset until the words "emergency landing" were bandied about. We have run all the relevant checklists and are confident that we know exactly what the issue is, as well as the issues to be dealt with. This is sound from a video camera that a passenger pulled out once it became clear that something unusual was happening on the flight. At this point, what I'm doing is burning off additional fuel. And almost simultaneously, or very close to that announcement, I looked a couple of rows in front of me, and saw that someone's television had imagery of a plane circling in a blue sky. And I heard someone say, that's our plane. We're on MSNBC. Good evening, everyone. I'm Colette Cassidy. We are breaking in to Hardball with this live picture of a JetBlue airplane, that is flight 292-- As you may have heard from the coverage of this story, JetBlue planes have satellite receivers, so each seat on a plane gets live DIRECTV on a little screen. I've been told by both the company as well as our in-flight crew that apparently we've made the news. I'm sorry about that. I apologize for any apprehension that this has caused to you. I want to assure you-- I mean, I think that ratcheted up the level of alarm, because it wasn't local news. It was national news. It was in the same text zipper as Hurricane Rita. It was on multiple channels. People were flipping around and they're like, oh my God, it's on FOX, it's on ABC. You know, and we're all familiar with these national events that take over your television, where you flip from channel to channel and it's the same image. Right. You are in the white Bronco, all of a sudden. Exactly. It wasn't a good feeling. For years, Alexandra has been having these conversations with her husband and his brother and his dad-- the brother and dad were actually Navy pilots-- about whether flying was safe. Alexandra, of course, said that it was not. And the thought went through her head right now that well, if we crash, at least I win that argument. I always knew I was going to perish in a plane crash, and you know, it's just coming true. Here it is. Well, today on our radio program, stories of people who thought they were goners, and what they say once it's clear that they're back from the dead. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program in three acts today. In the first act, we hear from more passengers from JetBlue flight 292 about what it's actually like to be on a plane that you think might be doomed. Act Two, ""P' is for Port-A-Potty" in which you visit a town that might not actually recover after Hurricane Katrina. Act Three. "Friday Night Floodlights." A story of a town that is actually near that town in Act Two, which doesn't have a high school up and running yet, but all kinds of people have turned their lives upside down to restart high school football. Stay with us. Act One. In the Event of an Emergency. So in addition to Alexandra Jacobs, I talked to two other passengers from that JetBlue flight. We basically had three hours total of flying in circles. Zach Mastoon was sitting in the very back of the plane. It was terrifying. I quickly asked the stewardess for a drink. It never happened. I never got the drink. They didn't do any service. There was just too much going on. And I was seated next to this really nice guy. He's in real estate. His name was AJ. He was really my angel. And he offered me this large bottle of what looked like seltzer, and he said, hey, you can have a swig of this. It's leaded. So I started drinking this really strong vodka tonic. And it was brilliant. It really took the edge off, and allowed me to look at the situation in a much more accepting way? If I hadn't had something to drink-- I know that sounds sort of pathetic, but worrying, and you know, freaking out, watching the news and hearing commentators tell me that I could die in a ball of fire wasn't, you know, what I wanted to do. So I flipped on Comedy Central. Started watching The Daily Show. People were up and about more than I would have thought they would be. Just getting their stuff, or going to the bathroom, or you know, whatever. Dave Reinitz is the guy who was shooting videotape on the flight, sitting in seat 18D. Yeah, people were-- there was some talking. But people, I think, were very in their own heads, and very-- trying to get their emotions in check for what was happening. Nobody was making a spectacle out of themselves, and no one was really, like, just going bananas. It was very tense. I mean, everyone was dealing with it in his or her individual style. You had the weepers. You know, it was later reported that grown men were crying, but I didn't observe any. I just saw a couple of women were crying. You had the stoics. And they were just sort of acting like-- just, you know, inside themselves. They weren't really expressing anything. And then you had these sort of chirpy, road warrior types who were laughing and joking, telling their harrowing experiences in previous flights. There was a real camaraderie among the passengers, and everybody was really understanding, and just sort of humbled. And in fact, before we were landing, they moved a lot of the passengers to the back of the plane, and this woman was seated in between AJ and me-- To make the front of the plane lighter? Yeah, possibly. They did it, anyway, and they moved some of the luggage back. And this woman was seated between AJ and me, and she started showing us pictures of this wedding that she had just attended. And it was this really intimate moment that would have never-- she would have never showed the photos to anybody. The strangest thing about the videotape of the flight is how normal everything looks. There is one long close-up shot of two hands. An older couple, across the aisle from Dave. And he filmed their hands, squeezing. The woman rubbing her thumb over the back of her husband's hand for a long time. You know, I was carrying some extra tension that day, because I'd had a big argument with my girlfriend. We'd left on very tense terms. So you're on the plane thinking about the fact that you just had this huge fight. I'm thinking about the fact that she could be at home watching this, knowing that we'd had some harsh words before I left, and how difficult that would be for her if anything happened to me. So I took a few minutes, and you know, first I said to the guy next to me, listen, I'm going to say some things. And then I turned the camera on myself, and I said some things to Barbara. Hey Barb, it's me. I'm watching the plane on the TV. We're having landing gear problems. We're going to crash land, or emergency land-- crash is a bad word-- in LAX. Just thought I'd leave you a message, just in case. I love you. Everything is going to be groovy. And we'll have a good laugh when I show you this video, and you see what a goober I am. But if anything happens, you know, take care of everything. Everything's yours. You know? You know, my family was great. They were making big fun of me about that. Oh, you left her everything? Oh, the '91 Toyota and the credit card bills, everything, huh? Yeah. There's been a bunch of press attention to the fact that there were people writing goodbye notes and things like that. Did you see people doing that? I did not. And really, if we all burned up, those notes would have been incinerated, anyway. Yeah. The guy two seats to the right of me-- he was this calm suit. Once he told me that an expert-- an aviation expert on the ground that had been summoned by one of the studios, had said that it would probably be OK, and that it might be messy, but that it wouldn't be catastrophic, that was probably the most reassuring bit of information I got during the entire ordeal. So the TV actually turned out to be sort of comforting. Yeah. After the initial shock of seeing it. Yeah. I was glad to have it. Wow. So in sum, actually, if you had a choice, you'd rather have had the TV? Yeah. Well, no, I have to qualify that. I would rather have never seen it on TV, but given the fact that the TV was there, it turned out to be more reassuring. One of the commentators said, well, I can't imagine that the people are all watching TV. You know, JetBlue has television. I'm sure they're all getting ready to brace themselves and learning about the emergency procedure. And at that point, the whole cabin kind of erupted in laughter. I guess a lot of people were watching the same channel. So during this two hours after you find out you're going to make an emergency landing, Alexandra, as somebody like you, who actually has to stop herself from picturing the different ways your plane can go down, are you actually picturing it, now that you're in a situation where--? No, I wasn't-- I mean, I was, in a strange way, growing calmer and calmer and more and more rational. You know, I'd been in this fatalistic mode of yup, I'm going to die in a plane crash, just as I always thought. But then as the emergency landing became more and more real, I thought, the pilot doesn't want to die. Nobody on the ground wants us to die. Everybody is doing their absolute best. You know, I'm really well-positioned. I'm in a seat behind the exit row. And I'm just going to be one of the first people out. I'm going to run straight into my husband's arms. I have a really good chance of surviving. And before the actual landing, like, as you're coming in for that final descent, did you think then, oh, I guess I could die now? No. I no longer believed that it would happen. I no longer believed that we would crash and die. Why? There had been so much of a buffer of time and thinking about it, and everyone saying it's going to be OK, that when it actually happened, I was no longer afraid. It's almost like you got bored with being afraid. I got tired of being afraid, yeah. The pilot told us that we were beginning our final descent, and I think he even said, "Flight attendants, prepare for arrival." Wait, you laugh as you say that, because--? Well, because it's such a mundane announcement. I mean, that's what they say on every normal flight. So I can't remember whether it was the pilot or the flight attendants, but we were told that we were going to hear an automated announcement. And as we came in for our landing, a mechanized voice came over the loudspeaker and said "Brace! Brace!" That was very scary, because that's when you were in the reality of, oh my God it's an emergency landing, it's a real emergency landing. A warning signal has taken over. Because whenever-- I don't know about you, but I've read black box recordings. And you read in the black box recordings transcripts about the various signals of the plane that take over. Brace! Brace! Brace! And then what was absolutely remarkable to me was that the flight attendants continued to repeat this mantra of "Brace! Brace!" And I kept waiting for it. I kept waiting for the thing to snap. I kept waiting for a big hit. You can actually hear me on the tape saying, "Come on! That's it? That's all you've got?" Gently the nose just got let down. We smelled some smoke and a little bit of the burning rubber. And a voice inside my head said, it's OK. You're smelling burning rubber because the tire is burning off, and you know, that's what it is. It was so incredibly smooth, it was almost anticlimactic. Dave Reinitz, Zach Mastoon, and Alexandra Jacobs, passengers in JetBlue flight 292. Act Two. "'P' is for Porta-Potty." Since Hurricane Katrina, lots of towns are trying to come back from nothing. New Orleans has gotten so much attention, but there are dozens of tiny New Orleanses all along the Gulf Coast, towns actually harder hit by the storm than New Orleans. One of them, a town called Pearlington in Mississippi, is just over the Louisiana border. It's about 10 miles inland and 45 miles from New Orleans. About 1,600 people live there. Or did, anyway. The county that it's in, Hancock County, is the Ground Zero of Hurricane Katrina, in terms of devastation. Around Pearlington, the estimated death toll is 80 to 90 people. One of our show's producers, Sarah Koenig, visited to see how they're doing. It's hard to overstate how small and isolated Pearlington was. Most people didn't have computers at home, never mind internet. And the only copy machine in town was at the elementary school, which doubled as the public library. And some of the school kids had never been outside the town. When the first graders made a book about Pearlington called The ABCs of Pearlington. "I" wasn't, say, ice cream or IHOP. "I" was the interstate, and the picture was the interstate with all the little dotted line of cars on it. "J" was the junkyard. "K," what was "K"? That's Jeannie Brooks, the school librarian in Pearlington. She was my host, and the first day I followed her into town. Just a two-lane road and trees for miles. You'd never know a town was back there. 15 miles outside of Pearlington, I got my first shock. I was following Jeannie in her truck, and she stuck her arm out the window and pointed. Oh. Wow. Tombs. Holy crap. There are just tombs on the side of the road. Like coffins. Like coffins are just sitting on the side of the road. White coffins with lids. Luckily they're closed. Oh my God. This part of the country isn't very high above sea level, so when the cemeteries flooded, the caskets just came floating up out of the ground. The ones I saw had landed in some bramble on the other side of the highway. Pearlington was, if possible, even more shocking. The entire town is gone. The streets have been cleared by now, so you can see the plan of what was the town. But on either side of the roads, where the houses used to be, there's carnage. Some houses have collapsed on themselves. Some, the wind has stripped to the frame, so they almost look like new construction. As people showed me their homes, it was hard to know how to react. Which is your house? Behind? Oh my God! It's a mess, ain't it? Well, it's just so-- that tree is so perfectly crushing your house. I'm sorry to laugh, but it's so shocking. It's a mess. Along with the water that went through it. The hurricane had pushed a 25-foot wall of ocean water 10 miles inland from the Gulf. Afterwards people saw fish, like sting rays, and speckled trout, and shrimp just swimming around in ditches. Everything was flooded. So some houses looked intact, but when you went inside, the floors were blanketed with mud. And not the friendly mud you played in as a kid, but a kind of noxious, slimy paste. You could see the waterline near the ceilings. Richard Clark had one of the few two-story houses I saw in town, a beautiful house he built himself. We walked up the staircase, above the waterline. Now, this is beginning to look like some of what the house was. So it's so crazy, because up here it's like the carpet is clean. It looks like it's just been vacuumed. Here's a bedroom, perfectly fine. Smells nice. Fresh. It's so weird. You would never know. If you were asleep up here, you would never know. We might sleep up here, once we get things straight. Maybe. Which would be a fine idea, except for the mold, which has been growing for a solid month in the more than 100 degree heat. When you go inside a house like this, you can instantly feel it shoot down your throat. It burns a little bit. The maps that fire and rescue teams were using to help Gulf Coast towns didn't even show Pearlington, and organized relief didn't come for about 10 days. So now, a month after the disaster, hundreds of people-- no one knows exactly how many-- are living in tents on their property next to their decimated houses. Just camping there amid the trash and stinking water and debris. So both of you are in here? That's my bunk and here's mother's. I hung out for a while with Mary Lou Brooks and her mother, Pauline Davidson. They're both widows, and they live on the same three-acre property. Mary had a trailer. Miss Pauline had a little house. And for the first week and a half after the storm, they lived in their cars. Now they live, like almost everyone else in town, in a tent, which Mary showed me. And that basket over there is my clothes, and this is mother's clothes. Got a friend brought us that little thing there, so we can put our nighties and our undies and all in it to keep them separated. They've got a generator, but they try to use it too much, since gas is so expensive. Mostly they use it at night to run a fan so they can sleep. Just close the screen here, and leave this open, and with the fan, it was real cool, you know, in there. Was it scary at all? Yes. I'm not going to tell you no story. It has been scary. I mean, some nights you sleep an hour or two, and some nights you don't sleep any. Because here you are-- you just don't know what's going on. Police come by and told us, wanted to know, do we have guns? And we told them, yes, we did. I've got one and mother's got one. He said, well, I would advise you all to sleep with them close to you. He said, but you all know like I do, once this free stuff's over, he said, there's going to be some bad looting then. Mary is 61. Miss Pauline is 79. She told me later she didn't want to shoot anybody, but she could, if she had to. To look at her, you'd never, ever guess she'd been camping for the past month. She looks like anyone's fastidiously kempt grandmother. I asked her how in the world she was managing it. Her nails she soaks in Purex laundry soap with a little bleach. She brushes her hair with a Red Cross comb. She's wearing seersucker pedal pushers and a clean white shirt. Someone came by in a truck and let them choose whatever clothes they wanted. A friend from Mobile met her halfway to Pearlington and gave her some new bras. And the day before, her daughter was able to use a washing machine that their Avon lady had hooked up to a clean well in another part of town. Before that, they were washing clothes by hand, using a hose attached to an overflowing well at somebody else's house. They even bathed that way, standing in this guy's yard, soaping themselves through their clothes. They do have a Porta-Potty on their property, but like so many confusing aspects of life in Pearlington right now, there had been some kind of dispute about whether it was supposed to be there. But now a toilet, they going to come get it. I called them to come and empty it, because it's stinking. And the lady said, well, thank God! She said, we've been hunting it for a week and a half! I said, well, how did you get it? I said, two men brought it over here in a truck. I don't know who they were. But she says, oh, no. We're going to have to come get it. I said, all right. Come get it. Did she tell you why? Because it was supposed to be at somebody else's place. Wait. This specific toilet? Yeah. But they haven't come, so that's good. No, they didn't come get it yet, but Lord God, I wish they would. It's been about two weeks now and it's not empty. Not for two weeks? Almost two weeks. So you can't really even use it now, because it's so stinky. It's too stinky. I have a bedside toilet, when I had my hip replacement. And we put it back there, and then we can haul it way off back there in the woods and dump it. That's better than nothing, but. Do you feel like a pioneer? Well, in a way, I guess you would call it that. That's better than homeless. Yeah, that's better than homeless. And that gets to me every once in a while. I have lived almost 80 years to be a homeless. Their days are kind of typical for people here. They spend part of the day cleaning something and part of the day struggling with some form of bureaucracy. Today Mary and Miss Pauline drove about 30 miles round trip to get their mail from a neighboring town. They're waiting for a FEMA trailer, and they need the electric company to hook up the meter so they can have power ready for the trailer. But to do that, they need to call the electric company, which means driving about eight miles away to get a cell phone signal. Today they spent about two hours by the side of the road, dialing the same number over and over. And then there's the problem of insurance. Unlike a lot of people in Pearlington, Miss Pauline actually has homeowner's insurance, but she doesn't have flood insurance. And she said her conversations with the company have been just maddening. They've been arguing about the definition of "flood." They told me, said, we don't pay flood. I said, didn't have no flood. But, no it was a flood. I said, no it wasn't. A flood is when it rains until the water comes up and the lakes and the rivers overflow the bank. That's a flood. And that Gulf didn't jump out here and roll 24 feet of water over my house. The wind did that. But so they're saying, we're not going to pay anything? They said they're going to pay from the waterline up. But it covered the house. Yeah, it covered my house. So that's nothing. That's the way I'm looking at it. Certainly one of the most infuriating, soul-crushing things to do is fight with a bureaucracy. And here is literally an entire town doing this, without telephone service. People who have already been through a much less figurative hell. I sat in the tree for seven hours, watching all the houses move. Are you kidding me? In the storm, you were there? There was four of us in the tree. Me, a guy by the name of Boogie, a friend of mine, Dale, and then his momma, Peanut. We was up in a big old tree for seven hours with eight dogs. This is Dallas, a friend of Miss Pauline's. It took me more than 10 minutes of talking to Dallas-- whose real name is Jean Trammell-- to realize that she was a woman. She's short and kind of square and manly. She's covered in tattoos, and she said so many horrible things happened to her, you kind of marvel that she's still alive. She's not from Pearlington, but she's lived here for 13 years, and everyone knows her. She's been checking up on less mobile people on her four-wheeler, which she toured me around on. She can completely understand Miss Pauline's frustration. That's like with me, OK? I'm supposed to be taking Zoloft because I do go into deep depressions at time. Two days ago, I was ready to take a .38 and blow my head off. Why? Because everything was lost and then we was told FEMA wasn't going to do nothing. And I sat there, day in, day out, day in, day out, for 15 straight days, I didn't go anywhere. Waiting for them. And then we got told last night that they're not coming to the houses anymore. Apparently this isn't unusual. A mental health counselor I met here told me people typically start to get depressed four to five weeks into a disaster, which is where we are right now. The school, or what's left of it, is where the whole relief effort is based in Pearlington. It's a pretty impressive setup. In the gym, there's a little supermarket of donated stuff. The sheets and pillows are the hottest items. People were allowed to fill two plastic Wal-Mart bags per person, per day, free. Keep in mind that there were no shops in Pearlington before the storm, so this is a big deal. There are two trailers for showers. One for men, one for women. Although the nice guy who runs them, who came on his own from Oregon, will look the other way if a couple wants to shower together. There's a little clinic staffed by volunteers, and I noticed a box of Zoloft starter kits in there-- some of which Dallas took, thankfully. And one washing machine commandeered from Arkansas. The mix of people here is so striking. People who normally would barely speak to each other, never mind become friends, people essentially from different countries, suddenly hanging out. For example, one day I stopped by at Boogie's, the guy who rode out the storm with Dallas in the tree. Delbert McArthur Junior is his real name. A tough-looking guy with a 6-inch goatee that falls down from his chin in two prongs. A Confederate flag flies on his property. He told the black National Guardsman who came by, that ain't hatred. That's heritage, bro. In his youth, Boogie was known for, as he put it, hurting people. When I visited, he was drying out his gun collection on a trampoline. About 150 weapons, total. That one holds 100 rounds. And these weren't quite hunting rifles. He's got assault weapons. AK-47s. A banned 12-gauge Street Sweeper that folds in half for easy-- something. And with him was a group of wholesome-looking church people from Wisconsin, including a fresh-faced college student named Ben. What are you doing right now? I'm fixing to let this gentleman fire this weapon. We're going to walk down by the pond, I'm going to let him fire it. He said he's never fired one. Are you from here? No, I'm from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. And what are you doing here? Hoping to help people out, I guess. How exactly does this help? Boogie took an AK-47 and walked with Ben to the end of the dirt road to a pond where the family's pigs usually wallow. Ben came to Pearlington with some friends from his church. Nope. It's made for brush fighting. Like T2, T3, T4, something like that, for like Pull-Ups sizes? The next day, back at the school, I saw Ben again. He was in charge of organizing diapers. At the school there's this shelter set up by Christian group based in San Diego and run by a formerly homeless guy from Philadelphia. Another church group from Alabama was cooking all the food in three giant pots, feeding maybe 400 people every day. What is it today? It's like chicken pasta. It's got pasta in it, cream of mushroom soup. What else we put, Joseph? This is Dr. Joseph. Hi. He's a cardiologist. Parmesan cheese. and-- Wait, you're a cardiologist? Yes. What? Is like, heart business slow? What are you doing here? You start to realize that almost every single person manning the place-- and there are hundreds of them-- is a volunteer from somewhere else. Unpaid, missing work, sweating. Still, I figured there must be some official entity in charge of the whole thing, and I decide to find out who that is. This turns out to be more difficult than you'd think. Pearlington has no town government. No mayor or town council or police department. So I start at what seems like the logical place. I see a guy in a FEMA T-shirt, and I go up to him with my microphone. Hi. No, no, no, no no, no! FEMA, you cannot run! Ask Boss FEMA! Who's Boss FEMA? Are you Boss FEMA? No ma'am. No ma'am. He's literally running from me. The guy who runs away yells that I should look for a guy named Larry, who is Boss FEMA. It turns out all the guys at the Pearlington distribution site wearing FEMA T-shirts aren't really FEMA. They're firefighters from other states who have been hired by FEMA for 30 days. So they don't know all that much, which sometimes makes people yell at them. And so that's why the guys run away. I do find Boss Larry, Larry Beachum. He's a firefighter from Missouri, and he signed up for the 30-day FEMA duty. But he rejects the boss label. Are you the umbrella over all of these organizations that are here? I mean, there must be dozens and dozens. No. I'm a worker bee. The person, or people, in charge of the operation here is Hancock County, EOC. He says there is a lady from Hancock County Emergency Operations and that she's in charge. But it's hard to know what that means, exactly. So the county is the one-- I mean, I guess what I don't quite understand is there are all these different groups, and who's-- so is it her job to coordinate so things don't get doubled up, like two teams don't go out to cut the same tree, or three teams don't feed the same-- you know what I mean? We do it. We as who? We coordinate it. We as FEMA? We as the people that are running this distribution center. Pretty soon I find the Hancock County lady, Stacy Pace. That's a sanitary issue that I thought-- She's so busy that she literally doesn't have time to stand still for an interview, so we walk. She's got no office or desk or notebook. Just two cell phones clipped to her belt. And so you're from EOC of Hancock County, or--? Nope. Who are you? I'm a volunteer from Hancock County. Oh. So just explain who you are and what you're doing here. Whatever I can, basically. But what is your, like-- when you're not doing this, what do you do? I'm director of nursing for Coastal Family. Oh, you're kidding. You don't even work for Emergency Management? No. Do you have any Emergency Management training? Ah, other than being a nurse. So how did you end up in charge of this? Started out fronting the medical clinic, and then just went from there. So Stacy's just another volunteer. She's from the neighboring town and she lost her house, too. She's so neat and organized, one of the guys working there calls her Miss Clean. She says cleanliness is the sign of a good leader. Another person who people kept telling me to talk to is the Iceman, who's been loading his Toyota pickup with bags of ice every day and delivering them to people who might not be able to make it to the school. The Iceman is busy-- busy like Stacy-- and he's hard to find. I got some directions that sound more like instructions to a video game. You go down around here are the Zuni Indians are. They're the ones that are handing out the ice. You can ask them where the Iceman is. And so you'll see him. He's got kind of a hat on. Looks like a safari hat. And he looks like Crocodile Dundee to me. The Zuni Hotshots is the name of a group of federal firefighters from New Mexico. They're also paid. Paid to pass out ice. The way it works is this. Ice has been incredibly important since the hurricane, and a major job of the relief effort is getting it to people. Trucks from all over the country, contracted through FEMA, deliver it to a central command post at a nearby NASA facility. From there it's sent to different drop off points, like this one, where the Zuni Hotshots are, and where the Iceman comes every day. A couple hours later, I do meet the Iceman. His real name is Lester Huckabee. He's a paleontologist from Tampa, Florida. He's been here longer than almost any volunteer, so everyone comes to him for help. I go out on an ice run with him. Uh, hey! You all need ice here? Yes. many you need? Lester finally clears things up for me. He tells me there are actually about five people running the Pearlington relief operation. When you say five of us, who do you mean? Stacy, I. Gosh, a couple people from Colorado. There's mostly volunteers. So no one from the government is in those five? No. We don't have a government here. We're all volunteers. The only government we have is FEMA, and what they do is hand out glorified trailers. Just glorified tents is all the government's doing for them. I've seen those FEMA trailers. They're OK. They're great if they had electricity and water and sewage. But they do, don't they? They have a toilet in them. Uh, yeah. But they're not hooked up to nothing. I think that right now there's six FEMA trailers in Pearlington and none of them are hooked up. And how many weeks is it after? 30 days after? This is the fifth week. The start of the fifth week. Fifth week? Good job, FEMA. I'm proud to be American, but I don't have time for horse [BLEEP]. Toby, y'all need some more? We pass out about 130 bags of ice in 45 minutes. Lester has to go back to get more. He's living in a tent, too, on someone's ruined property, but he's really happy here. You were saying you like it here. Yeah. I want to move here. What do you mean, here? To Pearlington? Pearlington. Are you serious? I want to help rebuild Pearlington. It's got everything I like. Gators, snakes, fishing, hunting. So it's kind of what I do. But it's destroyed. Ah, it can be rebuilt. It's my kind of place. These are perfect people here. They're really special here. Yeah. I'm in love. Boogie, the guy who gave AK-47 lessons to the church people from Wisconsin, feels the same way. He loves this town. He loves it so much that he used to drive six hours to and from work every day rather than relocate. He did try moving away once, for nine months, but it didn't suit him. It was too different. Later he tells me it was to Slidell. Slidell is 12 miles away. Boogie said that since the storm, about half of his friends had left and weren't coming back, but that he just can't leave, even though the town isn't even that great. We have heat 10 months out of the year. We have mosquitoes that bite you constantly. I don't know. It's just-- I've never actually sit and thought about it, never actually tried to figure out what keeps me here. You know? I've always been content. I've never-- well, a couple times I've want to roam, like I said earlier. But other than that, I mean-- But do you think that now what's happened, I mean, just looking around-- I mean, I wouldn't even know where to start. It seems so tempting to me just to be like, oh, forget it. I feel even more tied to it now, for some reason. It's hard to explain. It's weird. In my own mind, I think it's weird. Me still wanting to be here even more. Like Dallas tried to get me to go to Slidell to eat dinner and breakfast, and I wouldn't leave. I didn't want to leave. Even just for a meal? Just for a meal. Didn't want to leave, for some reason. Especially tied to that tree again, now. I was tied to it when I was a kid. I was hooked up to it. You used to climb it? All the time. Sleep in it. He's talking about the tree where they all survived the storm. That's another thing that's happened. He's become close to Dallas. He used to think he hated her. I asked her about that, about what it was like for a gay woman to move onto that street 13 years ago. She said after she first moved in, her neighbors set fire to her truck and poisoned a couple of her dogs and threw trash in her yard. After she confronted them, things got better. Since the storm, she's talked to her neighbors more than ever before. Since all this has happened, me and Boogie's got real close with me. And when they first brought the campers there, I slept in one of the campers for two nights, and then his cousin came in, so I left. Because it was actually his cousin's camper. And he kept telling me, why don't you go to sleep in there and I'll sleep out here? And I said, no. You go ahead and sleep in there. That's your family. You stay there. I said, I'll be all right. Well, he come by later on. Got him a drink out the ice chest-- even though they got ice chests over there. And he tells me, "Goodnight." And I went "OK, goodnight." And then he said something else, and I never did hear what he said. Well, the next day I ask him, I said, I know you said goodnight, but I know you said something else. What did you say? Oh. I said, "I love you." And I went, "OK. Love you too." Even though people are coming together in this unprecedented way, looking around Pearlington, it's really hard to imagine that the town will survive. There's already a song about that by Miss Mississippi. It sounds like a death knell. Bring back Pearlington. Pearlington. Save Pearlington. The school, the only public building in town, probably won't get rebuilt, which means little kids will have to be bussed to another town. A good number of people probably won't come back at all, and the ones who are staying are suddenly so poor. Miss Pauline, who finally got her FEMA trailer two days after I left, thinks she'll eventually buy it and live the rest of her life in it. You get the feeling that will be the only choice for a lot of people here. [SUBJECT] Pearlington is my name, you, live in all the nation's news, hurricane did her abuse, and now. My train tracks are all twisted and my houses have been lifted and security was shifted by the storm. Sarah Koenig reported that story. Coming up-- one teenager's guide to the best and worst MREs. Could be handy when your town gets hit by a hurricane. 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 show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program-- "Back from the Dead." Stories of people and towns that have come back from the brink. Or are trying to come back, anyway. We've arrived at act three of our show. Act Three. "Friday Night Floodlights." About 15 miles from Pearlington, the town we just heard about in act two, are the towns of Waveland and Bay St. Louis. Waveland was pretty much wiped out in the hurricane. The majority of homes and businesses were destroyed or severely damaged. Bay St. Louis fared only a little better. Even now, a month later, you can't drink the water out of the faucet. Some people still don't have electricity. Not really the kind of place you'd expect to find a thriving high school football scene. One of our producers, Lisa Pollak, says, that's coming back. The Bay High Tigers played their first game of the season on the Friday before Katrina. They beat Hancock High, 30-14. After the storm, the joke was that they'd gone undefeated. Everyone figured the season was over. Players were homeless. The high school was closed. But just days after the hurricane, the Bay High coach, Brenan Compretta, started hearing from his players. They wanted to play football. They called his cell and sent text messages. They stopped him on the street. They wanted to play football. They wanted something that reminded them of what life was before. The thing that a lot of them were saying is it only takes 11 men to play, and no matter how many they had, they wanted to do this. That was the only thing that they had to look forward to, you know? You wouldn't stage a school play without a school, but football is different. Here, anyway. In Bay St. Louis, game day starts at 6:30 AM with the team breakfast at a church. Newspaper stories about the game are posted on the wall at school. In the afternoon, drummers from the band march through the hallways just before the pep rally. Strangers in town stop players to talk about that week's game. So even though school won't start again until November, the coach called a meeting to try to restart the team. There were some challenges. Only 19 players showed up of the 70 who were on the team. They couldn't use their practice field since National Guardsmen were camping there. Their field house was destroyed and most of their equipment. And as for their uniforms-- We pulled up, a few days after the storm. They had people running around in our jerseys and cleats, and throwing balls around. And I guess it was fathers and sons or whatever. Wait, so you saw people wearing your guys' football jerseys just as, like, replacement clothes? Right, exactly. And you know, considering the circumstances, I didn't get really upset about it. It was like, well, I guess if they need some clothes, they can go ahead and take them, you know? They're saying-- there's a possibility-- they're saying it's probably going to be one of the most packed games we've played, ever. It's game day-- the Tigers' very first game since Hurricane Katrina, one month after the storm. And I've flown to Mississippi, where Tyler Brush, the team's quarterback, is showing me around. There's not a lot to see. Just huge piles of wreckage. And near the beach, mile after mile of empty spaces where houses and buildings used to be. After the hurricane Tyler's family left for a while. Moved to Florida, to a town where they used to live. They got a nice house and Tyler began high school there. He was practicing with their football squad. He was going to be a starter there, too. But then Coach Compretta called. Tyler says coming back here was a hard choice. My dad, he originally didn't want me to come back. I mean, he was pretty much against it. But he decided-- he said that it was my decision. I mean, I had to think about it a lot. I was nervous about coming back. I recognize the situation. I knew I was taking the chance, if I came back here, college teams might not see me play. But I felt that I still needed to come back, though, for whoever did come back. As quarterback, he didn't want to let the team down. So now his family is living 15 miles away in Diamond Head, and two of the team's other players, whose families didn't return, are living with them, too. This is a strange place to be a kid right now. With no school, they spend their days doing cleanup work. Hauling out sheet rock and moving trees and debris. It's bleak and boring. Their favorite hangouts are gone. Football is one of the few things they have left. We're actually pulling up to my house now. This is pretty much nothing left of my house. There's some stairs right here-- were right here, leading up to the house. They're completely gone. Literally all we are looking at are the wooden stilts that held up the house and the foundation, which looks like it was lifted up from the ground. And I mean, there isn't even like stuff around. Like furniture or clothes, or-- where did all the stuff go? I guess water just washed them up that way. Wiped out. There's nothing left. Does anybody in here need pants? You need pants, come with me. Over at the football field, the new uniforms arrive just in time-- a gift from a man in North Carolina-- and the kids line up while the coaches open the boxes. The new jerseys are blue and white, not blue and gold, the school colors, but no one seems to care. Hold on-- hey, man. We're not getting picky here. Just relax, buddy. What do you need? This isn't the team it used to be. Over half the Tigers still haven't come back, so the coaches have filled out the roster with some new recruits. A few seniors who have never played football, some freshmen from the school's ninth grade team, two guys from the Tigers' archrival, Saint Stanislaus-- they cancelled their season-- and to cap it all off, Bad News Bears style, some scared-looking seventh and eighth graders from the junior high. In all, it's still just 29 players-- a long way from 70. Some of these kids are all but homeless, sleeping on other families' couches and floors. One linebacker is living in a camper, alone, his parents hours away. All so he can play football. With everything these kids have been dealing with and everything they've seen, they seem genuinely relieved and excited to be here today, putting on jerseys and lacing up cleats. Everybody's just anxious to play again, to get things back to normal. That's Trevor Adams, a senior tight end. And for him, getting things back to normal means pretty much one thing. I love hitting people. That's-- I mean, there no better feeling in the world, just unloading on somebody. I mean, even now, dealing with all this, you have an extra feel of warmth. You get just that exciting feeling about, you know, hitting somebody, or you-- there's no-- you can't explain it. Equally excited is Brandt, a tenth grader. I think Brandt might be one of the happiest kids I've ever met. He doesn't stop beaming, even when he's talking about swimming through his flooded kitchen, or living for weeks without plumbing or power. He moved to Texas to stay with a relative for a while, but didn't stay long. Texas was great. Everybody was real kind. Like scary kind. It was just like-- have you ever seen The Stepford Wives? How everything's perfect? That's how it was. They were all like, hi, how are you doing? Can I get you anything? Clothes? Food? And I'm like, I'm fine, ma'am. So does this feel like a normal couple hours before a game, or does it feel different. Way different. One thing I'm going to miss before the game is the pregame meals. We don't have that here. Them pregame meals were good. All you can eat. What kind of food? Ah. Baked chicken with all these spices on it. Just so good. You're making me hungry. That was like a month ago. So you've stayed here this whole time. What's there been to eat for you? Three meals a day, MREs. So what's an MRE taste like? I'll tell you what. Meal number 20 and meal number 22. 20 is spaghetti and 22 is jambalaya. The best. I told my momma she should step it up, because that stuff is-- I'm going to just start getting MREs just regular. All right. Hey, guys. Everybody right here, where these guys are, get down, you can take a knee or something. Let's go. Real quick. You can sit down or take a knee, either one. It's late afternoon now, about an hour before the game. Everybody gathers around Coach Compretta, and he urges them to think about the past month when they get on the field tonight. Everything you have inside of you, let it out. All the aggravation, the frustration, having to get up and do all the junk you do every day because of this hurricane-- let it all out right here. Play for your community. That's why you're here, OK? Some people can't be here. Play for the guys who can't be here, too. Play for Bay St. Louis and Waveland. Does anybody have any questions about anything? Offense, defense, special teams, what? What? I love everybody. We love you too, Cal. Love you too, Cal. Of course, there's only so much love one football team can take. An hour later, as the team gets ready to run onto the field, the coach has this to say. So forget all the kindness and niceness right now, all that junk. Go out there and get after their behinds. Do you understand me? Yes sir! Now, we do want to win the football game, OK? Everybody touch somebody. Let's go. Ladies and gentlemen, the Bay High Tigers! It's kind of hard to believe that out of the ruins of this town, just down the street from gutted houses and buildings, this thing has appeared, this movie-set perfect football game. It's dusk now, with a pinkish sky. And under the stadium lights, everything's kind of glowing, and everyone showed up to play their part. The cheerleaders, the PA announcer, the marching band, or what's left of it. A single kid with a snare drum, standing in the bleachers. Please join me in singing the national anthem. The opposing team, the Long Beach Bearcats, line up on the other side of the field. The moment I see them, my heart sinks a little. Not only are there twice as many of them, they just look so determined. Assistant Coach Keith sizes them up this way. Ah. Big They came here on three buses. We need a minivan, you know? A big difference. And they don't have junior high kids out there, and we do. Not even the quarterback's father expects the Tigers to win tonight. They're missing so many guys that they'll have to play their good players twice as much. Their starters will play offense and defense. Guys will wear out. Doing the kicking for the Bearcats, Chip Vonderbruegge. The Tigers get off to a great start. The first time they get the ball, they go in a drive that lasts half the first quarter and ends with a touchdown on a six yard run by Robert Labat. I watch Tyler pass the ball off to Robert, knowing that Tyler pretty much moved back to town for this moment, and that Robert, who is living with them, separated from his own family, did too. Get out there! Go, go, go! Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run. Touchdown. TIgers on the board! Fight, fight! Here we go, go! On the sidelines, eight Tiger cheerleaders are jumping around. It's more than half the squad. One tells me her uniform was the first thing she packed when her family evacuated. When the girls aren't cheering, they're consulting this big, elaborate chart they've set up in front of the bleachers. Celeste, the captain, explains. This is our cheer list, and we have 63 cheers on it. And every year we just take it and we add more to it. OK. So like, what's 36? 36 is G-O, go Tigers go. And then what's 37? 37 is G-O, go, go! G-O, go. And what's 28? Go, go, G-O. Go, Tigers, go. There's some similarity. Yes, they're very. The coaches are scurrying up and down the field, improvising to fill in for the key players they don't have, swapping kids in and out. Brandt, the MRE kid, is getting trounced out there, so the coach pulls him aside. Hey Brandt, not bad baby, not bad baby. Going to make a change, put somebody in there with a little more behind on him, OK? I got manhandled up here. I know, we saw that. But the rookie players come through with some surprises. For instance, at the very same moment that the coaches are grumbling to themselves about where exactly freshman Allan Villalta is heading on the field, Villalta recovers a fumble. Oh God, Villalta is on the [BLEEP]. Oh damn, he just made a play! He just made a damn play. By the end of the first half, it's Tigers 7, Bearcats 6. Good job, Walt, that a boy. Good job. The home bleachers are pretty packed by now. And the thing I realize when I start talking to people is that this is the first time this town has gotten together since the hurricane. One of the first people I meet, Gary Yarborough, doesn't even have a kid on the team. I'm just out here, just trying to see who's still here, who's still in town, and visit with the other folks. And see how everybody's handling everything and dealing with everything. Is this the first time you're seeing a lot of folks in a while? Yeah, some of them, yeah. Because you know, with the curfews and nothing open in town, there's really no place to go to see anybody. As I walk through the stands, the one thing people keep telling me is what a normal night this is, what a relief it is to do something normal again. But talk to anyone for more than a couple minutes, and what you hear next is just how far from normal everything is. They're worried about flood insurance and FEMA trailers and whether they'll have jobs. I asked one man, the Booster Club president, what the highlight of the game is so far, and he nearly starts to cry. Down on the field, the Tigers are playing better than anyone had expected. Going into the fourth quarter, the score is 21-6, Tigers comfortably leading. But then, in the last five minutes of the game, everything falls apart. The Bearcats' star player, Tramaine Brock, rushes for a touchdown. They miss the extra point, so it's 21-12. Two minutes later, with just three minutes left in the game, Brock sprints 55 years to the end zone as the Tiger coaches watch helplessly. That's it. He's gone. [BLEEP] He's gone. Dang it. It's a two point game now, 21-19. The Tigers are still waiting, but Long Beach has the momentum, and they only need a field goal to win. The Tigers are completely exhausted. Many have been on the field the entire game. The kicker is limping. Allan Villalta, the ninth grader who made that great play, is on the sidelines with an injured knee. The Tigers get the ball back, their last possession, but they can't even manage a first down. They punt it away, and there's still plenty of time for Long Beach to score. Everything you've got, right now! Be ready to drive! The Bearcats start to drive again. They cross the 50 yard line into Bay High territory. The clock is running down. Coaches are screaming. Jason, be ready to drop. Here we go! Here we go! The place is going nuts. Bay High! Bay High! I can honestly say this is the only football game I've ever been to where it really did seem to matter who won. Earlier I felt bad taking sides against the Bearcats. Their town was hit by the hurricane, too. But now I don't know what I'll do if the Tigers lose. Their town was hit harder. They're the underdogs. They have to win. And then, they do. They stop the Bearcats. It's over. The clock runs out and the place explodes. 21-19 Tigers. It's every corny sports movie come to life. People streaming on the field, hugging, players sprawled on the ground. All these people in this wrecked town ecstatic over a football game. Assistant coach Jeremy Turcotte. I think next to getting married and having my baby, that's about the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. Hey guys, listen up. I'm going to let you go. I know we got to get home. Coach Compretta. Never been more proud, OK? In my coaching career. Never been more proud of a group of guys in my life than right now. I love you guys. I love you guys. Take tomorrow off. See you on Wednesday, 3:30. Be here for 3:30, OK? Everybody touch somebody. Great job, fellows. Great job, fellows. Break it down, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] win. Bay St. Louis of Hancock County is still under a curfew, ladies and gentlemen. After the game, you'll need to go home as soon as possible. And just like that, the place clears out. A half hour later, the only people left are the coaches, still reliving the game. Luke, one of the assistants, is on the cell phone with his brother in Alabama. They had the ball with about a minute and a half left, driving with no time outs, and we sacked them with no time left. But I just wanted to call and tell you that, man. I'll call you tomorrow sometime. I just wanted to holler at you real quick. I love you, bro. Bye. Of all the coaches I met here, Luke seemed the most discouraged about everything. He'd lost his house. He sounded disheartened. In the morning, he told me that when his contract is up in May, he'll probably leave here. But now his mood is different. And you know, we play next Friday night here, and you know, it's not like the town's going to be back to normal next Friday night. So I mean, they're still going to not have anything to do, they're still going to be a curfew. And you know, I mean, this just starts it. I mean, if you lose tonight, it's like, you know what? You go home and you're sitting in a trailer and you have no AC and you lost a football game. But you know, it's a little easier to go home and sit in a trailer with no AC when you just won a football game that nobody gave you a chance to win. Before coming to Bay St. Louis, I felt the way I think a lot of us feel when we see these places on TV. I didn't understand how you go back to a town like that, to all that loss, and live there in the middle of it. What are you going back there for? And how do you even begin to get over it? Watching the Tigers win, 21-19, completely outmatched, everyone together, cheering them on, I knew the answer. Lisa Pollak. Our program is produced today by Jane Feltes and myself with with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Sarah Koenig, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Chris Ladd. 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's lobbying for this be our new national motto, printed right on the money. I'm proud to be American, but, I don't have time for horse [BLEEP]. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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In Danielle's house, ever since she was a girl, when dinner comes, sometimes they serve a meal that might look familiar to you. Here's the main course. On a big platter, picture drumsticks, white breast meat, golden brown skin. Somebody carves this. Perhaps on a holiday, there's stuffing and cranberry relish on the side. And in Danielle's family, they have a name for this meal. As she told me on the phone recently, the name for this meal is-- Fish. Got that? Fish. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it is Your Radio Playhouse, a special program tonight on the wonders of "fish." Actually, we can say the word here. And the word would be "poultry." We are in the interregnum of poultry. We stand at this moment between the poultry of Thanksgiving and the poultry of Christmas. This is the peak poultry moment in our American year. Something like a fourth, a little less than a fourth of all the turkey consumed in this country consumed during these few weeks. And to honor that, we bring you this evening an odd variety of stories and things you would not hear elsewhere, as we always do of course. Things you not would hear elsewhere-- just transpose the words of that sentence yourselves at home. I'm not going to do that for you-- about turkeys, chickens, ducks, fowl of all kind and their mysterious hold over us. Well, I am Ira Glass. A Chicago poet actually named Jim Banks suggested a special name for this special poultry edition of this Your Radio Playhouse. His suggestion, "A Poultry Slam," after, of course, the poetry slams the we hold here in Chicago, in the venerable paneled darkness of the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge each Sunday. Coming up this hour, David Sedaris, Luis Rodriguez, and other writers and radio heroes. And of course, of course, of course, what poultry-positive radio program could be complete without-- Chickenman! He's everywhere. He's everywhere! Yes, indeed. In the late 1960s, the winged warrior Chickenman struck terror in the hearts of evildoers everywhere, on Chicago radio first and then across the nation. Tonight, we're going to bring you a historic first, the first new episode since 1969, later. That will be later, later. See, because we're savvy broadcasters here. Even though it's public broadcasting, we're going to make you wait 'til later in the show for that. We know many of you are tuning in for that, and we're going to make you wait. OK, to return to our story. 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 this stuffed hand puppet called Duki. A little background, Danielle is 28 years old, editor at Details magazine in New York City, a very fashionable magazine. Her sister, Ashley, two years younger, now a graduate student at the University of Michigan. And 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/hero goggles. I guess we'd call it hero goggles. And I think he was, because there was an S on his cape, I'm sure he was supposed to be Superduck or something. And he's a puppet. He lost the outfit pretty quickly, and he went naked. And then he became Ashley's vehicle for torturing me. Now it is not unusual for older siblings to dominate younger ones. And as children, Danielle pretty much would dominate Ashley. Danielle always got her way, except, except when Duki was around. And basically what would happen is Ashley would channel-- that's kind of an anachronism to use that word in this context-- but Ashley would channel Duki's voice. She would speak as Duki. She would produce the Duki-like voice. And Duki was sarcastic and selfish and bossy. Duki would insult and tease Danielle and 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 considerate. She's very considerate and kind and thoughtful, and very, very sensitive to other people. Very, very concerned about if other people are happy or if someone else doesn't feel good. And Duki has this total "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. Well, lately, he's at U Mich with my sister. And he tried out for the football team. They've got a good football team there. Nationally ranked. And he said he didn't make it. But he said it was because they thought he'd be more valuable in the band. And they got a good band, too. So apparently, he goes to band practice every day. And they've got him playing the triangle. He's playing the triangle in the band. And he couldn't come home for Thanksgiving because he had to go be at practice. 18 years after Duki arrived in the Mattoon household, I can say, I think fairly accurately, that the fluffy whiteness is long gone. "Fluffy" is not a word-- you would never use that word with Duki anymore. Nor is two-eyed, actually, if I remember correctly. What he looks like, physical-- he's like a slightly pathetic-looking grey, tattered thing. Very tattered. Very tattered. But then the fact that his brain, like what's coming out of his mouth, is in complete denial about who he actually is. I don't know. There's just something really, really great about that. And really, you have to love-- you love him for it. OK, I have been at Danielle's house sometimes and witnessed the following scene. Picture this. Danielle has not spoken with her sister in weeks, picks up the phone, calls her sister Ashley in Michigan. Ashley answers. Danielle asks immediately, "Can you put Duki on the line?" And then Ashley essentially becomes Duki, puts Duki on the line. Danielle talks to Duki for 15, 20 minutes. And then they both hang up. That's the whole conversation. And they both feel satisfied. I adore Duki. I really love Duki. And sometimes I think if he disappeared, it would really feel like someone died. I mean, I look at him and he looks really old and ratty. And it really makes me sad. Really, I feel like-- it sounds crazy. It really makes me sad to think about a world without Duki, and that it would be a big, empty hole in the world. He takes up as much room in my heart as a lot of people individually. And if something happened to him, if he were lost at an airport or run over by a car, it would really be heartbreaking. So I hope that it's becoming clear why, when you eat dinner in the home of Danielle's family, if they are serving some kind of poultry, chicken or turkey, if you ask anyone 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 show. So a few weeks ago, I contacted Danielle's sister, Ashley. And I asked her if Duki could come on the air. And I didn't get a call back. I got an answer back by electronic mail that for Duki to appear, I would have to call someone named Yona Lu, who I could reach through Danielle and Ashley's mom. And when I talked with 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 she's acting as his agent. Yona Lu is-- She's a hedgehog. Anything special that I should say to Yona Lu? I don't know. She's 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 on to my radio show, I was going to first need to contact Yona Lu. Yeah, you would need to do that. And that I needed to do that through you. Yeah. Who is Yona Lu? Yona Lu is-- she's a hedgehog. She's basically taken charge of Duki's financial affairs. And I presume this has something to do with money? 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 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. She says OK, it's OK. 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'd just go in and check. You'll just go in and check. Yeah. Should I wait? Yeah. All right, I'll wait. Ira? Yeah. This is just radio? Yeah. 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 Lu doesn't care what happens then. What if it were TV? I think she'd want to be on, too. Radio doesn't do much for her, she doesn't talk. OK. In Danielle's family-- I guess you're figuring this out. There's Duki. There's Yona Lu. And then there are four or five other characters, Therese-- I can never keep all their names straight-- who live in this world that's fleshed out with a lot of vivid detail and drama. They have a club called The Smart Set, and people are forever falling in and out of favor with The Smart Set. Anyway, there are jealousies. There are rivalries. People fight for favors and treats and invitations to ice cream socials. And each of the characters corresponds to some stuffed doll that Danielle and Ashley received as children. Though a few months ago, Danielle and Ashley were talking. And they realized that one of the characters, Guy Frank, didn't seem to correspond to any particular doll that they could remember. Where did he come from? They attempted to recall this. And then one of them did. Guy Frank is Duki's imaginary friend. Duki is such a fully realized imaginary friend that he has his own imaginary friend. As you might imagine, not everyone in the family takes all this so lightly. Danielle's father, for example, was never too keen on it. He was quite actually bothered by the whole-- he thought we maybe had a problem in the family. Really? Mm-hmm. For a while there, we had two daughters that only communicated through a duck. Yeah. That period that you're describing, when do you mean? I would say they maybe were 10 and 12 or 9 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. 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, this is probably completely really sick. But I have so much genuine affection and love for Duki that it's very easy to demonstrate those feelings. It's not as easy to demonstrate those feelings toward my sister, just because we never 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 kind of a big chunk. It definitely 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 the band, so a lot of his friends go to this happy hour on Friday night. OK. Well, could you get him? 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 got a whole bunch of celebrities on tonight? Well, we actually have a number of different people? Real celebs, like, Tom Cruise? They're just like Tom Cruise, yes. Yeah. 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. Like over Thanksgiving, we were watching The Muppet Show, and Miss Piggy was on. And she reminded me a lot of Nielly. Of Danielle. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And Kermit told Miss Piggy, "Move the pork." And so I was telling Nielly 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? You know Nielly. 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 side long glance that makes you feel like you're about the size of a pea? Yeah. That's what she does. She not as critical of me. Is there anything about the life of a duck that perhaps you could tell our radio audience that we might not 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 know? You're not in touch with the whole scene, yeah. 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 duck things anymore. I just wanted more in my life than that. Well, the story of a 26-year-old graduate student who talks like a duck brings us naturally to the subject of Chickenman. Chickenman first soared the radio airwaves from 1966 to 1969. And nearly every day, there would be a new episode for three years. These are short, little two-minute things, starting on WCFL here in our beloved Chicago. And after that, Chickenman appeared on over 1,500 radio stations across the country, around the world. According to the people who syndicate it these are the numbers. They say it's been translated into German, Dutch, and Swedish. It is still on the air, they say, in several dozen markets, making it one of the longest-running radio features anywhere. Chickenman began years before National Public Radio existed. It will probably continue years after we are gone. Like the mighty cockroach, like, I don't know, the bagel, like Hamlet, Chickenman endures, will endure. Coming up later in the show, we'll have the first new Chickenman episode since 1969. Have we mentioned this enough in the show? Should we just mention it every time? Every time we open the mike, I should just mention that? It was written especially for our broadcast by Dick Orkin, the voice of Chickenman. But before we hear that, let's just hear what all the fuss was about. Now, another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crimefighter the world has ever known. Bock bock bock bock! Chickenman! He's everywhere, he's everywhere! Benton Harbor, employed as a shoe salesman for a large downtown department store, spends his weekends, his only two days off, striking terror into the hearts of criminals everywhere as the white-winged warrior called Chickenman. How did it come about that Benton Harbor, weekend winged warrior, selected the visage of the chicken in his crusade against the forces of evil? Now it can be told. Yes, may I help you? How do you do? I'm looking for a costume. Well, what did you have in mind? Something that will strike terror into the hearts of criminals everywhere. I see. Well, how about this? Hmm. No, I don't think so. Why not try it on? Very well. Here, I'll help you. Thank you. There you are. Now take a look in the mirror. Hmm. Not bad. I wonder if you would permit me to conduct a quick experiment outside this store. Certainly. Pardon me, sir. Yeah? Are you by chance a vicious criminal? Uh-huh. Fine. Would you take a look at this costume I'm wearing? Yeah. Do you feel anything strange? Uh-- Anything at all? Uh, yeah. And what is that? I'd like to kiss you. Kiss me? Yeah. How do you account for that? Because you look like an adorable bunny rabbit. Well, how did it go? What else do you have? A Teddy bear and a chicken. A Teddy bear? It'd be cute. Wrap up the chicken, please. Be listening tomorrow for another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crimefighter the world has ever known. Bock bock bock bock! Chickenman! He's everywhere, he's everywhere! The all-new Chickenman, coming up at the end of our show. But next, a real-life story of real poultry and a real poultry farm. Stay with us, won't you? I'm Julie Showalter. I grew up on a turkey farm in southwest Missouri. "The night 3,000 turkeys died." The day before the night that 3,000 turkeys died, we moved 13,000 turkeys to the range. This requires some explanation. Turkeys spend their first 16 weeks in a heated brooder house. When they are 16 weeks old, they are put outside to range in fenced enclosures. Daddy decided we would herd them to the range. It looked simple enough. We made a temporary chute of wire fencing that ran from the double-end doors of the brooder house 50 yards to the pen. We would get behind the turkeys in the brooder house, shout, wave old shirts and gunny sacks at them, and they would run out the doors, through the chute, into the pen. And that's the way it worked in the first brooder house. The first turkeys hesitated at the door, walked out cautiously, then moved through the chute and dispersed. The rest followed. It took about an hour. Daddy was pleased. "Let's work straight through," he said. "We'll be done by 10:00." By the time the turkeys have been in a brooder house for 16 weeks, the air is filled with ammonia, feather particles, and dust. The stench is overwhelming. After an hour in the brooder house, your lungs hurt for a day. You can contract disabling lung diseases from working only a week in a poultry house. Tiny barbed pieces of feather dig into the tissue of your lung and never let go. But we didn't know that then. We moved the temporary fence to the doors of the second brooder house. When we threw open the doors at the end of the second house, it was 9:00 in the morning. The sun streamed in the open doors on turkeys that had never seen direct sunlight. The one thing you can count on with turkeys is that you never know how they are going to react. I've seen turkeys clamber against a fence trying to get into a range fire. I've seen them rush toward a screaming child, trying to kill it. And I've seen them run from a screaming child, spooked and terrified. These turkeys didn't want to go into the sun. As we pushed from behind, they compacted. It was like an old adventure movie where the walls are closing in. But there was no wall at the end, only a patch of sunlight which turkeys would not touch. We yelled louder, waved our cloths, kicked at the ones in the rear. Finally, Daddy walked through the solid carpet of turkeys to break the logjam at the front. He stood at the edge of the sunlight, lifting the turkeys three or four at a time with his feet, stirring them with this legs, forcing them into the sun. Suddenly, they broke free. As stubbornly as they had refused to go into the light, they now rushed toward it. They ran in a panic, piling on top of each other, knocking down the temporary fence. By the time Daddy could get the doors closed, at least 1,000 turkeys had escaped and were running free on the farm, onto our neighbor's farm, into the road. We didn't own the turkeys. We raised them for a company that owned the hatchery, the feed mill, the fleet of trucks that delivered and loaded the turkeys, the processing plant. We got a portion of the profits, if there were profits. With 1,000 turkeys gone, there would be no profits on this flock. 16 weeks of Daddy working 14-hour days, of my sisters and me working alongside him any time we weren't in school, all for no pay. And if we weren't paid for this flock, we would have no cash coming in until the next flock was raised. It took us eight hours to round up the escaped turkeys, four of us trying to track down 1,000 birds that had the whole world in which to hide and run from us. The sun beat down, and the air was thick and humid. We stopped once for water, and my sister, Billie, the youngest of us, just 11, vomited from the cold water hitting her stomach after hours of sun, heat, and dehydration. As she lay on the ground, shaking and holding her stomach, I hated her for being the one too sick to continue. But even she was not too sick. We all went on. She got an extra five minutes to rest, but we all went on. You may be asking right now how my father could be so cruel, how he could work young girls like that? Or you may think that I'm exaggerating, that self-pity has magnified our distress. I tell you, this is no exaggeration. And I tell you, my father had no choice. Or that any choice he had was so far in the past that there was no unraveling it. Years later, when we were grown, we caught a glimpse of his guilt, his bitterness over what he had done to us. "I couldn't afford n------," he told my sister Billie. "So I had daughters." At 6 o'clock, we rebuilt the chute. We opened the doors, and the 6,000 remaining turkeys, the sun now low in the sky behind them, walked through to the pen. We cleaned up. We ate supper. And we went to bed. That's the day we had before the night 3,000 turkeys died. At midnight, Mother woke us up. "We have to get to the pen. Daddy needs us." We had been too exhausted to hear the storm. We ran out in the driving rain. Flashes of lightning showed Daddy picking up turkeys and throwing them, one after the other. When people learn I grew up on a turkey farm, they invariably ask, "Is it true? Are they really so stupid that they open their mouths in the rain, look up at the sky, and drown?" The answer is yes, some of them do that. They are that stupid. But that's not how 3,000 die in one night. They die because they are scared, and they huddle together in their fear. They climb on top of each other, trying to get close, to find protection in the mass of bodies. And they suffocate. We called it piling. It wasn't unusual for a loud noise to cause a pile in the brooder house. If there wasn't someone to pull them off each other, 50 could die because someone slammed a door. But this was worse than any pile we'd seen, turkeys who'd never spent a night outdoors panicked by thunder, lightning, and rain in sheets. All we could do is pull them out of the pile and throw them away from it. They would run back, still seeking the comfort of the group. After a while standing in mud, grabbing soaked turkeys, throwing them, grabbing more, you don't know if the ones you are throwing are dead or alive. You don't care. Maybe we saved some. The next day, the sky was cloudless, and the sun bore down on us again. We picked up dead turkeys, throwing them onto the back of a flatbed truck. Daddy drove the truck into a field far from the house. He poured gasoline on them and struck a match. They burned for days. Well, Julie Showalter lives in Burr Ridge, Illinois, and says that she still does eat turkey. Well, twice a year, she eats it. And this is the special Poultry Slam edition of Your Radio Playhouse, coming to you from WBEZ in Chicago. Stay with us, won't you? This is Luis Rodriguez. And I'm going to read my poem, "The Rooster Who Thought it Was a Dog." Echo Park mornings came on the wings of a rooster's gnawing squawk. This noise, unfortunately, also brought in the afternoon, evenings, and most hours of the day. The rooster had no sense of time, nor any desire to commit to one. He'd cock-a-doodle whenever he had the notion. For late sleepers, day sleepers, or your plain, ordinary, run of the mill night sleepers, annoyance had this rooster's beak. It was enough to drive one crazy. Often, I open my back window that faced the alley just across from the backyard where the rooster made his home. "Shut up, or I'll blow your stinking brains out," I'd yell. Great communication technique. It worked on the brats next door, but the rooster never flinched. With calm aplomb, it continued to squawk. For one thing, the rooster never gave out a bona fide cock-a-doodle. It sort of shouted it out. It happened that the rooster lived with three dogs, a German Shepherd and two mutts. The dogs barked through their existence. They barked at everything in sight. I finally concluded that rooster thought it was a dog. Somehow, I didn't mind the dogs barking. But when a rooster barks, that's murder. In fact, I often saw it running alongside the dogs as they raced across the dirt yard, barking at passing cars or people. If the dogs went left, the rooster went left. They'd go right, and dang if that rooster didn't go right as well. Now I don't know if this is a regular condition for roosters. I thought I had a story for the Weekly World News. I could see it now. "The Rooster Who Thinks it's a Dog." Who knows what rooster dementia we had here? And whether the rooster chased cats up trees or pissed on fire hydrants, this wasn't clear. But once I grasped the heart of the matter, I began to see the rooster in another light. I felt sorry for this fowl with an identity problem. And I wondered how it must react when its owners threw chicken bones to the dogs. Would it nibble on the remains of its favorite hen? I shuddered at the thought. Yet despite the revelation of the rooster's bark, the problem of sleep didn't end. Then one day, a new neighbor, a young lady, who often drank herself to bliss, got a gun and blew the rooster away. She became somewhat of a local hero. I must say, though, it was an unfitting end for the bird. But I suppose one can tolerate barking dogs. But barking roosters? That's another matter altogether. Now, another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crimefighter the world has ever known. Bock bock bock bock! Chickenman! He's everywhere, he's everywhere! The office of the Police Commissioner of Midland City. Hello, this is the commissioner-- Miss Helfinger, this is the winged warrior. Yes, what is it? Please inform the commissioner that I'm now all set for test sequence number one. What? It's all primed and ready to go. What are you talking about? The chicken missile, Miss Helfinger. The chicken missile? Yes. So tell the commissioner I'm ready for test sequence number one. Yes, Miss Helfinger? Commissioner, the chicken missile is ready to go. Huh? The chicken missile. Oh, yes, of course. The-- And it's ready for test sequence number one. Test sequence number one. Number one. Well, that's very nice, very nice, yes. Hello, winged warrior. Right here, Miss Helfinger. The commissioner said that's very nice. Oh, fine. In that case, Miss Helfinger, have the commissioner stand by with the chicken missile receiver. What? I'm going to count down-- Listen. [INAUDIBLE]. We'll see you at 1400 hours. Hello, wait-- Yes, Miss Helfinger? Commissioner? Yes. If I would say to you, "Prepare the chicken missile receiver," would you know-- No, I wouldn't. I didn't think you would. Commissioner? Yes. I would suggest that you crouch under your desk. Crouch under my desk? Yes, it should provide some protection. From-- What? From the chicken missile. Oh. Wow. Say, that chicken missile really works nifty. Will the Midland City Fire Department recommend that a chicken missile receiver be installed in what's left of Midland City Hall? Be listening tomorrow for another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crimefighter the world has ever known. Bock bock bock bock! Chickenman! He's everywhere, he's everywhere! More Chickenman. That all-new episode, coming up. In the meantime, my friend Verta tells this story. Verta, Vertamae Grosvenor, is a National Public Radio commentator, host of an NPR show called Seasonings. Anyway, back in 1970, she published a cookbook. And she was interviewed about it on television by Barbara Walters. And as Verta tells this story, OK, she's on TV, making fried chicken for Barbara Walters. And at some point, Barbara Walters asks her, "How do you tell the chicken's done?" And Verta tells her, "You can tell by the sound." Ms. Walters gives her this look which says, basically, "Give me a break," and quickly cuts to a commercial. And Verta says that's always people's reaction. They say, "You're crazy, Verta. That's not it." They say, "Tell me something real. What is it? 15 minutes? 20 minutes," or whatever. And I say, "You've got to listen to the sound of the grease. Listen to the music." So you have been claiming for years that you can tell if the chicken's done purely by the sound. And so to determine if that's true, we've decided to conduct a little radio experiment here, with your permission. The other night, we fried a chicken, and we recorded it at different stages of its frying. And we are going to play you now four different moments in the frying of the chicken that we've changed the order of. I'm sure you did, Ira. Well, I'm telling you up front. And we want you to listen to the four of them and identify which one is the one where the chicken is done. In other words, can you tell that the chicken is done without any visual cues, without the help of smelling what the chicken is smelling like? Can it be done purely, purely on the basis of sound? Let's roll. And our listeners at home can play along with us here. Let's roll the first little sample sound. I would say-- Yeah? I'd say that's something like the middle. OK. But that definitely isn't towards the end, you're saying. Yeah, it's in the middle going toward the end. It's in the three fourths part. OK, let's hear sound number two, please. Number two is toward the end, too. OK. Number three. I think that's the beginning, more toward the beginning. That is more toward the beginning. And number four. That's an ender. It's toward the end. When all those little balls are forming on the bottom, those little, nice, crusty. Now, Verda, if you would have to hazard a guess as to which one would be the very last one-- I still say it's one or two that's toward the end. And the answer is number two, which means that using only the sound of the chicken, Ms. Vertamae Grosvenor can get close to telling when chicken is done, but can't be totally sure of it. In short, this was hard. Yes, it was hard. You have to see it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, it's a serious, labor-intensive thing. You've got to stay on it. You just can't be talking on the phone and watching TV. You've got to stay on that chicken. I was asking your daughters today, and they were saying how they can also tell if rice is done by the sound. Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah, I taught them that. Those are the kind of family values I taught my children. "Listen to the sound of the chicken." "Listen to the sound of the rice." You talked to both of them? I talked to both of them. They were both really funny. One of them said, "Everything that she cooks is golden brown and perfect, perfect, perfect." Who said that? I believe it was Chandra. Really? But she said, "But just because we're her daughters, that doesn't mean that she tells us the real recipes. We ask her for the recipes, and tells us recipes. But then when we cook them, they're not the same. And we know that she's holding back on ingredients. That's-- well, that's not quite true, but you know. That is true. You don't tell them all the ingredients. Well, no. I just tell them, but then they have to find out the rest for themselves. There you go. You see what I'm saying? As with so many things in parenting. I say, "I put a little ginger in." Then they have to figure out how much a little ginger is. That's what they have to do. I tell you, going into this, I was completely convinced that you were just going to snap and get it, and it was going to be really easy. But it turned out to be hard without those other cues. And I guess I've learned that the chicken is a tricky thing. Chicken is tricky. Chicken is craftier than we usually give it credit for. Oh, but did I tell you this one? I have something to tell you about chickens. All right, yeah. The chicken and the rooster had a fight. The chicken knocked the rooster out of sight. Rooster told the chicken, "That's alright. Meet you in the gumbo tomorrow night." Well, the fabulous Vertamae Grosvenor from a studio in Washington, DC. More fun a-comin', writer David Sedaris in New York City. And of course, have we mentioned-- I can't remember. Did we mention the new Chickenman episode, the first one since 1969? Did we mention it? All right. Stay with us. July 19, 1992. This afternoon, at the 26th Street Flea Market, I had one of those experiences that remind me why I shop in the first place. Not shop like grocery shop, but step out into the world searching for that one thing I cannot name. I pass the usual objects, the grinning mammies offering themselves up as salt and pepper shakers, the coffee table made from dice, another head carved from a coconut. "That's collectible," the dealers say, referring to an ashtray in the shape of a doll-sized toilet bowl. Collectible to who? Last weekend at the flea market, I saw this thing, a taxidermied turkey's head attached to its own foot. This turkey was equipped with that length of flesh that spills from the top of its beak and fell to its neck. Stiff red hair stood out from the head and shoulders, and the claws were really sharp. You'd think that something armed like that might be able to protect itself. I pictured its maker standing by a chopping block saying, "I know. I'll take the turkey's head and attach it to the foot." Why would you do that? Or more importantly, what sort of life would you lead that might enable you to make this connection? I was hypnotized by this object and asked the price as if I were under a spell. "$45," the dealer said. My tongue was dry from hanging in the open air, and I tried to fit it back into my mouth. "All right," she said, "$35. $30." But she could have gone up. "All right. $85. $120. $370." I had no choice but to follow wherever she led me. I handed over my wallet in a trance, just gave it to her, thinking she could take the whole thing, the cash, blank checks, library card, whatever. Take it all. I stared into the face of this taxidermied turkey's head, and nothing else mattered. Tomorrow, what's that? Yesterday doesn't count. My life began the moment I could call this thing my own. On the way home I felt giddy and confident that I could approach anyone at all and say, "I'll give you one hundred-- no, $500,000 if you can guess what I've got in this paper sack." And I swear that not one of them could have come up with the right answer. I walked home 30 blocks, looking everyone square in the eye and thinking, "Sucker." Well, David Sedaris is the author of Barrel Fever, often heard on NPR's Morning Edition. All right. Well, forget about those two new Beatles songs, so-called Beatles songs, put out two and a half decades after the group broke up, because here, here, right here on Your Radio Playhouse, we have chicken mania. Chickenman-ia All right, forget that. Dick Orkin, the voice of Chickenman and the brains behind Chickenman. This is the style that launched 1,000 imitators. When I was a kid listening to the radio in Baltimore, I heard this stuff, and really, Chickenman, until the time I was 13 years old, and The Tooth Fairy, another series that Dick Orkin did. And then occasionally, you would hear these commercials for Time magazine or other stuff. You could always tell. You could always tell. That's the guy. That's the guy. Those are [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Because they all had this very deadpan feeling. There was just something offbeat. You couldn't even quite put your finger on what it was. And I, like many people who got into radio in the years that followed, spent the early part of my career in radio trying to imitate that sound and then giving up because of the utter futility of that. And so we are very, very pleased. All of that is a way of saying we are very, very pleased. We, the corporate we, I and the little production staff here at Your Radio Playhouse, we are very pleased to be able to bring the first new Chickenman episode written since 1969, the first full episode written since 1969. You know, Chickenman is getting up in years. And no one appears to be more aware of that than his creator. And now, another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crimefighter the world has ever known. Bock bock bock bock! Chickenman! He's everywhere, he's everywhere! Tuesday morning, 9:30 AM. The Chicken Alarm in my Chicken Cave goes off 30 minutes late, which makes me late for my annual physical at my doctor, DuPont Chopper. I didn't want to be late, since it was my first in 30 years. 9:50 AM. I get a flat as I pull the Chicken Coupe out of the Chicken Garage. So I take the convenient number 32 bus, which drops me off only 14 blocks from the doctor's office. You're late, you're late for a very important date. --says the doctor. And I say, "I know. I'm sorry. All the air went out of my whatchmacallit." Well, that happens to all of us. Age. 11 AM. After several tests and poking and prodding-- Well, your cholesterol is a little high. The pain in your toes is arthritis. And I think you have the beginning of a nice hernia. Cholesterol high? I had no idea. Well, technically, it's not high, because one, it is in your mind. And two, it is your bad cholesterol that's bad. Your good cholesterol is not good. But in time, your bad cholesterol will be good, and your good cholesterol will be bad. And that's not good. Anything else? Yes, you're ugly. That's my Chicken Mask. The beak and, you know, the feathers. Uh-huh. Well, don't look at small children or animals. Anyway, that's the health story. But I don't think you have to alter your lifestyle, unless you are a crimefighting superhero of some kind. Want to buy one of my tapes? 12:00 noon. I return to the Chicken Cave. And there, in the chicken mirror-- augh!-- I see something horrible. No, not my ugly face, my own mortality. I ask myself why it never stared me in the face before. After all, I've been fighting crime and/or evil for over 30 years, pursuing it down streets and allies and sewers and other picturesque places. And my mortality never came up even once. 1:40 PM. I go see the police commissioner and share with him the doctor's diagnosis. After all, he is my closest friend. And if I can't tell him the bad news, who can I tell? So I give him a new coloring book I bought for him and tell him my sad news. And he says-- Ha, ha. This looks like a real neat coloring book. So what do you think commissioner? About what? What I just shared with you. Oh. It's a real neat coloring book. About the diagnosis and the need to alter my lifestyle. Oh. Well, that would mean that you'd have to-- and of course one can't even be sure that that, you know. So anyway, that's how I see it. OK. Thanks, commissioner. Anytime, winged warrior. After all, what are friends for? And may I ask you a question? If I make the sky blue in this picture and the mountains brown, do you think the rocks should be chartreuse? Perfect. 4:00 PM. I go to the local office of the Grace Hill Ferguson Employment Agency and Screen Door Company. OK, when you say something more sed-ren-tarry, what do you mean? Sedentary. You know, things where I can seden-- sit. Oh, OK. What kind of previous work experience do you have? Basically fighting crime and/or evil. And what special equipment, office or otherwise, are you experienced in using? Geshtukna ray gun. Could you spell that? G-E-S-H-T-U-K-A-N-A. And I also worked a Chicken Dissolver and a Chicken Modulator and a can opener. OK. Do you know Windows 95? Look, what light job openings are on your list there? Just look. Heavy cable puller, refrigerator and piano mover, cement hailer-- Hauler. OK. Big tree planter! Circus tent-- Miss? What? Not holler. Those are all active and heavy things. Anything light I could do? Yes, a negligee model in a delicatessen. I don't-- Oh, well scratch that, then. Requires previous experience. Oh, here's something really perfect. What's that? A napkin-folder in a nouveau Italian-Chinese restaurant specializing in pizza and light salads. Takeout available. Mmm, I'm hungry. Wednesday morning, 9:30 AM. My Chicken Alarm goes off a half hour late for my geriatric counseling appointment. Tire still flat. So I take the convenient number 18 bus. And that leaves me off only 28 blocks from the counselor's office. I have one word of advice, Mister. Get out. Excuse me? Get out. OK, I'm a few minutes late. What? You're 30 years too late. Get out. Oh, you mean get out, not get out. May I suggest a small, desert, superhero retirement community. Ooh. You play golf? Not real good, no. Good, you'll fit right in. Neither does Fishwoman or that Flying Newt. I sent them there. They love it. Fishwoman? Yeah. Little scaly, nice personality. Want to buy one of my tapes? 2:00 AM, next morning. I can't sleep, and I sip warm milk in the Chicken Cave. What to do? I'm on the horns of a dilemma. Heavy concrete hauler? Fold napkins in nouveau Italian-Chinese restaurant specializing in pizza and light salads? Or challenge the fates? 8:00 AM. I stand on the roof of Midland City's tallest skyscraper, four dizzy stories high. I hurl a challenge to the fates. This is the winged warrior, fates. I shall go on fighting crime and/or evil. I don't care that my bad cholesterol is bad, that-- Suddenly, a black cloud forms swiftly in the sky, and I hear-- OK, do what you want. We'll try to be there for you. But watch the fatty foods, the cookies, the ice cream, and good luck to you. Who is that? One of the fates. Which one? Frank. Phyllis, Fran and Fred are in Las Vegas. God bless them, they should only win and be well. OK. Well, fine. I'll just carry on, then. OK. Listen, could you change that mask you're wearing now? It's very ugly and could scare kids and small animals. Thank you very much. Right. And at that moment, I knew fate was blind, and I, the famous fowl, would have the last laugh. For you see, I wasn't wearing a mask. Well, what has the winged warrior gotten himself into here? Can he actually stop time by challenging the fates? And is it Frank Fate he's talking to or Georgie Jessel? And another thing, doesn't that nouveau Italian-Chinese restaurant sound super-trendy? Be listening tomorrow for another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crimefighter the world has ever known. Bock bock bock bock! Chickenman. He's everywhere, he's everywhere! Well, "Chickenman Challenges a Fate Named Frank" was recorded at Dick Orkin's radio ranch in Hollywood, California. Along with Dick Orkin, the cast included Charlie Brill, Allison Anne Martin, Miriam Flynn, and Jim Gallant. Engineers Elizabeth Lane and James Burns. Written by Dick Orkin and Christine Coyle. Ms. Flynn's hairstyle by Mr. Bunny. The show is produced by Dolores Wilber, Nancy Updike, Peter Clowney, Alix Spiegel and myself. Contributing editors Margi Rochlin, Paul Tough, and Jack Hitt. Many songs in tonight's program were provided by Mr. Steve Cushing and the Blues Before Sunrise Radio Network. Our program comes to you from WBEZ Chicago. Our address, 848 East Grand Avenue, Navy Pier, Chicago, 60611. Our email address, oh why don't you write us, [email protected] That's [email protected] And finally, thanks to the Mattoon family, Ashley, Lynn, Duki, Yona Lu, and of course, Danielle. I just want a real person who's like Duki, probably. I want to go marry some guy who's like Duki. And how's that search going? Not well. I'm Ira Glass. See you next week, same chicken time, same chicken channel. Same brave little radio station. Ira? Hmm? Don't make me sound like an idiot, OK? Done.
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So Paul, let's begin this week's show this way. I want you to explain to me everything you had to go through in order to see the movie Independence Day. I had to get something to eat. I had to get not only a Coke, but also a juice from somewhere outside of the movie theater and not open it up. I didn't want to have it open. I wanted to have it sealed and have a straw with a paper straw cover around it. Had to sit on the aisle. Had to leave the theater during the previews, and then come back in just as the movie was about to start. Had to wash my hands a couple of times, of course, just in case I had to operate or anything. Happens a lot in your modern theatres. Who's already scrubbed? [LAUGHS] I've sort of known that I had certain little quirks sometimes when I was watching a movie or really doing anything. But for some reason, I just realized it was going a little too far, that these rituals that I'd developed were just a little bit out of control. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, we choose a topic, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories, documentaries, radio monologues, short stories, found tape, anything we can think of. Today's program, what happens when a little idea becomes a compulsion? What happens when it starts to control you? Our program today in four acts, four different stories. And joining me for this hour is Paul Tough, who actually holds a job. Doesn't just go to theaters freaking out his fellow patrons. Paul Tough, an editor at Harper's magazine in New York and a contributing editor to our show as well. Paul has been thinking and talking to a lot of people about this subject of small obsessions and compulsions. And can I just say that your story in the movie theatre-- I mean, those are pretty small things. I mean, all those things seem pretty innocent. They are, they are. I mean, none of them are really out of control. I guess one of the reasons they sort of hit me is just because I've been thinking about this a lot. And what struck me about it was that feeling, where suddenly you think, this could become a lot worse. I mean, there are people-- well, OK, I was washing my hands a couple of times before a movie. The movie theaters are kind of dirty places. But there are people out there who wash their hands hundreds of times a day. And what separates me from that person? A couple hundred times. Exactly. There's a numeric number we can assign to that difference. But I had this feeling there in the movie theater that it could happen at any point. So Paul, among these cavalcade of stories that you've brought in to play for us over the course of the hour about obsession, I know that some of them are serious and some of them are lighter. What do you want to start with? One of the first people that I talked to is actually someone that I know really well, an ex-girlfriend of mine named Jillian. And what I wanted to talk to her about was her obsession with the number two. When she was a kid, just like any kid, she had a favorite number, a favorite color. And her favorite number was two. But it became a lot bigger than that. So I started being very preoccupied with doing things twice. If I, for example, dropped keys, I would then lean down and pick them up. But before I actually picked them up, I would probably drop them again. Like really close to the floor so no one would quite know what I was doing. But I'd be very aware that I was fulfilling some sort of two obligation. Her obligations weren't all-consuming, but they were somewhat laborious. At the dinner table or in class, she'd say something, and then she'd have to repeat it under her breath to make it two. If she made a phone call and the person that she was calling wasn't there, she'd have to let the phone ring an even number of times. She started to see the whole world as being divided into things that were even, things that were on the side of two, and things that were odd. My favorite color was blue, and I also had this fantasy that blue was basically an even color. So it all seemed to fit in. But yellow seemed much more odd to me. And red seemed odd to me. And brown seemed even. Black seemed odd. This doesn't resonate at all with you? Well, I can see blue being even. Tell me a little bit more about the other associations with two. Like you talked about-- I think you told me once that days of the week were as well? Yeah, days. Both Sunday and Monday seem even to me. But I don't like them as days at all. I much prefer Tuesdays and Thursdays, which seem odd. I mean, days are weird. Monday, Wednesday seems pretty even to me. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday all seem odd. I've got to say, I see it totally differently. You do? Yeah. I see Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays as even, and all the others as odd. I mean Tuesday, first of all-- it kind of goes without saying. The thing about an obsession like Jillian's is that it can grow to the point where it's not just this game in your head. It can start to really control your behavior. And that's a problem, because that's when people start to notice. Jillian, for instance, she not only had a thing with the number two, she also had a deal with symmetry, where things had to be really symmetrical in terms of her body. If she would touch her left ear, then she would have touch her right ear. Things would have to be very even. The big symmetry thing that I can remember is going to a Broadway show with my family. And I had this sense that it didn't feel quite right to just clap with my hands. And so, I developed this thing about clapping with my elbows, with this idea that somehow that would produce a more symmetrical experience. And so, I would clap with my hands, and then clap with my elbows, and then maybe even clap with the entire hand and elbow. And I can remember just sitting there and someone turning to me and saying, what are you doing? What are you doing with your elbows? And thinking like, this is not normal. What I want to ask you about is the relationship between the two thing and other people in your life. And I just sort of remember that there were times when you and I were going out where I would get really mad about the two thing. I mean, do you remember those times when I would get mad about twos? Yeah. But I always felt like your irritation about it was just irrational. I mean, for example, it used to come up a lot with the alarm clock, right? Like, I set my alarm clock usually for 8:02. If I need a little more sleep, then it's 8:12 or 8:22. I don't really like 8:32, but I'll do that. But so, when I used to want to set the alarm clock for 8:02, and you would object and want to set it-- I mean, first of all, sometimes you would object. You would just want to set it for 8:03, which was just pure malice on your part. Like, obviously, I'm not going to be happy if the alarm clock is set for 8:03. I mean, what would you really care if I set the alarm clock for 8:02? Well, I actually remember that the minute we started talking about it. I actually remember what made me mad about not being able to set the clock for 8:01. Because it is about unnecessarily cluttering your life with things. Spending extra time piling stuff onto your good mood or bad mood just seems totally unnecessary. But you only think about it as piling stuff if it's something that really feels like an obligation. Which the two thing is in a certain way, but it's also just something that you like, or that I like. But that's not what would bother me about it. It wasn't just that you would say, oh, 8:02. Oh, you set it for 8:02. That's great. That's going to be fun. It was like, if it was 8:01, you'd go nuts. It wasn't just-- That's because I realized it was coming out of a sadistic impulse in you. Well, if I just happened to be fast-forwarding through the 24 hours, and then I'd drop it around-- No, you would never just happen to set it 8:01. You would set it and there'd be something very sinister about your setting the alarm clock. It only became sinister after I had already felt like you were overdoing it. Is this really the place to rehearse this? I mean, there is a way in which I'm addicted to the two thing. And in a way, that's almost as powerful as any other physical addiction. And that doesn't bother you? No. I think that I actually kind of like it. I mean, I think I like having that kind of order in my life and having routine. When you would drop the keys and pick them up again, you'd do that sort of quietly, right? So that other people wouldn't think you were doing that? Well, I mean, I was clued in enough to know that people would think it would be kind of weird. Your average Joe is not going to be that sympathetic to someone who has an obsession with the number two. Although I do think-- the more I talk to people-- I do think people have variations of these things. You talked about it about being a continuum. And on the one side of the continuum, would be the people who you might just label as quirky. And the other side of the continuum would be the people who might have to start taking Prozac, right? And I think-- yeah, I think most people are on the continuum. Paul? I mean, sure most people are on the continuum, but that doesn't explain why one particular person-- why Jillian-- would end up with such an extreme set of beliefs and practices and someone else would end up with fewer. Why do you think that she ended up at the point where she is on the continuum? We talked about it a lot. And I don't think either one of us really came up with a definite answer. The one thing I kept thinking about though is, to me, obsessions can sometimes take the place of religion in people's lives. An organized religion gives you certain rules, certain rituals, by which to live your life. Things will be orderly if you follow those rules. And if you grow up in a nonreligious environment, maybe you start creating those rules for yourself. You grew up in a pretty atheist household, right? Yes. So do you think that maybe people who grew up in that sort of household, where there weren't a lot of sets of rituals and where it was sort of a hyper-rational household-- you know what I mean? There's no religion. There's two psychologists as parents, who both basically believe that everything can be figured out. But both you-- and I think your siblings too-- have this tendency towards magical thinking. But my siblings and stuff, I don't think they really experienced-- I could imagine that it is a kind of substitute. But if is, then it was pretty specific to me. What about [? Elena ?] and the rubber bands? What do you know about [? Elena ?] and the rubber bands? I know that she wore rubber bands around her arm every day for a couple of years or something. And do you know why she wore them? No. I don't know either. I think she wore them-- I mean, she wore a lot of rubber bands. She didn't just wear them around her arm. She wore big rubber bands around her neck too. [LAUGHS] She had lots of rubber bands all the time. And I think she also carried paperclips in her pockets. And that's a hyper-rational thing, your family-- I think if you go into any house though, you'll find these kind of things. My mother used to say that having four kids expanded her idea of the normal. Like, what the normal could entail. So Paul, so what else do we have coming up? Well, I've gathered another few stories about obsession. The next one is a little bit further down that continuum. This is one with somewhat more serious consequences. Act Two, Further Out. Ira, the thing that's I think a little scary about these compulsions, even the ones that are pretty innocent like Jillian's, is that you feel when you've got them that something else is controlling you. And so, that makes you think that you could just suddenly go over the edge, just because you're out of control. There's a sense that something else is writing the rules. So explain what you've got for us next. Well, this is a story of someone who did go over the edge-- for awhile, anyway. It's by a woman named Lauren Slater, who was a psychologist in Boston. And this is an excerpt from a book that's going to be published soon, which is tentatively titled Black Swans. And one thing that's really interesting to me about Lauren, especially after having talked to Jillian, is that they sort of started in the same place. As a child, Lauren did a lot of the same compulsive things that Jillian did, had a lot of the same superstitious beliefs and fears. When she walked through a door, she had to tap the frame three times. When she said her prayers at night, between each prayer, she thought she had to close her eyes and then count to 10 and 1/2. But at some point, it went further than that. There is something satisfying and scary about making an angel, lowering your bulky body into the drowning fluff, stray flakes landing on your face. I am seven or eight, and the sky looms above me, gray and dead. I move my arms and legs, expanding, contracting, sculpting snow before it can swallow me up. I register a mistake on my angel, what looks like a thumb print on its left wing. I reach down to erase it, but am unable to smooth the snow perfectly. So I start again on another angel, lowering myself, swishing and sweeping, rolling over. No, yet another mistake. This time, the symmetry in the wing span is wrong. A compulsion comes over me. I do it again and again. In my memory, hours go by. My fingers inside my mittens get wrinkled and raw. My breath comes heavily and the snow begins to blue. A moon rises, a perfect crescent curl whose precise shape I will never be able to recreate. I ache for something I cannot name. Someone calls me. Come in now, come in now. Very early the next morning, I awaken, look out my bedroom window, and see the yard covered with my frantic forms. Hundreds of angels, none of them quite right. The forms twist and strain, the wings seeming to struggle up in the winter sun, as if each angel were longing for escape, for a free flight that might crack the crystal and ice of our still, stiff world. Looking back on it now, I think maybe those moments in the snow were when my OCD began, although it didn't come to me full-fledged until my mid-20s. OCD stands for obsessive compulsive disorder, and some studies say over three million Americans suffer from it. Some mental health professionals claim that the onset of obsession is a response to an underlying fear-- a recent trauma, say, or a loss. I don't believe that that is always true. Because no matter how hard I think about it, I remember nothing unusual or disorienting before my first attack. I don't know exactly why at 2 o'clock one Saturday afternoon what felt like a seizure shook me. I recall lying on the floor in my apartment in Cambridge. I was immersed in a book, The Seven Storey Mountain, walking my way through the tale's church. A monk moaned. And suddenly this, a thought careening across my cortex, I can't concentrate. Of course, the thought disturbed my concentration, and the monk's moan turned into a whisper, disappeared. I blinked, looked up from the book. The floor suddenly frightened me. Between the planks, I could see lines of dark dirt and the sway of a spider crawling. Let me get back, I thought, into the world of the book. I lowered my eyes to the page, but instead of being able to see the print, there was the thought blocking out all else-- I can't concentrate. Now I started to panic. Each time I tried to get back to the book, the words crumbled, lost their shapes. I said to myself, I must not allow that thought about concentration to come into my mind anymore. But of course the more I tried to suppress it, the louder it jangled. I looked at my hand. I ached for its familiar skin. But as I held it out, the sentence, I can't concentrate on my hand, blocked out my hand. So all I saw was a blur of flesh. I tried to force my brain onto other topics, but with each mental dodge, I became aware that I was dodging. And each time I itched, I became aware that I was itching. And with each inhalation, I became aware that I was inhaling. And I thought, if I think too much about breathing, will I forget how to breathe? Say "God I'm sorry" 14 times I ordered myself. This is crazy, I said to myself. 15 times, a voice from somewhere else commanded. In the days after my attack, obsessive thoughts returned. What before had been inconsequential behaviors, like counting to three before I went through a doorway or checking the stove several times before bed, now became imperatives. There were a thousand and one of them to follow. Rules about how to step, what it meant to touch my mouth, a hot consuming urge to fix the crooked angles of the universe. It was constant, a cruel nattering. There, that tilted picture on the wall. Scratch your head with your left hand only. It was noise, the beak of a woodpecker in the soft bark of my brain. I did very little for the next year. I didn't want to go out, because any movement might set off a cycle of obsessions. I sat hunched and lost weight. Fear and grief prevented me from eating much. When I was too terrified to get out of bed, I checked into the local hospital, where I lay amidst IV drips, bags of blood, murmuring heart machines that let me know someone somewhere near was still alive. Then one day, my doctor said to me, there's a new medication called Prozac still in its trial period, but it's 70% effective with OCD. I want to send you to a Doctor Vuckovic. He's one of the physicians doing trial runs. I shrugged, willing to try. I'd tried so much, surely this couldn't hurt. I didn't expect much, though. I certainly didn't expect what I finally got. The pads of paper on Vuckovic's desk are all edged in green and white with the word "Prozac" scripted across the bottom. The pen has "Prozac" embossed in tiny letters. He asks me about my symptoms for a few minutes, and then uses the Prozac pen to write out a prescription. After a couple of days of nausea and headaches, the Prozac began to work its magic. One morning, I woke up and waited for a command. Touch your nose. Blink 12 times. Try not to think about concentrating. The imperatives came. I could hear them, but from far away, like birds beyond a mountain, a sound nearly silent and easy to ignore. By the fourth day, I felt so shockingly fine that I called Doctor Vuckovic. I believed he had saved me. "I'm well," I told him. "Not yet. It takes at least a month to build up the therapeutic blood level." "No," I said. "It doesn't." I felt rushing enjoy. "The medicine you gave me has made me well. I've actually never felt better." A pause on the line. "I suppose it could be possible." "Yes," I said. "It's happened." Coming up, the chemistry of obsession. Prozac stops working for Lauren Slater, a beaded kitchen, and more, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And co-hosting with me for this hour is Paul Tough, one of our contributing editors. And he has assembled a number of stories about obsession. And right now, we're in the middle of a story by Lauren Slater. And she found herself seized by obsessions, hearing voices that paralyzed her. And then nearly overnight, she found herself cured by Prozac. How could a drug change my mind so abruptly? My brain wasn't wet clay and paste, as all good brains should be, but a glinting thing crossed with wires. I wasn't human, but machine. No. I wasn't machine, but animal, linked to my electrified biology more completely than I could have imagined. We have come to think lately of machines and animals, of machines and nature, as occupying opposite sides of the spectrum. There is IBM, and then there's the lake. But really, they are so similar. A computer goes on when you push its button. A gazelle goes on when it sees a lynx. Only humans are supposedly different, above the pure cause and effect of the hard-wired primitive world. Free will and all. But no, maybe not. For I had swallowed a pill designed through technology. And in doing so, I was discovering myself embedded in an animal world. I was a purely chemical being, mood and personality seeping through serotonin. We are all taught to believe it's true. But how strange to feel that supposed truth bubbling right in your own tweaked brain pan. Mornings now, I got up early to jog, showered efficiently, then strode off to the library. I was able to go back to work, cutting deli part time at Formaggio's while I prepared myself for divinity school the next year by reading. I read with an appetite, hungry from all the time I'd lost to illness. The pages of the book seemed very white. The words were easy, black beads shining, ebony in my quieted mind. Then one day, as though I'd never swallowed a Prozac pill, my mind seized and clamped and the obsessions were back. I was staying with a family in Appalachia in Kentucky on an oral history project. During my interview with Kat, the mother, I decided to take a break in the sandy yard. It was almost 100 degrees. Chickens screamed and pecked. In one swift and seamless move, Pat's husband, Lonny, reached down to grab a bird. He laid it down on a stump, raised an ax, and cut. The body did its dance. Blood spilled. I ran inside. I took a step forward and then said to myself, don't take another step until you count to 25. After I'd satisfied that imperative, I had to count to 25 again, and then halve 25, and then quarter it, before I felt safe enough to walk out the door. By the end of the day, each step took over 10 minutes to complete. I stopped taking steps. I sat on my bed. "What's wrong with you?" Kat said. "Come out here and talk with us." I tried, but I got stuck in the doorway. There was a point above the doorway I just had to see, and then see again. And inside of me, something screamed, back again, back again. The next morning, a Sunday, Kat told me, "You'll feel better if you come to church with us." She peered into my face, which must have been white and drawn. "Are you suffering from some city sickness?" "Come to church," Kat said. "We can ask the preacher to pray for you." But I didn't believe in prayer where my illness was concerned. I'd come to think that whatever was wrong with me had a simplistic chemical cause. I woke late one night, fists clenched. It took me an hour to get out of bed, so many numbers I had to do. But I was determined. And then I was walking outside, pushing past the need to count before every step. I'd passed midnight fields, a single shack with lighted windows. Cows slept in a pasture. I rounded the pasture, walked up a hill. And then before me, spreading out in moonlight, a lake. I stood by its lip. My mind was buzzing and jerking. I don't know at what point the swans appeared. White swans, they must've been. But in silhouette, they looked black. And they seemed to materialize straight out of the water. They rose to the surface as memories rise to the surface of consciousness. Hundreds of black swans, suddenly floating absolutely silent. And as I stood there, the counting seized, my mind became silent, and I watched. The swans drifted until it seemed for a few moments that they were inside of me. Seven dark silent birds, 14 princesses, a single self swimming in a tepid sea. I don't know how long I stood there, or when exactly I left. The swans disappeared eventually. The counting, ticking, talking of my mind resumed. Still, even in shattering illness, I had been quieted for a bit. Doors in me had opened. Elegance had entered. This thought calmed me. I was not completely claimed by illness. Nor was I a prisoner of Prozac, entirely dependent on the medication to function. Part of me was still free, a private space not absolutely permeated by pain. A space I could learn to cultivate. It is a smaller space than I would have wished for myself. Even after I raised my dose, the Prozac never worked as well as it once had. And years later, I am sometimes sad about that. Other times, strangely relieved, even though my brain is hounded. I still must check my keys, the stove. I must pause many times while I write this and do a ritual count to 30. It's distracting to say the least. But still, I write this. I can walk, and talk, and play. I've come to live my life in those brief stretches of silence that arrive throughout the day. I am learning something about the single moment. How rife with potential it is. How truly loud its tick. Lauren Slater is a psychologist and writer in Boston. This story is excerpted from her upcoming book, Black Swans. And also, Paul, you guys are going publish this in Harper's in September, right? That's right. OK. Lauren Slater's also the author of Welcome to my Country, which is published this year by Random House. Act Three, Sacred Versus Profane. I'm Ira Glass, here with Paul Tough. Paul, welcome back. Thank you, Ira. And Paul is one of the contributing editors to our program, also a writer and a senior editor at Harper's magazine. Each week in our program, of course, we choose a theme and do a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. And Paul, you have been gathering the stories for this week's show. And the theme is, those who just are tuning in-- We're talking about obsession, and the compulsions and rituals that go along with it. So you have kind of a meta-obsession going. Sort of an obsession with obsessions. Exactly. I'm obsessed with the obsessed of all sorts. At least for the purposes of this hour. And as you've been putting this show together over the last few weeks, you've been saying that these kinds of compulsions that we're hearing about share a lot with religion. Yeah. I think there are certain similarities. And I think that just as religions can help people sort of find order in a chaotic world, some of these rituals that people create for themselves do the same thing. This reminded me-- when we've talked about this-- this reminded me of something that I learned in Hebrew school as a kid. Let me get some music going there. [MUSIC PLAYING] There we go. This music was always playing when I was a child, Paul. in the schtiebl in Baltimore. This is the Glass household, pretty much. Anyway, what it reminded me of is this thing that I learned that in traditional Judaism-- and you'll still see very religious Jews do this. That in that kind of Judaism, nearly every act of human life is accompanied by some kind of ritual, or a thanks to God, or a prayer, including putting on clothes, washing your hands, using the bathroom, strict rules about what you can eat and how you eat it. You know, the Kosher laws. Rules on covering the head. A religious Jew kisses the mezuzah on the door frames in his own home when he enters and leaves a room. Plus all sorts of prayers and blessings. If we hear lightning, there's a blessing for that. If we see thunder, there's a blessing for that. If we hear bad news during the day, there's a blessing to bless the true judge. If we hear good news, depending on what type of good news, we might say, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. This is Mayer Silber, 35 years old, father of three, a member of the Chabad Hasidic Community here in Chicago. He's a litigator for the local district council of the IRS. He was gracious enough to come in and talk to me about the similarities and differences between the hundred rituals that he does as a religious Jew every day, and the more secular rituals that you've been talking about, the people you've interviewed, Paul, have been talking about over the course of the hour so far. And when he came in, I described a bunch of these kind of daily compulsive rituals to him. Jillian's having to do things in twos-- dropping her car keys and then having to drop them a second time. Or Lauren Slater's having to count to 30 every now and then before she can allow herself to move forward in any task. And Mayer Silber said, really, he only sees one similarity between what they're doing and what he does. I would only say that it's just the capability to be devout to something. I think maybe we should go onto the differences from there. And I guess it sounds like, the way you described them, and I may be wrong, that these people are imprisoned by certain actions. I don't feel imprisoned. I don't feel compelled to say, oh, I can't be in a car from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. I look at it as freedom. One interesting difference between Mayer and the people who we've heard about so far in the program is that when Mayer goes through his daily rituals-- when any religious person, I guess, goes through their daily rituals-- it connects him to a tradition, to the Bible, to the Torah, to his family, to his people. Whereas the people who we've heard in the show up 'til now, when they go through the day with their very obsessive rituals, it doesn't connect them to anyone else. Their path is just a lot more lonely. Do you obey the Commandments our of fear that something bad will happen if you don't? I would say that I do. Yes. To be honest. What's the bad thing that would happen? What's the bad thing that would happen? Yeah. Oh, I guess maybe it's the fear of not knowing. The fear of not belonging. Sort of like this abandonment, that maybe with my abandonment of God, God would abandon me. And I would be alone. And I'd be responsible for myself. Where here I feel like if I can go and do the things that God wants, God is with me. Ira, one thing that I find kind of interesting is that even though Mayer is describing how different he is from Jillian, say, I think there are a lot of similarities between how they see their worlds. I think that, especially when he was talking about his fears, I think Jillian's are a lot the same way. It's not that she's terrified of the number two. But she-- She's not afraid of the wrath of two. Just like he's not afraid of the wrath of God coming down on him if he doesn't obey the Commandments. But I think that she feels like it's kind of a dangerous world, and it helps to have something on her side. In her case, it's the number two. I think just like he said that he'd feel sort of lonely or separated if he disobeyed God, in the same way I think Jillian would really miss the number two. Act Four, Heroic Obsessions. Now Ira, one thing about the way that we judge obsessions is how successful the person is. I mean, take Michael Jordan. In every way, he's a completely obsessed person. He's obsessed with winning, to what we'd consider to be a really unhealthy degree if he wasn't such a good basketball player. I mean, it's just lucky that he is able to carry the team on his back whenever he needs to and actually win. If not, he'd be up on a freeway overpass somewhere. Right, exactly. If the story of obsession could be subsumed in a larger story of heroism and glory, then the obsession-- nobody even pays attention to it. Right. Well, this leads us to our next two stories here on our show. This is the work of two people who've immersed themselves in their own particular obsessions. And people at home can judge for themselves with what results. This first piece of work is one of the stranger things, I have to say, we've ever put on the show. A guy named Greg Whitehead has been collecting the sound of people screaming-- and their thoughts about the meaning of different kinds of screams-- for years all over the world. He sets up these special phone lines that people call into. He's set up a thing called The Institute of Scream Studies. A scream is often treated as some kind of insurmountable, impenetrable obstacle, pure, white noise force, that is beyond analysis and unworthy of any kind of interpretation. But here at the institute, we hear the scream from entirely the other perspective-- the scream as an opening, as an entry point, as an access point. An entry into a vast interior landscape that has as its surface this highly nuanced, very individual, psycho-acoustic force to it. There's also a scream line, the actual journey that the screamer takes into the interior landscape. And when we established the telephone answering machine here at the institute, we called it the "scream line," because that machine was going to circulate individual scream lines into-- Thank you, Mr. Whitehead. I believe you are on the wrong track. I'm sure if you came to my house, you would hear the screams that you'd never want to hear again. [LOUD SCREAMING] [SCREAMING] Oh, I feel much better now. Thank you. Hi. I'm [? Melia Mangum. ?] I'm eight years old, and here's my scream. [SCREAMING] Bye. The scream-- Hi. It's kind of early in the morning to scream. So I don't think I'll scream, but I'm going to tell you a story. I was thinking about how screams sometimes come later, much later, like a kind of delayed reaction. So this is a true story that happened long ago when I was a teenager. And I was on this train. Like, I'd run away I think with this guy. And we were on this train. And we'd been going for days and nights. And it had got really steamy on this train. And it's kind of a seedy atmosphere. And everybody was playing cards. All the time, playing cards and smoking. And then suddenly, this fight broke out. Like, out of nowhere. First, it was just these sounds. It was, like, really muffled sounds. Bodies colliding and ricocheting down the corridors and stuff. And then these kind of muffled shots. And we pulled the door across our compartment, and this body kind of rolled over, rolled past, stumbled past. And there was blood just smeared all over the glass. And you couldn't see anything because of that. It's like the sounds and the vision, and everything was muffled. But it took hours and hours before we reached the next town, and we're going through this small desert. But when we eventually got there, the train stopped. And there was this scene kind of took place in absolute silence. It was extraordinary. No one seemed to speak. And it was incredibly hot and hazy. And there was just this desert all around. And they took the body off the train. And then the guy who'd killed him was taken off with handcuffs. And these few cops appeared from nowhere. And it was just like this platform in the middle of nowhere. I mean suddenly, out of the silence, this scream came. It was just like something between a wail and a scream. And it's like it just went right through the whole landscape. And it's like the dust sort of settled in the air as the scream kind of just hung there. It just seemed like for ages. I don't know if I can do that scream. I can hear it really, really clearly. I'll try, but I think it won't be like that. Anyway, it was something like this. [SCREAMING] That compendium of screams from Greg Whitehead of the Institute for Scream Studies. He invites your screams and your thoughts about screamings. And if we get together enough of these from around the country, he's going to put together a second compendium of screams for some later show that we'll play. So a little radio experiment. Here is the phone number to call. Call 312-832-3326. Again, 312-832-3326. We're serious about this. Call, scream, and talk about screams. And Paul, while people are dialing-- Well, the next person that I talked to is an artist in San Diego named Liza Lou. And she is another obsessed person who has a heroic narrative of obsession. For five years, she had a ritual that she did every day. She would get up in the morning, get dressed, get ready to go about her day, and then sit down at her studio with tweezers, and white glue, and tens of thousands of tiny little beads. And she would spend the whole day gluing them down into patterns. And at the end of five years, she'd created this amazing work of art. I haven't had much luck describing this work. What does that mean, a beaded kitchen? You imagine a beaded skirt or a beaded top. The best I can do is I can say, this is a three-dimensional room. It's 200 square feet. It's painted. But it's painted with beads that you have to apply with the tweezers one at a time. So it's this amazing amount of color. It's pinks and blues and silvers and golds. Imagine a wood grain counter in your kitchen. Only suddenly, instead of brown wood, it's become golden and yellow and burnt copper. There's a table in the middle of the kitchen with a bright beaded tablecloth. On the table are a plate of pancakes that's beaded, and a cereal box that's beaded, and toast and bacon and a newspaper-- all of them beaded. Behind the table, there are beaded cupboards, a beaded fridge, cookbook, stove. Every surface is covered with tens of thousands of beads. And the effect is one of unbelievable color. The whole place seems like it's plugged in. It's just shining. Nothing's bare. There's even a beaded dustpan on the floor that's filled with beaded dust. The thing about an obsession is you never know where it's going to lead. One minute, you're just a regular person collecting autographs or saving string or trying to keep clean. And then, something just overtakes you. For Liza-- and I think for a lot of people-- you reach a point where it's suddenly not so much fun. It's a job. It's a duty. I didn't think about it. I thought it would take about six months to do when I started. I didn't think it would take so much. I didn't realize it would take my life. It's like falling in love, maybe. It's a form of where you watch you life-- you watch everything else fall away. You lose everything in a sense. For five years, I was in the constant stage of to-do lists. Of stress and pressure, and always feeling like a failure. Because every day you feel as though you've got nothing done. You maybe get five inches of work done-- five inches of an entirely beaded kitchen. So you really felt like a failure every day for five years? It's such a personal problem. I mean, yeah. I always would feel like I didn't get enough done. I never had the feeling of, wow, did I just really do well today. Maybe I'll work an 18-hour day. And then maybe I'll continue to do that for two weeks. So how much time did that take? I don't clock in. How many days in those five years did you not work on it at all? I don't know. I don't know. And I don't know how much it cost me to do it. I don't know. If I knew those answers, I wouldn't do it. Nobody who thinks like that would bead a kitchen. The wall panels were really challenging. Because the curiosity is the thing that motivates me. I'm not patient, I'm curious. So I already knew-- once I had done one wall panel, I knew what it was going to look like. Then I had to do nine more or eight more panels. And then they all get put together. And that was really difficult. I would wonder, god, why am I so depressed? And then, finally, I stood the whole wall up and I realized, my god, no wonder I've been depressed. I've been doing the same pattern for the last three months. She didn't have any grants or patrons when she was working on the kitchen. So to make ends meet, she'd have to sell pieces of her work from time to time. And, of course, the pieces that she'd sell would be beaded. They would be pieces from the kitchen. And in fact, she says that she's probably sold the equivalent of the kitchen. There's sort of another entire kitchen out there in various people's homes. So she'd have to bead in order to buy beads in order to bead. It's one step backward, and then another step forward, hopefully. Hopefully, it would buy two months in the studio-- one sale or two sales. And the problem with my work is that it takes so long. So selling a soup can wouldn't just set me back a day. It would set me back maybe several weeks. For a long time, I resented how hard it was. This didn't seem right. I mean, nobody who works at I. Magnin has to work at I. Magnin in order to then work at I. Magnin. Do you know what I mean? She was living in LA a couple of years ago, and there was an earthquake that almost destroyed the building that her studio was in. I got this phone call in the middle of the night. I had an apartment where basically they were locking the studio out, where you would lose everything. They did this to doctors' offices. They lost all their files. Because once a building is condemned, they lock it out, and you can't get back in. So there was this moment where I didn't know if I was going to lose three years of work. And if I had lost it, if it had gotten locked out, I wondered, would I do it again? Would I make that table again? But thankfully, I had time. We had two hours to get everything. And a bunch of friends came and we just shoved everything. And this work is so fragile. Can you imagine doing this in two hours? But we got everything in the truck. And I ended up moving even further south to San Diego. So did you ever answer that question for yourself, about what you would have done if it was destroyed? Oh, thank god I didn't have to answer that question. The thing is, people think I'm patient. And I'm not patient. I'm tremendously impatient. But I'm very, very curious. Just to point of death, I'm curious. I wanted to know what it would look like to bead a table. That's what got me through it. It's the same pattern. It's a pink and silver and blue pattern, again and again and again and again. But what sustained the interest was, what will it look like when it's finished? So if I had lost the piece, and I knew what it took to do the piece, and I already knew what it looked like, why would I do it again? What would be the motivating factor? Would that be to make it so that you could see it? I'm not sure if that's what motivates me. I'm not sure if the approval of anyone else is what motivates me. If I had known that there would be those kind of sacrifices, I probably wouldn't have done it. But as they came up, it was sort of like, as you cross that road, you decide if you're going to jump over it or if you're going to retreat. And every time, I found that I would jump over it. Life is so-- there's so much chaos. I think that one of the great solutions to dealing with that chaos is to have a mission, to have some kind of purpose. That's sort of the way I deal with why I'm here, is to make every square inch something meaningful. My materials happen to speak of that, because they are so slow and painstaking. And I have all this time to think about purpose, and why am I doing this, and is this a meaningful thing to be doing? Everything has meaning. That's the philosophy of my work. Absolutely everything has meaning if you give it meaning. I had this thing up in my studio. And also it's a loft. So I was having something repaired. And the repairman came inside and was fixing my washer and dryer. And he looked at my kitchen, and it was almost finished. So it was really what you're looking at, just about, maybe minus a tile or too. He put his hands on his hips. He said, neat hobby. [LAUGHS] Liza Lou's kitchen is currently on display in a museum in Minneapolis. And she's working on a beaded backyard, including a million beaded blades of grass. Well, Paul Tough, thank you for co-hosting and sitting here for this hour with me. Well, thank you, Ira. Our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel, Paul Tough, and myself, with Peter Clowney, Nancy Updike, and Dolores Wilber. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. Original vibraphone music today, written and performed by Carrie Biolo. If you would like a copy of this program, it's only $10. Call us to get that at WBEZ in Chicago. The phone number is 312-832-3380. If you want to leave screams, stories about screams, or thoughts about screams for the Institute for Scream Studies, call 312-832-3326, and we will pass those along. Our email address, [email protected] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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In her two years in Baghdad, Hannah Allam lost over 10 close friends. She was dragged from her hotel in the middle of the night by Iraqi police. She was caught in an attack on a shrine. And things got so bad and lasted so long that she called her mom on her cell phone, thinking she might not make it out of there. Then a few weeks ago she took a break from her job as Baghdad bureau chief for the Knight-Ridder Newspapers and game home to the Midwest. What struck me most coming back this time, this is the longest I've spent in the states in two years, and it does not seem to me like this country is at war. I was just in the airport here in Oklahoma-- Will Rogers International Airport-- and I was waiting on a flight, and a female soldier in full camouflage got off a plane and it was clear she had just come from Iraq, and was kind of looking around and people were looking at her as if she had come from Mars. And it struck me that what was going through people's heads was, oh, yeah, there's a war going on. I mean, just that was the looks on their faces. You know, I live in Oklahoma, I go to Walmart, I'm an Okie. I mean, generally, the conversation goes, oh, can I have your zip code. Oh, I live overseas. Where? Baghdad. Oh, Baghdad. Wow. Well, you must be happy it's going so much better there now. And me, stunned silence. And me, mumbling, yeah, yeah, OK. Where do I sign, and getting out of the shop. Right. This is you actually just giving your visa card to somebody and you're like yeah, yeah. I get that comment a lot. And people want so much for it to be going well. Sometimes I just can't bear to tell them that it's horrible, or that I lost so many friends, or whatever. I don't. I don't say it. It's hard though, soldiers are risking their lives, contractors are risking their lives, she and her staff of reporters are risking their lives, and it's not even for something people are paying attention to? Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss has seen some of the same things now that he's back in the states. Here's the commander of Charlie Company 234 armor in Iraq. He was blown off the road by an IED in June 2005. Shrapnel in his legs, arms, and face. He woke up two weeks later at a hospital in the states. He says that Fort Riley in Kansas where he lives, so many people have been sent overseas. It's a military community, there's no escaping the reality of the war. But when I watch the news and even the local news coming out of Topeka, they cover Iraq in the world minute. It's like an aside to what's going on with the wheat report. And I think a lot of people are just kind of getting on with their lives and although they realize there's a war going on, unless it personally affects them, they don't see it as a war like we saw the second world war or even Korea. They see it as more of an over there, but it doesn't apply to them. It doesn't anger me that people don't realize there's a war going on, it disappoints me. So it's hard to explain, but I don't want to get into the crowd that says, you weren't there, you don't understand. It's something that can be explained, just in a lot more detail than you would see in a 60-minute TV show or even an excerpt on the radio. Take the body count. It's been in the news all this week because the number of American soldiers dead in Iraq passed 2,000. The body count, to me is probably the most offensive thing as it scrolls past on headline news or things like that because it's not about what we've lost, it's about what we've done and what those 2,000 people were doing when they were killed. Like myself, what was I doing when I was wounded? I was trying to keep a road open and safe for not just my soldiers, but for the people that travel on it every day. Now that I'm included in the X number of people that have been wounded in Iraq, I'm more than a statistic, and what I did over in Iraq is more than statistics. It seems like every day we hear these numbers and facts come and go, car bombings, more deaths. All really fast, without a lot of explanation. And today on our radio program, we just try to slow down, and understand better one particular number from Iraq, and what it means, really. From WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. In act one of our show we're going to talk about a number and a quick news story that nobody really seemed to take very seriously at the time that it happened and what was really behind it. In act two, the Air Force drops a bombs on the wrong target in Sunni Iraq and accidentally kills 12 people, including children. An army captain has to go apologize and try to make things right. A journalist was with them and recorded this very difficult moment. Act three, what do we do with these numbers anyway? Stay with us. Act one, Truths, Damn Truths, and Statistics. The number we're going to talk about right now is not how many Americans have died in the Iraq war, but how many Iraqis have. The fact is we have no idea how many civilians have died as a result of the war. Nobody counts. Not the military, not the State Department. The Iraqi Ministry of Health for a good while early on in the war, was compiling morgue figures from across the country, and making them public every week. But that practice was stopped. These days, the place that most people go when they need a figure is a privately run, nonprofit website called Iraqbodycount.net. It gets its figures by going through newspaper articles and other press accounts and simply counting the number of people reported dead in those articles. Even the people who started the site and who run it today freely admit that this method gives you a huge undercount. At best it's a minimum. The true number could be much, much higher. One of the producers of our radio show, Alex Blumberg, started looking into all of this. And he found something surprising and disturbing about the death figures, and what we know about them. Here he is. Eveyone will tell you, counting civilian casualties in wartime is hard. First of all, you need to do something called a large-scale mortality study. And second of all, you need to do it in the middle of a war zone. To date in Iraq, there's only been one attempt. It was a Johns Hopkins University Study published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in late October 2004, a couple of days before the US presidential election. It concluded that probably 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war. This figure was astonishingly high. 10 times higher than any casualty estimates at the time. Even today, a year later, with all the extra deaths that have happened in that year, no other estimate comes close. Just this week, the New York Times ran a story based on the Iraq body count website that's estimating civilian casualties at a fraction of that number, just 30,000. Since The Lancet study's figures were so high and the study itself got almost no traction in the press, I remember thinking at the time it came out, that it's probably bogus and slanted. I'm guessing a lot of people, if they even heard about the study, felt the same way. But recently, in trying to figure out how many civilians have died in the war, I've learned more about The Lancet study. And the more I learned about it and the remarkable story of how it was done, the more likely it seems that the 100,000 is actually the best estimate. And if anything, low. Before the Iraq study the main thing I was known for and that I had testified in front of Congress for was documenting how many people had died in the war in the Congo. This is Les Roberts, the lead author on The Lancet study and one of a handful of scientists in the world who could be called, an expert in counting war dead. In the Congo study, he found that 1.7 million civilians had died from the war, a figure cited by Colin Powell when he was secretary of state, and Tony Blair on the floor of the British parliament. Les has also done studies in Burundi, Rwanda, and Sierra Leon. To a guy in Les Robert's line of work, the war in Iraq had a number of unique and interesting things that deserved study. The main thing that distinguished this work was that the military took unprecedented care to avoid civilian casualties. Almost 2/3 of the bombs dropped were precision guided, as compared to just 8% in the first Gulf War, and 0% in World War II. They limited daytime strikes and avoided civilian infrastructure, like power and sewer plants. Compare that to World War II where American forces fire-bombed entire cities as part of the military strategy, killing up to 100,000 people in Tokyo alone, and upwards of half a million civilians in Europe, and you can see why George Bush called the Iraq War one of the most quote, "humane military campaigns in history." But Les knew that often it's not bombs and bullets that kill people in war, it's the other things that happen when society falls apart. Clean water and medical supplies get scarce. In a lot of the studies he did in Africa, diarrhea killed more people than weapons did. Women can't get to the hospital to deliver their babies, so infant mortality rates go up as well. It took Les a long time to get to Iraq and see if the same things were happening there. First, an Iraqi doctor who he'd plan to work with died in an auto accident, another social ill, by the way, that tends to increase during wartime. And then insurgent violence spiked. It wasn't until August of 2004, five months after he'd originally planned to go, that he finally landed in Amman, Jordan. He had $24,000 in foundation money in his pocket, his passport, and a letter of invitation from the Iraqi Ministry of Education. He found a driver, a retired Iraqi army officer named Wahid, who agreed to take him to Baghdad. Problems started at the very first checkpoint, on the border between Jordan and Iraq. Wahid takes my passport, he takes my letter of invitation, and he goes. And he comes out just a few minutes later and he is just terrified. Turns out he bumped into a former friend of his from his military days. And he had pulled out my passport in front of him and his friend just, like, blanched and pushed the passport back into his pocket and said, you have an American here, are you crazy? Don't let anyone see that. Just get the hell out of here and don't let me see you again. You idiot! Fortunately for Les, Wahid was something of a Han Solo figure, an unenthusiastic, but talented smuggler who didn't look for trouble, but didn't run away from it once it found him. He talked his way through that first checkpoint. And we drive up a couple of miles and he pulls off the road behind this abandoned old gas station. And in the upholstery of his car he's got hidden another pair of license plates with a different color. And he's got another registration form to go with those license plates. So quickly, he gets out and he changes his license plates. And he says, look, you must lie down. You must stay hidden. And so I spent the next, whatever, eight hours lying on the floor. And we actually had to go through two extra points where they stopped and looked around in the car and he chatted with folks. And here I am, I'm lying down behind the back seat on the floor. So when they stopped and looked around, you were actually hiding from them? That's right. And were you scared? That's a funny thing. I had consciously made the decision that it was worth trading my life for a chance at getting a realistic estimate of how many Iraqi civilians have died and how they've died, so I was quite at peace with the notion of dying when I went. Les finally made it to Baghdad, where he met for the first time in person, his Iraqi co-researcher, the man with whom he'd be working for the next month. His name was Riyadh Lafta and he was a doctor of community medicine at Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Riyadh had hired a team of researchers, mostly doctors from his university. All of them native Iraqis, but fluent in English. Let's pause here a moment to talk about their methodology. Because when their study came out later, a lot of people wanted to believe that it was flawed or biased. In fact, the survey team used a standard methodology for measuring health and mortality over a geographic area. It's called a cluster sample survey and it works like this. Using the most recent census figures available in Iraq, the team made what was essentially, a map of the population. They then used a random number generator to pick 33 points on that map. Baghdad was the biggest population center, so it got several points by itself. But the other points were spread all over the country, from the Kurdish north to the Shiite south, from small towns to big cities. Once they'd picked a town though, the team still had to figure out who to interview there. Here again, they worked hard to leave everything to chance. Using GPS units, they would drive around the outskirts of the town and store the coordinates, creating a rough outline of the town border. They would then generate a random point within that border, drive to it, and interview the 30 nearest households. It was such a commitment to random sampling that the first few times the team did it, even the researchers Les and Riyadh were working with, found it obsessive. It was very annoying to them because here they are in the car. They're out, they're feeling like they're at risk. And they'd be driving around for a long time to get to the extremes of a city and draw their map before they interviewed the first house. They're like driving around and not getting any work done they felt. And this is all just to make it as scientifically valid as possible, right? This is a way of picking houses without any sort of preference for safe neighborhoods, dangerous neighborhoods, near the highway, far from the highway. It was a way of sort of transcending human laziness so that, in essence, every household in Iraq had an equal chance we would visit them. And that is, in essence, the definition of random. The survey went smoothly, at least for the first couple of days. People, it turned out, were much more willing to answer questions. Even to provide death certificates as verification, than the researchers had initially thought they'd be. In fact, the trouble, when it came, came from Les himself. Must be about the fifth day I was out with them, the eighth cluster I attended. I, and two of the interviewers were up in a town to the north called Balad. And there was a huge picture of the cleric Sadr as you rolled into Balad. So clearly, it was an anti-coalition city in a big way. Sadr of Sadr militia? Of the Sadr militia, that's right. And as fate would have it, the first or the second door they knocked on was the governor's house. And so somebody calls the police. Les watched from the car as the police took the two researchers-- both doctors, one a dignified man in his 50s and the other a single mother-- and drove them away. He was terrified that somehow the police would find out that they were working with him, an American. But he could do nothing but sit in the parked car and hope no one discovered him. I had done everything I could to be invisible. I wore boring Iraqi clothing. I had dyed my hair black. I had grown a beard, so I would look right. But it still didn't look right. They had made up a fake business card that said, Dr. Abdul Salaam. That I was from Bosnia because that would explain me being blue-eyed, non-Arabic speaking. But I could still be a Muslim and that would make me OK. I was just so worried that us sitting there for an exorbitant length of time would draw attention that I put the back of the passenger seat down and I sort of laid on my side to pretend I was asleep, so I wouldn't have to speak to anyone if anyone came to the window of the car. And I had probably been lying on my side for about 20, 30 minutes and these two little kids, they might have been 10, they came up to the window beside where I was, they stuck their head in the car, they looked around, and I'm pretending to be asleep. And they said to me, in English, hello mister. And you know, even with my eyes closed pretending to be asleep, there's just no way I could pretend I was an Iraqi. And there was no way around it, so that was a pretty just horrifying experience all around. And I'm wondering have I gotten these two lovely interviewers arrested or killed? And after an hour or a little more, a car brought back the two interviewers and they went right back to work. They didn't come to the car. They didn't look at us. They didn't acknowledge us. They just went right back to work and finished out the 30 houses randomly picked in that neighborhood and off we went. But after that day, no interviewer ever spoke to me again. Not in person. Riyadh and Les decided that for everyone's safety, he should lay as low as possible. So for the next 16 days straight he didn't leave his hotel. To pass the time he crunched the numbers that the survey teams were calling into him every night. The surveyors were getting basically two pieces of information from each household. How many people in that household had died in the 14 months before the invasion, and of what, and when? And how many had died in the 17 months after the invasion, and of what, and when? By the time the teams had completed their 32nd out of 33 clusters, over 900 households, and over 7,000 people, the results were pretty shocking. The death rate itself had gone up about 60%. Large increase, but one that Les had expected from his other surveys. The shocker was how people were dying. For the first time in any of his surveys, the leading cause of death wasn't disease, it was bombs and bullets. In the 32 of the 33 clusters sampled, 21 people died of violence, as compared to just 1 violent death in the period before the war. There was a second shocker. Of those 21, 2 people died in firefights where it was unclear where the bullet came from. 3 were killed by insurgents or Saddam loyalists. 7 died from criminal violence, carjackings, revenge killings, that sort of thing. And the biggest number, 9, were killed by the American-led coalition. I just didn't expect violence from the coalition to have dominated the causes of death in Iraq. In no way reading the New York Times and listening to National Public Radio would I have believed that the coalition killed far, far, far more people than did the insurgents setting off car bombs. I should mention that only three of them involved guys with guns. All the rest were helicopter gunships and bombs from planes, so it's not about individual soldiers doing bad things. In fact, two of those three cases when soldiers shot civilians with their guns, they actually went to the houses of the decedents and apologized to the families. There's no evidence here of soldiers running amok. There's evidence here of a style of engagement that probably has relied very heavily on air power that has resulted in a lot of civilian deaths. I was at a presentation last November and a Pentagon spokesperson said that they've dropped about 50,000 bombs in Iraq. 50,000 bombs. Very, very small fraction of them would need to miss their target or be based on bad information to explain 100,000 civilian deaths. At the end of three weeks, there was only one more cluster to survey. The team had saved it for the end because it was the most dangerous one: Fallujah. Remember, this is September 2004, insurgents control the city and it's basically under siege from the coalition. They're shelling it regularly. It just seems crazy to go there. And I said to Riyadh, Riyadh, we have been to 32 of our 33 picked neighborhoods. We actually only thought in the end we would get to 30. We had aimed for 30 and picked 33 with the thought that 10% of places would be too unstable for us to get to. So we've done better than we expected. We have a terrible story to tell, the mortality is way up. Whatever you find in Fallujah is not going to change the story. Think of what we're going to gain. We're going to gain nothing. And he said, God picked those random locations. God wants me to do this work. I must do this. And we went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and-- I was brought up Catholic, and I had never really thought about it or understood it until that moment in time. But in my head, I actually sort of build up a weight. What's the likelihood of something bad going to happen to these guys, and how bad is that? What's the likelihood of something good coming from what they do? And how good is that? And I sort of put a weight on each of them and as I spoke with Riyadh, he actually did not have the capacity to do that. Because for him, doing God's will and this work were inseparable. He couldn't separate out risk because that was separating out sort of faith. The more we spoke, the more I understood that on some very, very fundamental level that we couldn't communicate with each other about our motives here. And in the end, he went. Only one other interviewer agreed to go to Fallujah with Riyadh, a doctor who had relatives there he wanted to check up on. Their car was stopped three times on the way into the city. Heading to their random spot, they saw devastation everywhere. Houses were bombed, rubble lay in the streets. The block they stopped on was no different. They had to visit 52 households to get the requisite number of interviews. 23 homes were either temporarily or permanently abandoned. Neighbors said that in the abandoned houses, most people had died. But this data couldn't be substantiated, so it wasn't even included in the survey results. In the 30 households they did survey, there were 53 deaths. 52 of these were violent deaths, all but one caused by coalition weapons. 24 of the people killed by coalition bombs and bullets were children under 12 years old. And with that, the survey was over. Five days and counting, tonight the newest polls, the latest trends, and breaking developments from the campaign trail on America's News Live. This is Fox Evening News October 28, 2004, on the day the results of Les' survey that just shy of 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war were released. Les had not even considered the Fallujah data in coming up with this number. Fallujah had so many deaths, it was too much of a statistical outlier to even include. Fox never mentioned the study, neither did ABC or CBS. The only national network that carried the story was NBC for 21 seconds. Tom, thanks, and we begin here with Iraq Watch tonight and one measure of the high cost of war. A new study from Johns Hopkins University estimates that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the start of the war. The majority as a result of US air strikes. This is a much larger figure than some previous estimates. The Pentagon had no comment on the number, but said it had taken great care to prevent civilian deaths. And there is word-- Morning Edition and All things Considered on NPR, devoted 45 seconds to the story. And it didn't make the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any national newspaper. The Iraq study had provided information about the war that up until that point, no one had been able to provide. The number it gave was much higher than anyone would have expected. It was just as accurate as Les' previous studies in Africa that he'd done using the exact same methods and which were widely reported in the press and quoted by lawmakers. His Congo study was page one in the New York Times. The only differences with the study were that he'd risked his life to do it and it was about Iraq. Which, if anything, should have made it more interesting to the media. So why didn't it get any press? Partly, it was the timing. The study came out five days before the US election, and so the media was pretty preoccupied. Plus, there was a suspicion that the team had timed the release of the survey specifically to influence the election, a suspicion that Les didn't really help dispel. He said to an AP reporter about the study quote, "I emailed it on September 30 under the condition that it come out before the election. My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was, that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq. I was opposed to the war and I still think the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives. As an American, I'm really, really sorry to be reporting this." One desk editor at a national news organization told me that when the study came out he sent an email to one of his colleagues saying, "The Lancet had in the past, published some studies with a political slant, but that this study seemed sound and maybe they should report on it." Then he saw Les' comments and he didn't follow up. This is exactly the type of story that those who believe the media has a liberal bias love to pounce on. And so, in essence, if the research turns out to be flawed, this desk editor's organization gets the heat for it. He had a very small window of time during a very busy news cycle to decide whether the study was legit or just an angry and easily debunked researcher pushing an agenda. And Les' comments seemed to be all the evidence he needed. And there was one other thing that made it easy for the media to dismiss the report. A researcher at Human Rights Watch, who himself had done studies of civilian casualties during wartime said he didn't believe the study. The researcher's name was Marc Garlasco, and he told a reporter for the Washington Post quote, "The number seems high to me." And quote, "It seems like a stretch." I was actually on the Long Island Railroad when he called me. It was sometime in the evening and I had yet to read Les' report. This is Marc Garlasco. He said he told the reporter from the Post that he hadn't read the study, but the reporter said he really needed a quote and could he just respond to the number. Garlasco's quote was cited elsewhere and he appeared on CNN, although none of the study's authors were interviewed on CNN, or any of the major networks. Here's what Marc Garlasco says now. First of all, I'm not a statistician. I know absolutely nothing about it. And when I then went and spoke to statisticians they said, well, the method that he's using is a really accurate one. This is something that we use in studies all throughout the world and it's a generally accepted model. That kind of made me think about it. Think about my prejudices going into reading his report because I had been on the ground in Iraq immediately after the war. But I also had taken part in the targeting for the war. OK, let's just stop here for one minute. You heard what he said. He'd taken part in the targeting for the war. Get ready, because this story's about to take a turn. Marc Garlasco isn't your typical human rights advocate. Well, I worked in the Pentagon almost seven years, and my last job there was chief of high-value targeting on the joint staff. And basically, that means that I was one of many people that was involved in the tracking and attempted killing of Saddam Hussein and all those people in the deck of cards. And I would sit there with my compatriots and we would put X's on buildings one day, and the next day those buildings are gone. So you were literally in this invasion? Absolutely, I was involved in the war planning. In January of '03 I was involved in the final targeting of Iraq, when we put the final target lists together. And of course, those got brushed up as we got closer to the war. During the war I was working 18 hours a day, at least, in the Pentagon. You know, putting in hours trying to get and kill Saddam Hussein and others. And after Baghdad fell, then on April the 11 I walked out of the Pentagon and it was a Friday. And then on Monday morning I walked into Human Rights Watch and suddenly I'm now a human rights advocate. And got on a plane and flew to Iraq to see my handiwork. Literally, like how soon after? Literally, it was just the next week. Got onto a plane and went to Iraq. And I was standing there in craters that I had helped cause. Marc doesn't see moving from the Pentagon to a human rights nonprofit as the 180 degree flip most people might. He says all he's ever wanted to do was fight bad guys, and both organizations do that, just in different ways. He'd been thinking about leaving the military before the war began and he hadn't supported the war himself. But he stayed through the fall of Baghdad because he knew the targets better than anyone else. And he figured if there was going to be a war anyway, might as well be him targeting the bombs rather than someone else who might not know or care as much as he did. The thing that finally prompted him to leave, he says, didn't have anything to do with the war. His wife got a great job offer at the Bronx Zoo and they'd always wanted to move back to New York. When Marc went with Human Rights Watch to Iraq, it wasn't to get a comprehensive count of civilian casualties. His mission was to look at specific attacks and see which kinds of attacks caused high civilian death tolls. Because Marc had planned many of the strikes he was now going to investigate, it was a little complicated. There was the attack on Chemical Ali in Basra and I'll never forget sitting in this tiny cubicle in the bowels of the Pentagon watching it on the television as we had the predator overhead. And you're watching this black and white screen because it's a night shot and anything that's white is hot and black is cold. And we were watching people walking in front of it and all of a sudden this building just erupts and was gone. And we watched as bodies flew out of it. And you could see the legs kicking in the air like rag dolls. And we just erupted in cheers and we were ecstatic. You know, here we are, we killed Chemical Ali. This is great. And, what is it, three weeks later? I'm standing in the crater with this 70-year-old man who's got tears in his eyes and he's telling me how 17 members of his family, including his grandchildren, were killed. And I still feel very-- I have very mixed emotions about the whole situation, the whole experience. What are those mixed emotions, like on the one side and on the other? Well, on the one side, I feel like I took part in this wholesale slaughter of this guy's family, which is very difficult to swallow. But on the other side I know that we truly, truly did what we could. We were going after some very bad people. You know, war criminals. Chemical Ali had gassed the Kurds. He was singularly responsible for thousands of deaths. And so he was certainly a legitimate military target. But I think this just goes to show how difficult the job really is. You know, this is one of those strikes where we did everything right, where we thought we had the bad guy, where it was weaponeered correctly, and yet, it just was the wrong place to hit at that time and people died for it. The attack had hit the intended buildings, but it also destroyed the two neighboring buildings. That's where the man's family had died. Also, Chemical Ali hadn't been in the targeted building anyway. It's unclear who died there. Marc went to lots of places in Iraq he'd studied on maps and aerial photographs and heard about from defectors. And there's no way around this, after all those years of imagining these places, what they must be like, it was exciting to actually be there. I was walking through bunkers that I knew about. I went to Saddam Hussein's bunker. I went to his family's bunkers. One of my favorite moments was when I actually met one of the bunker builders and hired him as a translator. And he took us into Sajida's palace and Sajida was Saddam's wife. And we knew that there was a bunker under the building and we had targeted it and dropped a weapon into it. And he took me in and we go into the building and I'm seeing the inside for the first time, which had before only been described to me by defectors. And here it is and this picture that had been painted in my mind. And we get there and the guy says, now I will walk you down to the bunker. And we walked down to it and we get to the bunker. And when we look down on it from the top, there's a hole-- as the Penetrator went in-- through the four floors straight down into the bunker. And he looks at me and he says, whoever did this was a very smart man. And I lost it. I just completely lost it. Because you're like, I did that. I was like, hey, thanks. I appreciate it. The military denied my request to talk on the record about civilian casualties. But Marc Garlasco says that civilian casualties are one of the primary factors he and his colleagues considered when planning the war. Say he had a target he wanted to take out. The headquarters of the Iraqi Secret Service maybe, or one of Saddam's palaces. He'd work with the weaponeering guys to figure out how many and which bombs to use. And then-- Once that's established, they'll work up these collateral damage estimates. And tell you, OK, in this strike 10 people are anticipated to be killed-- civilians. Or 20 civilians, or whatever. And in this war in Iraq, there was a magic number, and the magic number was 30. And for any target where it was anticipated that 30 civilians or more would be killed, it required the signature of either the President or the Secretary of Defense for that strike to actually occur. How was that magic number arrived at, do you know? I have absolutely no idea how the magic number came to be 30. A lot of times when the collateral damage assessment came back too high, they would try to get it lowered. For example, a strike Marc planned early on in the invasion. An Iraqi division was holed up in a big, multi-building convention center in Baghdad. Which unfortunately, was right across the street from a hospital. Now because of the amount of guys there and the construction of the buildings, we knew that they needed to use 2,000 pound bombs. The problem with this is a 2,000 pound bomb has a very large, destructive radius. And it certainly would have enveloped the hospital. But there are things that you can do, even when you're dropping large munitions, to reduce civilian casualties. One of those is to change the angle of attack. And so imagine if you will, a plane is coming in and drops bombs at such an angle that they actually push the debris away from the direction of the hospital. Additionally, you put a time delayed fuse on it. And in this case, I think it was maybe five nano seconds, which is an incredibly short period of time, but it's enough that allows the bomb to bury itself in the ground. And what this does is, it basically lets the building implode. And it falls in upon itself and contains a lot of that blast and fragmentation damage that would come out and injure civilians, or destroy some of the hospital. And then additionally, you're using a penetrating warhead, so it's burying into the ground. So you're not just willy-nilly dropping bombs like in the second world war. And when I got there I went into the hospital and spoke to the director and all the people in there. And you know, nothing worse than a few broken windows. And I was like, wow, this is great. We did a really good job on this one. What got Marc thinking about civilian casualties in the first place was a battle damage assessment he did after the war in Kosovo. He targeted the bombs for that war and then afterwards the military sent him over to see how well he'd done. He measured how often the bombs hit their targets, whether they'd destroyed what they were supposed to destroy. Pretty much the only thing he didn't check the accuracy of were the collateral damage assessments. That's what got me. That's what really surprised me. At no point in time did we ever have to report back on civilian casualties. And so my question has always been, if you're looking if the weapons worked correctly, if the targets were correct, shouldn't you also be asking, were your civilian casualty estimates correct? I mean, shouldn't that be factored into it to make sure that your models are accurate? Because if your models are not accurate, what are they worth? You know, why do you even bother doing it? Because it's just throwing darts at a board at that point. Wow, did you ever find out an answer to that question? No, but it's something that I keep asking the military now that I'm in Human Rights Watch. You know, when I was there I was wondering, why isn't it done. And now I ask them why isn't it done and why don't you do it? And you know, I guess the answer that I get back just hasn't satisfied me. It's we're still fighting a war in Iraq, it's really hard to do. Or it's very difficult to account for civilian casualties for a variety of reasons. And you get kind of the bureaucratic double talk. And it's just not good enough because I've been there and I know that people care and want to do the very best they can. And they don't want to kill civilians. And here's an opportunity to really make a difference and to show that you're doing your utmost best to make sure that you're upholding the Geneva Convention and not killing people unnecessarily. In talking to people in the military off the record, I heard a couple of arguments against counting civilian deaths. First they say, it's not the military's job. If what you're trying to do is win a battle, it could be a dangerous, and in the long run, counterproductive distraction to worry about counting all the civilians you accidentally kill along the way. Second, and perhaps more persuasively, they say no one would believe them anyway. Just ask Les Roberts. Even though Les' study didn't get much mainstream attention, it did provoke, like so many things these days, a bitter debate on the internet. The attacks came mainly, though not exclusively, from right wing blogs. Several charges leveled that the study were simply untrue and seemed designed to willfully muddy the waters. For example, there was a claim repeatedly made, both in the press and online, that the data weren't random because the researchers had been blocked from going certain places, or had decided against certain places because it was too dangerous. This is simply false. A couple people suggested that the researchers had gone to Fallujah on purpose to boost their numbers, even though exactly the opposite was true. Les had wanted to skip Fallujah altogether and they hadn't even included the data in their final casualty estimate. Several objections had merit, though. First of all, the study makes no distinction between combatants and civilians. Les actually acknowledged this in the study itself and went to great lengths not to claim, as others did on his behalf, that the study was a measure of civilian mortality. Certainly, some of the people the coalition killed they intended to kill. But half of all the casualties were women and children, so even in the unlikely event that 50% of the men who died were actually fighting us, it's still a large number of innocents. The critique that got most traction on the internet though, has to do with something called the confidence interval. Let's take an election poll as an example. If candidate X is projected to receive 55% of the vote, what that really means is that he's projected to receive some percentage within two numbers. Let's say 52% and 58%. That range is called the confidence interval. The confidence interval in Les' survey was very wide, between 8,000 and 194,000. It was this wide for a lot of reasons, but mainly because the sample is relatively small relative to the population, and because violent death, unlike death due to malaria or diarrhea, isn't very uniformly distributed. So you have Kurdish areas where mortality actually went down during the war versus Fallujah, which averaged almost two violent deaths per household. Such a wide confidence interval means that statistically speaking, Les' estimate of 100,000 dead isn't very precise. The number could be thousands or tens of thousand smaller. Or equally likely, bigger. But a lot of people made wrong conclusions from the wide confidence interval. They interpreted it to mean it was just as likely that 8,000 people had died as it was that 100,000 had. The online magazine, Slate, wrote "This isn't an estimate, it's a dart board." In fact, the likelihood follows a bell curve, with 98,000 being at the top of the bell, the most likely number. So actually, there's only a 2.5% chance that the number is 8,000 or below, but a 90% chance that it's 44,000 or above. Here's Les. A couple of people told me that Sunday before the election, their minister from the pulpit had said this study in The Lancet was flawed and wrong. And my next door neighbor, who was listening to talk radio, spoke to me the day of the election and she said, well I just heard on talk radio today that The Lancet study finding 8,000 Iraqi deaths was flawed and wrong. And so it was discussed, but I don't think it was discussed in a very sort of scientifically rigorous process. Clearly, the people on talk radio weren't attacking the study out of a commitment to experimental rigor. They were attacking it for the same reason that the news media was hesitant to report it. Because the very act of counting civilian casualties is political. The moral logic of war is this. We're willing to undergo X number of costs in lives, money, resources, to accomplish some goal. The goal we hope will be worth it in the end. So assuming the goal in Iraq is good, is it wrong to kill 100,000 civilians? Saddam, himself, probably killed 230,000 of his own people. A number, by the way, no one seems to go out of their way to dispute. If you add the million or so lives he lost in the futile war he launched against Iran, 100,000 seems like a bargain in comparison. Maybe he would have gone another killing spree and this 100,000 is insurance against the later, far worse death toll. Or Maybe 100,000 lives is worth it if in the end, democracy does blossom through the Middle East. After all, we killed far more Japanese with just two atomic bombs than, according to Les, we did in a year and a half in Iraq. If we don't count civilian casualties, we don't have to get into this kind of horrible math. And most of us don't want to. So instead, we leave it to the professionals. The military are the only ones who even try to come up with a formula, the collateral damage assessment. 30 dead civilians for 1 bad guy. For Les, he doesn't really care who counts, just so long as someone does. Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying army's relationship to the occupied is roughly the same as a police department's relationship to its population. And in my hometown if a policeman pulls out his gun and shoots six shots at someone, another policeman will come and try to find where each of those six bullets landed and decide, was this excessive use of force? Well, how can we say that we are really looking after the well being of the Iraqi people, if we don't sort of go through some sort of minimal effort to decide, what are we doing to them and what can we do to limit the adverse consequences? One of the most surprising things Les discovered in Iraq is that despite what everyone says about the difficulty of counting civilian casualties during wartime, it's actually not that hard. The survey teams got participation rates that most American pollsters would kill for. Only 5 of the 988 households the team surveyed refused to answer the questions. And people were able to provide death certificates over 80% of the time. That confidence interval? Les is sure that based on the results of the first survey and with a little more money-- remember, this whole thing cost only $40,000-- he could design a follow-up survey that would narrow that interval way down. We can count civilian casualties in wartime, we just have to want to. Alex Blumberg. Coming up, so a military that's trying as hard as it can not to kill civilians makes a mistake. What do they do then? Well, we have a recording to play for you of what they do then. 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, What's in a Number? In act one of our program we heard about the number of Iraqi deaths that occurred in the first year and a half of the war there. And how the majority of those deaths, according to this Johns Hopkins study, were caused by US led forces. Now we're going to move to act two, where we hear US forces trying to cope in the aftermath of some of those deaths. This is act two, Not just a Number. The civilian deaths in this particular story came at a unusually bad time for captain Ryan Gist. He was the American officer in charge of the US army presence in a section of the Nineveh and Salahuddin Provinces in Iraq, a Sunni area. And this meant that he dealt with everything from seeing that the region had water and fuel, to dislodging insurgents and winning over the local population. He faced all sorts of problems. On November 10, 2004, for example, insurgents blew up most of the police stations in his area. And the next day, Iraqi army and police simply stopped showing up for their jobs. One town called Aitha was especially troublesome. US had not made many allies there. And it was turning into probably the greatest threat to stability in our region. So to begin with, we knew we were going into a very hot spot. We went in and for weeks we'd go in there and we would try and talk to leaders, try and talk to people. And they were scared. The terrorists literally had a grip on everybody. And that is the challenge in Iraq. And what it takes is just feet on the ground every day going to different houses and just talking to people. And finally, we found someone whose family had been killed, every one of them had been killed by the terrorists within the last month, and he wanted revenge. And he wanted to see his town free of this threat. So the guy gives him names and locations of people that he identifies as insurgents, and the army launches an operation to get those people. And this is where things went wrong. As part of this operation, US forces were supposed to drop a bomb into a nearby field just as a show of force. But instead, the bomb was dropped onto the house that the army was just about to raid, killing 12 people inside, including children. And nearly killing the US troops who were about to go in. That's according to an American photojournalist, Sheryl Mendez, who was there. In addition to the human tragedy of these deaths, for Captain Gist this could not have been worse. It was the hardest time in my life. And the most difficult part for us was in the weeks afterwards. We had to show that it was an accident and that we are someone who can be trusted and we are here to help them. The photographer Sheryl Mendez tape recorded him as he went to the sheiks who were the local leaders and to the police, as he went around trying to make things right. Here's one of those recordings. He's in a police station. I'm here for a couple reasons today. The first reason is to express my regrets to you. I feel much pain in my heart for what happened. We did not intend to hurt any innocent people here. We did not mean for any women and children to die. I had men hurt in the explosion as well. You're sitting there in a room with five, six, seven people that are definitely angry at you. They believe you did it intentionally. That hate you for being in the town in the first place. This is a very sad situation. It's also important that I get all the facts and all the names from you because we will compensate the families of those who were killed and wounded. And what I just kept repeating and kept saying was, what happened was a horrible mistake. And I want to make amends in whatever way that I can. I know that we cannot bring thdm back, only Allah can do that. But I hope to be able to help with the healing process. And I'm also here to ensure this does not destroy the relationship we've established with the people of Aitha. I know there's a lot to do to rebuild this relationship and this is my first step. But it's also very important that I get all the facts here. Right now I have 12 names of those who were killed and three that were wounded, so I think I'm missing one here. It seems like such an incredibly awkward thing having to do. I don't think awkward is at all the word you would use to describe something like this. It was, I mean, possibly the most emotional event of my life, going out and dealing with these people in such incredible grief. Noman Huessein? Afmed Noman? No [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. Noman. Noman. Akmed. Akmed. Addeb. Addeb. Hasna Hasna Debuyah. Debuyah. Leya. Leya. Azizah. Aziz. Azizah. Azizen. Azizah. Azizah. Azizah, that's a woman, you don't know who she is? What happened after that? Well, this took about-- the way it works in the Arabic culture is there's about a 7 to 10 day mourning period, or grieving period after the death. So of course, I wanted to go in there. We're Americans. We want to go in, we want to fix it immediately. I wanted to go in there and make the payments to the families and talk to them and express our regrets. So the hardest thing for me was I couldn't go into the town for seven days. So it was incredibly difficult for me. Because during those 7 to 10 days you're thinking, these people are deciding they hate us and they're spending word about how we killed these people, like it's just the worst thing from a propaganda point of view and winning over people's hearts. That's what your fear is? That's part of the fear. But also, I'm a human being. I'm an American. I want to get in there and I want these people to understand that we are good people and we are here to help them. So really, at that point, I'm sure you can hear it in my voice there, is that I know I can't fix it, I know I can't bring them back, but I want to make it better. But out of respect, we waited 7 to 10 days, went to neighboring towns and villages and told them what was going on, and got the message out. And I know the message got to the people in the town. But then the following three weeks, we went in and did exactly what we were doing before. Was meet with people, and begin to develop, or rebuild relationships. And we continued to conduct operations, continued to pull bad guys out of the town. This is pretty much the standard way that he'd operate in these villages. He said, sure, there were some villages and local leaders who were sympathetic with the insurgents. But in other places, they were being bossed around by them. A couple of terrorists who intimidated the leaders of that village could effectively control the entire village. People were scared to leave their houses. Kids stayed in the houses. Kids didn't go to school. So when you went in and you took those guys out, and you came back and said, yeah, I just caught this guy, this guy, and this guy. And I found all kinds of explosives, threat CDs, beheading CDs in their house, they're gone. They're never coming back. And the most incredible thing was you saw the change within a day. Within 24 or 48 hours, you would go back into that town and a town where kids would not even wave to you or kids would throw rocks at you, you'd go in the next day and they would be crowded around the humvees just wanting to touch you or talk to you. In Aitha, he says, people waited to see who was going to win-- the US led forces or the insurgents. Until there came a turning point. There was a distinct turning point. The turning point was when the sheik of the town came to see me, which would never have happened before. And do you remember what he said at the beginning, like so as to explain? What do you remember of what he said? What he said was I need your help. And that was it right there. I knew what was going to come after that. You know, just thinking about that accidental bombing, the way that it ended up working out, did that accidental bombing actually give you access to people and a way to meet with them and a reason to meet with them that you might not have had otherwise? It wasn't that it gave us a reason to. We had a reason to, we're going to be in the town regardless. But it forced them to listen to us because they were so hurt by the incident and they began to understand what we were there for. And they eventually offered us forgiveness and asked for our help. And to this day, I probably have the strongest bond with that town than any other town over there. Of course, a month later, I knew we were going to have elections in the town. The town was secured by Iraqi security forces and it seemed like every five minutes the Iraqi security forces were coming under fire, we were coming under fire. The most incredible thing was the Iraqi security forces held their ground. They fought the terrorists off. A lot of fire, very intense night. And then that morning, about 4:00 in the morning, I remember sitting on the hill, all the American forces pulled out in the morning, so the Iraqi security forces could secure the actual election site during voting. I remember sitting on a hill overlooking the town of Aitha and the sun started to come up, and all of a sudden I realized, there was a line of about 1,000 people in front of the polling site. The whole town almost came out to vote. It was absolutely incredible. Captain Ryan Gist and the 65 men that he commands returned safely to their base in Fort Lewis, Washington, at the end of last month. Act three. What do we do with these numbers anyway? So if in fact, 100,000 Iraqis died because of the war, and that number is a year old, or at least like Alex said in his report, there's a 90% probability that at the time it was over 44,000 dead, what do we do with that number? You know, the problem at the heart of the whole thing is that it instantly brings you to all of these imponderable questions about what is worth it. What is worth so many people dead? And in a way, once I understood this number and believed this number, I wasn't even sure if it's a helpful thing to think about that. What do you do with that? So I called a woman named Nancy Sherman, who has the unusual set of jobs of being a philosophy professor at Georgetown University. And also, she's taught ethics at the US Naval Academy. She interviews military people, she writes about how they think in books like Stoic Warriors, and she thinks you do want to know how many civilians die in a war, so you can understand the trade-offs. Now, many would argue that once you include the numbers of civilians killed, the trade-offs don't start looking so good. But of course, then there's the problem, what exactly are we measuring against? What's the good we're bringing about in the name of which violence is incurred? Right. And that's where you get into such immeasurable things. Because if, in fact, a democracy is created in the Mideast and it changes the whole shape of the Mideast-- That's right. But these goals and goods have to be tangible and there has to be evidence. I know, but the thing that seems so hard is we're measuring an actual concrete number against a benefit that really can't be measured at all. If by changing the shape of the Middle East we prevent a nuclear attack on New York City, or Cairo, or just anywhere, then it just changes the equation. And it seems like what you've got is you've got a certain number of dead bodies on one side, and then a future that's yet unlived on the other. Exactly. These kinds of calculations about how much cost can you incur in order to get a good at the end are very, very troublesome. Because when you're doing these kinds of calculations, you'd like to have a concrete good that's here and now existing. Numbers are always tricky, but the massiveness of numbers does matter. And when does the moral psyche break, at what number? I don't know. Tell me about Darfur. The world hasn't broken on that number yet and that seems pretty horrific to me. Nancy Sherman from Georgetown University. Well, our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig and Amy O'Leary. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Sam Hallgren and Chris Ladd. 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. You know, whenever he finishes a budget or correctly orders lunch, he calls me into his office, leans back in his chair-- And he looks me and he says, whoever did this was a very smart man. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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This is one of those stories where something big and heartwarming and idealistic that somebody wants is just going to get torn apart. Just driven straight into the ground. And it begins, as these kind of stories often do, with an idea that was planted in somebody's head when they were a child. Back when she was a little girl, Erin Einhorn was told this family legend, and, as some legends go, it was kind of a spectacular one. When Erin was a girl, she used to beg her mom to talk about it. I love the story. Because I, of course, was born in suburban Detroit, where my life was really boring. And she had this really dramatic story, of this incredible survival. The story went like this. Erin's grandfather and grandmother were on their way to work one morning in Poland, and were rounded up by the Nazis, and they're put on the train to Auschwitz. So they are on this train. So my grandfather sees a way to escape from this train, like an open window. And he turns to his wife, Sura Leah Rosenblum, and he pleads with her to jump with him from the train. My grandmother's about 21, 22 years old and she's just terrified. And she refuses to go. To jump from the moving train. The train is moving? It's at moving train. And the story is that it's a window. I'm not sure what that means, if there was a window, why other people didn't jump. If you apply some questions to the story, it doesn't necessarily hold up. But I never did apply questions to the story particularly. Because it was this incredible story. So there's a train, and there's a window. And my grandfather wants to jump. And he wants his wife to come with him, and she refuses. And he goes by himself. And he leaps from the train, as the story goes, in a hail of bullets from the Nazi guards. And he is wounded in the leg. He's bleeding from the leg. So the history goes like this. He takes the yellow armband with the Star of David that the Nazis made all the Jews wear. This is pretty much a symbol of everything that had gone wrong for his people. And he removes it from his arm, and he wraps it around his leg, as a bandage. And then he runs back to his town, Bedzin, to find his daughter. Who is Erin's mother, who was then just a baby. Who they had left with an elderly relative before they went off to work in the morning. Then he goes with her to the home of a woman he knew. And the woman's name is Honorata Skowronski. And he begs her to take care of his child, and he promises her all kinds of things, and riches and he'll take care of her for the rest of his life. And he asks her if she'll hide my mother among her other children. She had a number of children. And she agreed. And then he's ultimately captured again. And ends up back at Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. And he comes back after the war, and somehow is able to find my mother again. I mean, his wife is gone. His parents are gone. His brothers are gone. His sister's gone. Their spouses, their children, his cousins, his friends, everybody. But the one person, the one thing, really, he still has from that life is this child, my mother. Because of this woman, this hero, who risked her life. Poland actually had the death penalty for saving a Jew. Now one confusing thing about this incredible story, as far as Erin was concerned, was the fact that nobody in her family liked to talk about it. Nobody saw this woman as a hero. I mean, my mother was really flip about the whole thing. She would say, "Well, she only did it for the money," or something. Which I didn't particularly believe. The truth is, we didn't really discuss any of this. My mother just hated to talk about it. The whole story really bored her. I think she just didn't-- she came to the United States at the age of nine, as this kind of big-nosed, red-haired Jewish girl who spoke Swedish. Because they had actually lived in Sweden after the war for four years. So she was this really, really odd kid, and she really didn't fit in. And I think she just wanted the whole thing behind her. Yeah. But I mean, to me, it was this important-- it was a story that I would tell that I thought kind of made my mother special, you know. There was this woman, out there, or her family anyway, there was this part, this important part of my mother's story. And I actually really wanted to connect my mother with that part of her past. Even though she wasn't really particularly interested in it. I wanted to see what would happen. Or just thought, maybe if I could find this family my mother would show an interest, she would be moved by it in some way. So Erin moved to Poland for a year to figure this out. To have an adventure. She's 27. And what she finds is so much more complicated than what she expected. And so different than what she expected. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, "Settling the Score." Our program today in two acts. And the two stories in our show today have so much in common, but actually, saying what they have in common right now, actually telling you what are the things they have in common is going to spoil what is going to happen in the stories, as they unfold. So, for now, I'm just going to say that in both stories there are people, there are these this mysterious, unfolding conflicts where it's not even clear for a while, for a long while, what the conflicts are about. And there are other similarities to them, key similarities, yet to be revealed. Stay with us. Act One, "One Good Deed." So Erin Einhorn, the woman with the amazing family legend that nobody in her family likes to talk about, she heads off to Poland. And basically what she has in her hand is an address. Of this building that her grandfather owned before the war in Bedzin. She knows that after the war, one thing that her grandfather did to thank the woman who saved her mother's life, Honorata Skowronski, is that he told her to move in there, into this building, rent free. Erin figured that Honorata was probably dead, it was so long ago. But that somebody there might remember Honorata's family, have some idea of where the people had gone to. So Erin's living in Poland, she's learning some Polish. And one day she takes some friends with her, partly to help with the translation, to the town of Bedzin, to try to find this address. And when she gets there, she's completely surprised. First of all, she had sort of pictured the town like it would be the town in Fiddler on the Roof, with cows and goats and thatched roofs and all. A village, basically. But, in fact, the building is in a real city. On a street with shoe stores and a sidewalk cafe. And it turns out to be a three story building, like a townhouse, broken up into five or six apartments. With iron balconies. But it's really rundown. Actually, one of the balconies is kind of twisted and almost falling off. We go in and the stairs are cracked, there are marble stairs that are cracked and there's actually graffiti on the wall. It smells bad. It's a little squalid. Yeah. So we went up the first set of stairs on the left, and knocked on the first door. And we had this name Skowronski. And so one of my friends asked this woman who answered the door, "Is Skowronski here?" or something. And the woman-- from my perspective, I can't really speak Polish. But I see the woman nod and point toward the sky. And I'm like, oh, they're dead. And my friend laughs and he's like, "No, they live upstairs." So all of a sudden now, we're like, oh my god, they're here. And actually, I mean, various things happen, but essentially the next thing I know I'm standing face to face with this old man, with tired blue eyes, who once called my mother his sister. And I had this photograph that my mother had given me, right before I went to Poland. It was my mother at about maybe four or five years old. Just this little kid, and she looked like she had been crying maybe. Her eyes were kind of puffy. And her father's in this picture with her, looking very serious. And then there's this woman, this stern looking woman. And my mother never really knew who this woman was, actually. She thought it might have been Honorata Skowronski. She wasn't entirely sure. But I had this picture. And I handed it to this guy, and he just starts. He stares at the picture. He says, [SPEAKING POLISH]. "That's my mother." And I pointed at the child in the photo and I said, [SPEAKING POLISH]. "That's my mother." And the guy just started to cry. I mean, tears running down his face and he just took me in his arms and he says, "She was my sister." He invites us in and he just starts telling us this story about-- she used to follow him around. He was her favorite. He used to change her diapers. He used to make her pancakes. He used to milk the goat so that she would have fresh milk. And when the guards would-- or the SS would march in the street, or the Gestapo-- he would hide her in a dresser drawer. Because she was just this child. And then one day, she basically vanished. I mean, her father comes for her at the end of the war. And he never, ever sees her again. She lived there for three years. They were really close. And, in a way, this is exactly what you had pictured might happen, right? If everything would go wonderfully. Yeah, it was like a dream come true. You know, it was one of those moments where everything is just resolved and everything's perfect. It was more than-- and he's just, "You have to bring your mother to me. I really, I want to see her before I die. You'll bring her." His mother, it turns out, had been passed away in 1995. But he says, "Bring your mother. We'll take her to my mother's grave, and she'll know that her daughter had come back." He used the word daughter. I mean, it was all kind of a shock. We got his phone number, and I said, "Look, you know, can I come back? And we can sit down and talk." And he said, "Sure, no problem." And we made arrangements to meet again in a couple of weeks. When she goes back, it's a big deal. The man's whole family is there. His wife, a bunch of grown kids and grandkids. They serve cake and coffee. Erin's roommate Manda comes, to help translate. And so actually, that next meeting was actually really just wonderful. Just to get all these stories and just hear what they'd heard. Their half of this story that I'd heard. But it turns out that, actually, as much as I was excited about going back and finding this family, it turns out that they had really been excited about the possibility that I was coming back. Because it turned out there was this whole back story that I hadn't anticipated having to do with this house that had been my family's property. My translator-- actually Honorata's son is named Wieslaw Skowronski. So I really want to talk to him, and hear what he remembers. But his wife and his daughter start talking to my translator. I'm mean, just really, really rapidly. I am begging her to translate. We're actually arguing. I'm like, "Manda, translate!" And she says "It's hard! It's complicated!" And every time she tried to stop them, they would just keep going. And increasingly adamant. Just over and over and over again. And I would say, "What's going on?" And she said, "Well, it has to do with the house. I think that they want your mother to sign some document?" This pretty much, right here, is where Erin's entire dream is going to play out like some heartwarming A&E special, this is where that dream starts to fall apart. And in this second meeting, Erin can't even the story straight of what family wants, and what's gone wrong with the house that they need fixed. And what they are even talking about. All she can tell, from the urgency of their voices and their expressions, is that it is really, really important to them. It takes several more meetings, over the course of months, to get the whole thing straight. Well, it turns out that my grandfather had to given Honorata Skowronski permission to live in his house, as the manager, but not to sell the place basically. It was the only right she didn't have. And she had the power to collect the rent from tenants. There were, I think, eight or 10 apartment buildings. And she could collect the rent from the tenants. She had to pay the taxes. And she could keep whatever was leftover. And that arrangement worked perfectly fine until 1995, when Honorata Skowronski died. And then the tenants stopped paying. They said, you are not the owner, we don't have to pay you. And so they went, her son and his wife, went to the municipality for support. And said, you know, help us force these renters to pay. And the town said, well, let me see the deed, and they look at the deed. And there's this name, Friedrich, on the deed. And they're like, who's Friedrich? And they're like, well, you know, there was this Jew and he had a daughter and we saved the daughter. But it fly. And so, meanwhile, they still have to pay the taxes. They have to pay the taxes, they have to pay the utility bills. But they can't collect rent from the tenants. The tenants are living there for free. Do you volunteer to basically get your mom to sign a paper for them? What do you do? I was like, yeah, sure. Yeah. I'll look into it. Later on I would actually discover that it's, frankly, not anywhere close to as simple as they though that it was. In fact, the lengths that Erin has to go through to clear up this bit of business for them are breathtaking, even by the standards of nations that used to be behind the Iron Curtain. We're going to dwell here on them at some length, because for any of us who have actually been caught up in some months long bureaucratic run around with an HMO, or the phone company, or our own federal government, it is heartening to know that there are still places in the world that make these kinds of problems with American bureaucracy seem minuscule. Yes, no matter how badly we can botch things up here in America sometimes, and God knows we can do it pretty badly sometimes, we can always console ourselves with the thought that things can be much worse. There is still, in this world, a special standard of bureaucratic horribleness known everywhere by the phrase "Former Soviet ally." So I went to the Consulate and I asked for advice. And they said, well, actually we don't give out advice. They give you lists of lawyers who speak English. So I went to a lawyer, and actually his advice was very complicated, so I went to another lawyer. And then that lawyer had completely different advice. So I went to a third lawyer, and, in any event, they all basically agree on one thing. And that is that, in fact, my mother couldn't sign anything, and I couldn't sign anything, and even if my grandfather were alive, he couldn't sign anything because, in fact, none of us own the property. The property is owned by Israel and Zizsla Friedrich, who are my great grandparents. And so what I needed to do before I could do anything at all to help the Skowronski's with their property problem, was to inherit the house from my great grandparents. But the first hurdle for that is before you can even begin an inheritance procedure, you have to file a death certificate with a register of wills. But I didn't have a death certificate, because they died in the Holocaust. So I went to Auschwitz. But, of course, Auschwitz had no records of my great grandparents having been there. I don't even know if they were there. I know they didn't survive. And, even if they had survived, they would be like, 130. So they still needed you to prove that they were dead, even though if they were alive they'd be 130 years old? Correct. So I figure, well, OK, at least let me prove how old they are. So let me try and find their birth certificates. But I go to the Bedzin records for that time period, and there's no records of my family at all. Meaning that they probably weren't in Bedzin at that time. They must have been in a smaller village. So I basically spend six months driving around to villages that I know have the surname Friedrich in them. And I would pull up these giant genealogy books that have birth, marriage, and death records. And they are these big, dusty, yellow books. And I turn the pages in search of my great-grandparents. And, actually, my friend translating the marriage record of my great-great-uncle, had a reference to a town called [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. So I go to [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and I actually find my great-grandfather's birth certificate. So I get this record. And then I give it to my lawyer and he's like, "Well, OK, what about your great-grandmother?" And actually, I still have no idea where she was born, so I don't have that record. I said, OK, I can prove that she gave birth in 1895. And they're like, OK, well, we'll see. But in any event-- so first we apply to get their death certificate, which ultimately takes three and a half years, to get a death certificate. But to make the inheritance procedures move forward, she needs documentation on each and every one of her great-grandfather's heirs, all of whom have a potential claim on the building. I'm not the only heir. My great-grandparents had eight children, four of whom died in the war, four of whom survived, including my grandfather. And three of his siblings who moved to the United States before the war. And of those three siblings, one had four children, two had two children, all of their children had children, and there were great-great-grandchildren, and something like 50 heirs that I could count living at the time. So for every heir that we were going to declare in the process, and ultimately we ended up choosing a representative from each branch of the family, we had to prove the entire chain between us and my great-grandparents. So for me alone, I had to have my grandfather's birth and death record, my mother's birth, marriage, and death record, to prove why her name had changed from Friedrich to Einhorn. And then every record that came from the United States had to be sent to a Polish Consulate. And not just any Polish Consulate, because different Polish Consulates are responsible for different American states. So my birth certificate in Detroit, had to go to the consulate in Chicago. While my grandfather's death certificate from Atlanta had to go to the consulate in Washington. And meanwhile, this whole process is going on, I've now spent-- well I paid $2,000 to my lawyer, I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on these documents, ordering the documents, all this time. But every time I go to the Skowronski's, they're still having problems. Because they still can't collect the rent, they still have to pay the taxes, they still have all these problems. And so I'm showing up and they say, "So, hey, what's going on the property?" And I said, "Well, you know, it's going to take a long time." But they become increasingly frustrated with me. And do they feel like you're trying to steal the property from them? I think that they just think that I'm not trying hard enough. They don't understand why they're still having these problems, two years after they met me. And there was a couple of incidents where they started to yell at me, and they'd say-- we were actually arguing over who owned the house. They insisted my grandfather owned the house. And I would say, "No, it's my great-grandfather, that's why it's so complicated." And they'd say,"No, your grandfather owned it, and he gave it to our mother." And I'd say, "No, look it says on the deed, Israel Friedrich, he is my great-grandfather." And they would say, "No, your grandfather owned it." And we just do this. I mean, we did this for a year, basically. Arguing over who owned the house on the deed. It's during these months where she is arguing with the Skowronski's, and driving around to records offices in these tiny villages, Erin has an entire second line of detective work that she's doing. She has a stack of letters, and other documents, and she's getting these translated from German and Polish and Yiddish and Swedish and Hebrew. And as she does this, a whole other version of the family history-- these two family histories, I guess-- slowly begins to emerge. And it is not a pretty history. It is not in a heroic Polish woman, and a grateful father now in America. Erin found out that there was a reason the two families had not been in contact for years. It was more than they had just fallen out of touch. One of the first letters that Erin reads is from May 22, 1962. Nearly two decades after the end of the war. And this was actually a handwritten letter, in Polish, from Honorata Skowronski to my grandfather. The letter starts out, "Dear Mr. Friedrich, I am writing to you after such a long time because we haven't been corresponding. Because you are a man of honor. I have been waiting for your letter, and maybe you have been waiting for mine. Now I'm writing to you that I am sorry. You may be angry at me, because of the letters I wrote to you. I also was offended because of the way you wrote to me, but let's forget about that. I was happy to have someone abroad, and I felt that you were my brother. And you are so cold to me. I don't want much. All I want is us to live in peace, because life is so short. We should be kind to each other. Mr Friedrich, let's forget about it. I'm just curious how you are doing? Is Arentka married? Does she have family? Is she doing all right? Are you in good health? How is your family? Are you still close with your brothers and your sister? Regarding the house, Mr. Friedrich, I will write everything about it. There are eight tenants, and they pay 40 zloty each per month, with all the utilities. If you don't believe that I am able to manage your property, you can ask anybody or the municipality. I have just carried out a renovation but the money goes to municipality, so I have nothing left. At least the house is kept in order, and is well-maintained. Mr. Friedrich, maybe you could come see your property? You could see its condition. I would be very happy to see you here with Arentka. I would like to see my daughter. I would be very honored to see her. And if you cannot come to Poland, maybe I could visit you and then I could see how the world looks. Maybe I will write some more in the next letter. Best regards to you, to Arentka, and to your family. Skowronski." That letter just is so full of intrigue of what were they fighting about? Right, you say, well-- I had some idea that there had been a conflict there. The comments my mother would make, like, "Oh, she only did it for the money." And there was also a family story, my mother had said, about how Honorata had once asked my grandfather to send her a Chevrolet. He was in Detroit, I guess. That's where Chevrolets come from. I knew there was something there, but, then I had more letters translated. There was one from January, 1959, that her grandfather wrote to a lawyer in Poland, apparently concerned about what was going on at his house. He tells the lawyer that he's just found out that Skowronski doesn't pay the taxes in the building, and got into debt, because the city seized some factory buildings that were part of the property. Quote, "All of this happened without my knowledge, so I hope you can clear this up." Then, about six months later, July 17, 1959, he gets a letter from somebody in Bedzin, probably a neighbor. Erin can't actually tell, because the name is illegible. It's four pages of single spaced, typed, really dense. It's an absolute screed. Dated July 17, 1959 in Bedzin, and addressed to my grandfather on Cloverlawn Street in Detroit. "Dear sir," the writer of the letter addresses him. "I don't like prying into other people's affairs, especially as I have some disagreements with Skowronski, caused by her. Hoping that this letter will remain absolutely confidential, I don't want any other disagreements with such a rude person as Skowronski, I find it necessary to inform you about the situation, because I wouldn't like you to lose your house. These are the facts. One, Skowronski administrates your property in a very robbing way. She scrounges all that she can out of the house without investing anything. She doesn't maintain it well, doesn't care about renovations, even doesn't want to have it removed from the municipal funds. That is why the house is untidy and rundown. Anyway, she doesn't seem to know what order is, and she started growing pigs in the cellar. Worse, Skowronski doesn't pay the taxes as well. And she doesn't pay the municipality money she collects from the occupants for water, et cetera. Skowronski doesn't have time and goodwill to take care of the house. She deals with trading, and is out all the time. She has constant problems with police and cases at the court. Recently, she had a very serious case for abusing her children. She may even go to prison for a long time. And then the house will be abandoned completely." So, as you're reading this letter. what are you thinking? I'm thinking, no wonder he was freaking out. No wonder he was angry. No wonder he wrote her a presumably nasty letter which would have prompted a nasty fight, which would have caused her, several years later, to have to write that apology. And to plead for forgiveness and try to get in his-- "Mr. Friedrich, I consider you my brother. I want to see my daughter." She feels badly that they'd had this fight. And when you're reading this, do you feel like she's probably in the wrong? I think both sides clearly had a legitimate position. Even if-- you know what? So she was raising pigs in the cellar. But she saved my mother's life. And I think probably if Mrs. Skowronski was writing to him, and asking him to send her things, that's probably because she had the perception of America that many people do. That it's this nation of wealth. And my grandfather had been wealthy before the war, so he is this rich Jew in America. And why is he giving her grief about this house? Why doesn't he just pay the? Debts And, of course, he was very poor, very struggling in the United States. He had had epilepsy from being beaten on the head in Auschwitz. And though he was a tool and die maker, and should have been doing well, he would have epileptic seizures on the floor of auto plants. And then would be promptly fired, several decades before the ADA. And if all this weren't complicated enough, Erin discovered that Honorata Skowronski had been awarded a medal from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. A medal that nobody in Erin's family knew about. The medal's called the Righteous Among the Nation's medal. And it's given to non-Jews who risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Because of the medal, Honorata also got a pension from a Jewish organization in her old age. But the most interesting thing in Honorata's Yad Vashem file, and the most helpful thing in piecing together the past, was a statement that she wrote, typed in polish, dated September 7, 1983, that laid out more clearly and systematically than anything else, point by point, how Honorata viewed what had happened between the two families over the years. Erin reads. "This case concerns the help I gave to the Jewish child under the German occupation in Poland. During the German occupation, I lived Dombrowa Gornicza, Parkowa Street. Mr. Friedrich, and his one and a half year old daughter, Arenna, lived in Bedzin, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Street, number 20, and his wife was taken away to the ghetto. In July of the same year, I took his daughter, Arenna. I prepared a birth certificate for Arenna, with my family's surname. I carried the child on my own back from the border while escaping from Dombrowa to [? Myehov ?]. And so, as not to let the people know that she was Jewish, I used to change the color of her hair. In November, 1945, Mr. Friedrich came back to get Arenna. She was five years old, and I gave her back to him in the presence of two witnesses. She was crying very loud. She didn't know her father, and she was more attached to me than to her father. She was crying and calling me, "Mommy, take me home with you." We made a photo of me, Mr. Friedrich, and the child as a souvenir when I was giving the child to Mr. Friedrich. I don't have this picture now because I've lost it. When they were about to depart, Mr. Friedrich promised to pay me back and told me that until the end of my life I would be all right and he would never forget about me. And all I got was the picture of Arenna in Sweden as a six-year-old child. This was for all I did during the occupation. For hiding and taking care of the child. This is a very short summary of my taking care of Arenna. I used to correspond with Mr. Friedrich until 1950, but Mr. Friedrich hasn't responded until now. Right now I am in a grave situation, paralyzed, and I can't walk. All I want is to live until the moment when Mr. Friedrich will thank me. The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw has all of my data, but I need to have all of the confirmation from Mr. Friedrich that I kept his daughter during the occupation." At points during that letter, she seems so bitter. "This is all I got." Yeah, and my family's version of events is that, in fact, they had plied her with gifts. That they had sent her all kinds of things and that she always wanted more. And as far as they're concerned, my grandfather blew them off, completely neglected them, completely mistreated their mother. She died wishing he would come back, wishing her daughter would come back, resenting my grandfather. But hearing the story about your mom crying when her dad shows up at the end of the war, and she's got to leave the Polish family, it seems clear from that that they really loved your mom. I think they probably did, and I'm sure-- I know for sure that she cried, because that was her memory. She remembered having cried when her father came. And I'm sure it was emotional for them. I mean, I don't think-- Wieslaw Skowronski's tears the day I met him, in May of 2001, were unfakeable. I mean, they were sincere. And not just that day. Every time I would go back there, his wife would be going on about the house, and there would be this moment where suddenly he would seem removed from the conversation. And he would be looking at a photograph, and he would start to cry. It's just so interesting in the light of all of this, that your mom, and everybody else in your family, decided that the Skowronski's were just in it for the money. Do you know what I mean? It seems like from everything that you're finding that actually the Skowronski's were very sweet with her, and that she loved them. And it seems like in a way, the most convenient thing for everyone to believe for her to move on with her life, for her to believe and for your grandfather believe, was just that this Polish family had just done it for the money. You know, to wipe out any fondness she had for them. Yeah. I mean, I think-- maybe it was a convenience. There's no way it was just for the money. She just didn't want to confront all that. And her coping mechanism, it's a very popular coping mechanism, is denial. And that's what she did. That was why she told me her story as it wasn't a big deal. She specifically told me, "I had an easy to childhood. I was lucky. I was always loved." And it was easy for her to kind of blow off how traumatic it must have been to be torn from place to place. Which is why years later she's watching baby Jessica on television being ripped away from her adoptive parents, and the whole country is upset over how traumatic it was to watch this little girl, this two year old, being taken from the only parents she'd known. And my mother's flipping off the TV in disgust and saying, "Ugh. That kid'll be fine. The same thing happened to me." Erin's hope, of course, had been that by going to Poland, by doing all these things, she was going to reawaken some feelings in her mom about her own past, and about what happened during the war, and what happened with the Skowronski's. And then, just as Erin was beginning this process of meeting with the Skowronski's, right after that first visit with Wieslaw, her mom dies. Cancer For whatever reason, I just couldn't break this news to them. Because Wieslaw had been so excited about seeing my mother again, after all these years. I mean, she had been essentially dead to him. He didn't know where she was, she had vanished. She was gone for his life for 50-som years and then, in early May, I show up and say, "She's alive. She's 59 years old. She's great." I just couldn't show up again, in July, when I got back to Poland, and say "Yeah, actually, no. Unfortunately she's died." I just couldn't do it. I ended up telling him several months later, after preparing him by breaking the news that she had cancer. Then she was getting worse, and it was getting bad. Just so it wouldn't be so shocking. When I finally tell them that my mother has died in, I think, October of 2001, they're kind of sad. And they're like, "Oh, I'm sorry." And then a few minutes pass, and then they're like, "OK, so what's going on with the house?" My heart just sank. You know? Is it just you think I'm here to do what my grandfather should have done and that's it for you? Suddenly you were actually involved in the same relationship with them that your grandfather had been. We ended up, I think, in a lot of ways, reliving the same thing. I think my grandfather, in some ways, may have been hurt by these letters he'd gotten from Honorata Skowronski asking for things. And he was, after a while, he says, "Stop asking me for things. I'm grateful for all that you did, but I can only do so much." And I think I started feeling the exact same way. Without this family, I don't exist. So my very existence is thanks to them, or thanks to Honorata Skowronski. But after awhile, I'm like, "Look, I'm trying. I'm doing what I can. I'm trying to help you, but I can only do so much." Should I have offered to pay their taxes? And how long does this debt last? So, she saves a life. Now, saving a life is multi-generational heroism, you know? If I have children or my brother has children, that we have children, our family lives on. So maybe the gratitude should be a multi-generational gratitude. But now it's 2005-- actually, Wieslaw passed away in 2002, a year after I met him. This is the man you first met when you got there, yeah. So he has passed away. My mother has passed away. My grandfather is gone. Honorata is gone. And now the person who's asking me to help them is the second wife of the son of the woman who saved my mother. Just last year, in 2004, the family became so impatient with Erin, that they filed their own claim, under Polish squatter's law, saying they'd lived there for 30 years and they should get the building. Which led to other complications. The building is actually a duplex, and the owners of the other half of the building are a family in Israel. And they do not want to give up the building to the squatters, and they'd been trying to get Erin to take their side of things, and fight this Skowronski's. Which means that people have been angry with Erin for years now about this building, and, whichever way that it works out, whoever ends up owning the building, somebody is still going to be mad at Erin. So you go to Poland thinking you are going to have this sweet and nostalgic rejoining with these people, and you find yourself to be their reluctant, absentee, resented landlord. I certainly end up stepping into a role I hadn't anticipated. You know, I kind of thought, in a lot of ways, that the history was this book. And I was reaching up to a high shelf and fishing this book off the shelf. And I would bring the book home, and show it to my friends and family and say look, isn't it beautiful? I never anticipated that the characters in the book lived on and that, in fact, the book was all beat up and that the book actually had resentments and feelings and-- In fact, that you were going to be in the book, fighting it out with them. I'm certainly a conflicted character. And not necessarily as a heroine. I'm actually stepping into the role, in many ways, of the villain. Erin Einhorn, she's a reporter for the New York Daily News, and she has written a book about her experience with the house and the Skowronski's. It's just come out. It's called The Pages in Between. Coming up, a man gets a chance to settle a 17-year-old score with help of the Chicago police. 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 different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, "Settling the Score." We have two stories today, and each one is about somebody in a situation where one things leads to another without them exactly sure where it is going. And they're forced to figure out some kind of past, which has been lost. And, in the end, you get to the question, can money solve certain kinds of problems? Especially big emotional things that have been brewing for years. We've arrived at act two of our program, Act Two, "The Things that Money Can Buy." Beau O'Reilly, who as been on our program a bunch of times, he tells the story. A warning to listeners, before it begins, that at some point in this story Beau is going to refer to a way that people hide contraband, in their body cavities, and then remove it from said body cavities. But he's going to use words more explicit than the words that I'm using right now. OK, so you are pre-warned, if you find that shocking. When Beau's story begins, he is flying back from overseas, from Germany. And as we come into O'Hare, they say over the loudspeaker, whatever, the intercom, "Would Richard O'Reilly"-- which is my real name-- "Would Mr. O'Reilly, would you please stay in your seat when we land." Now I realize that when they say, stay in your seat when you land, don't do it. Just get up and leave with everybody else. Because it's not good news. They're not there to help you probably. So we land. And I sit in my seat. And everybody else gets off. And I'm the only person in this whole plane. And then an official looking airport person comes up to me, with the stewardess, and says "Would you just please come to the front of the plane?" And now I'm asking, is there something wrong? Has something happened? And I'm walking with a cane. And this cane I've gotten in Germany, because I've hurt my back. And I got this cane in Germany. And it's a little nondescript, wooden cane. Except that it has a bullet on the end of it. And so the point of this cane is this bullet. And apparently that's a very normal period between the wars where they made canes and they stuck these bullets on the end. And it's a certain cane that they all have. And so I'm walking with his cane, and there are two Chicago policemen there. And The policeman grab me on both arms, on either side, and they ask me to put my hands behind my back. And one of them takes the cane, and they put me against the wall, and they ask me where my weapon is. "Where is it?" And I say, "I don't have a weapon." And they search my body, they hand search my body. And it turns out the weapon seems to be this cane. That this cane has been reported. And then they say, "You're under arrest." And they read me my Miranda rights. And I say, "What am I under arrest for?" And they say, "We don't know, there's a warrant for your arrest." And they handcuff me behind my back. There's a Chicago police station in O'Hare airport, sort of underneath O'Hare airport, which I never knew. And they take me down in there and there's holding cells. It's pretty small. And I sit there for some period of time, maybe about an hour and a half, two hours or something. And then they come back in, it's a different cop, it's a bigger, older cop. And they say, we're going to take you into the city. They put me in the back seat of a squad car, they drive me into the city. And by now it's night time. It's dark. I think when we landed it was still day. And they take me to a building, which turns out to be down in the Loop. And they take me out and they take me through a basement, and up a an escalator, elevator type of thing. And then they take me and they put me in this cell. And the cells there are these little boxes really. And there's a metal bed, with some sort of mat. And a toilet without a toilet seat, and that's it. There's nothing else in there. And I'm in there by myself. Again I ask what I've been arrested for, and again they say, we don't know. I ask for my phone call, and they say you can make your phone call in a certain period of time. They leave me in there for a little while. And I'm sitting on the bed and the man in the cell next to me begins to shout and scream. And he sounds loud and big. He sounds like a big man. And no one comes when he shouts and screams. And he's screaming for the for the jailer to come, he wants him to come. And so he starts to pound with both fists on the wall, that is my wall and his wall are the same wall. And it's like a drum, so there's this very big [POUNDING NOISES] sound going with it. And this screaming. This goes on for really a long time. Like, literally hours. And every once in a while, somebody comes in and yells at him. And he stops for a couple of beats, and then he continues. And so I can't sleep, even if I want to sleep. And then the cell opens, and this young man comes in. And he's a newly arrested prisoner as well, as he quickly tells me. And he's already pretty high, which I know. I can tell that. And he tells me quickly, too. So we have a little discussion about what it's like to be high. And he sits down, and he says, "Well, do you want to do some? Because I got to do this before the morning." And I said, "Do some? No No, I don't want to." And he takes this aluminum foil-- it's dope. I'm not sure what it is. I figured it was smack because of the way he acted. But I wasn't sure. And he has it up his ass. And he literally leans over and he pulls it out of his ass. And then he unwraps it and he takes it. And he very quickly gets really, really stoned. And very loquacious. And so he's talking, he's telling me mostly about the day, and the neighborhood and where he lives and what he can get and what he can't get when he's on the street. And what job he could get if he could just get over there and do it. He is mostly just rambling through. And after the first, you know, 15 minutes of it, I'm done talking to him. So I pretend to sleep. And I lie on the top of the bed with my eyes closed, but he keeps talking. And periodically the man, who has stopped slamming, begins to slam again on the wall next to us. So that's the first night. In the morning, a new jailer comes and says now I can make the phone call. So I go and I make the phone call and I reach a family member who says they'll reach somebody else who will reach a lawyer. That's all I know. And again, still, no one has given me an answer to what I had been arrested for. The second night, I think the second night-- and this seems like the middle of the night, it seems like midnight, one o'clock in the morning, I really don't know what time is, they come and they got me. And they say, you have a visitor. And they take me to one of those rooms that you see in the prison movies where there's a glass thing and you to speak through a grate, and there's a little microphone that barely works. And there's things written on the inside the Plexiglas and scratched with pens or something. And my sister-- one of my sisters-- is there. And she has this whole sheath of papers. So she holds up these papers so that I can see them, and it's from the state of Wisconsin. And my daughter's name is on the piece of paper. I have a daughter. This case is about my daughter. The state of Wisconsin is suing me for back child support. 17 years before. I think it's about $14,000 or something at this point. And I see the paper, and I'm very surprised by it, because the history of it is that I lived with this woman, and we had a child. And we didn't have jobs. And if you are on welfare and food stamps and you're unmarried, the state of Wisconsin will bill the father in the form of child support. So when my daughter was three years old and she was living with me, I was called in to court. And I went in front of the judge, and I said, "I don't think I should have to be paying this money, because I am raising my child, and I'm paying for her care." And the judge said, "You're right. get out of here." And I assumed, at that point, that had been stricken from the books. And I just walked out of the courtroom that day, I didn't pay any money, I didn't get arrested. I took the bus home. And I guess that that never got written down, there was some clerical error about it, because it was never changed in the system. The state of Wisconsin still thought I owed them this money, plus interest. And I never heard from them again until now. And so this is 17 years later that this is now happening, from that court appearance. I'm sitting in the cell and my own past is catching up to me. Within a year of me going in front of the judge in Wisconsin, my daughter's mother really shifts direction, and she starts religion hopping is what I used to call it. Where she moves from one religion to another and she moves around a lot during this time. She keeps leaving, coming back and leaving and coming back. And in the course of that year, I also start going the opposite direction. Smoking a lot more pot than I had before, and drinking heavily. And one day I come home and my daughter's mother has taken my daughter. And left. And at first I thought that that would change pretty quickly. I expected to hear from them over the next period of months. I didn't. I went further and further into lots of dope and lots of alcohol, and it wasn't until years later, after I had long stopped drinking and smoking pot, that I was able to really look at my own responsibility for it. That I had messed up. That I was responsible for someone and I didn't take care of her. I didn't see here. I didn't help wit money. And then it was a long time, 12 years, which is impossible to ever make that right. Just too long. And finally my daughter contacted me when she was 14 or 15, and I saw how much I'd hurt her. There was no pretense about it. There's no "I'm sorry, let's make it right," because there's something that's completely been lost and broken. And the kid had no say about it. And that begins a series of contacts then between my daughter and I. And it's often uncomfortable. She's a teenage girl, a suburban teenage girl. We don't know each other. It can be hard to find things to talk about. And as time goes on over this, I call her, she doesn't call me back. She calls me, I don't call her back right away. Things get put off. And there's still a lot of distance in the relationship. That next morning, they bring me and what seems like probably about 60 other guys and they take us to now the big courthouse where we're all going to be tried. And there they bring you-- I think it's like four cells. So there's maybe 300 guys in these four cells. And I'm sitting on this bench, and these three older men come in. And everybody seems to know them, and they sort of spread out and give them the space. And they sit on this central bench. And one of them takes out a joint and lights it. And they pass this joint back and forth, and they sit there and smoke it. And nobody says anything. They just smoke this joint. Then these two young men come up to where I'm sitting, and one of them says, "Give us some money. Give us your money. We want to get some. Give us your money." And I said, "Well, no. I'm not going to give you my money." And they said, "Well, you have some money in that jacket, right?" I say, "Yeah, actually I do. But it's my money. I'm going to probably need it." I'm keeping this, again, this quietness of tone, but, again, not looking him right in the eye. And he's like, "No, man, I'm telling you. Give me the money." And I say, "Well, I'm not going to." So then a third guy comes, and the three of them are standing around me in the circle. And the first young man is doing most of the speaking. And he's insisting, "I'm going to take your jacket. I want your money." And then, across the way, one of the older man says "Hey. Pops. Pops." And I look up, and he's looking at me. And he says, "It's Pops, right?" And I say, "Yeah, yeah. Pops." And he says, "Yeah, that's just Pops. Leave him alone." And the three young men sort of move away, and the guy says again, "Pops, you want some of this?" Some of this being the dope. To smoke. And I say, "No, no thank you." And here I am, I'm in jail because of what I did, you know, 20 years ago and the year I was living 20 years ago. And I'm surrounded by these guys that I really recognize from that way of living. I was proud of that, I lived like them too. This is who I was, when I lost my daughter. So I get taken into the courtroom and my lawyer says, "I think we can get you off. We certainly can get this reduced. You don't have to pay all of this money. So what is it that you want to do?" And I thought about it. And I said, "No, I think I know what I want to do. Which is that I want to make this right today. I want to pay this money." And the lawyer said, "No, come on, you don't have to do that. It's too much money. We can get you off of this." And I thought about it. And it wasn't that I felt that by paying the money I would be then closer to my daughter. It wasn't that. It was, I'm wanting at this point, to make amends to my daughter in any way possible. Whatever is going to make her life easier, whatever I can do for her, now I'll do. I'm actually grateful for it, because it gives me a means. It give me a way, it gives me a clear, simple way. So a deal is struck, right there in front of the judge, where if I can come up with a portion of the money right then, they'll release me and set up a monthly payment plan where I get to pay off the rest of it. And I do that. And I don't know if my daughter even knows that the money came from me. But I know that the money went to her. Something then really did change between us. And what changed was me. I could talk to her more easily. I could show her the way I felt about her more easily. And because I responded with ease, she responded to that over time. She was then more easy with me. She was more able to just be easy with me. And when she really gets into difficulty, and has trouble, a few years later, she's able to reach out to me. And I'm able to reach back. So this weird trip into the underworld has really actually been this weird gift to me. If it took being dragged off a plane, and handcuffed and held in a jail cell and being around people pulling heroin out of their asses and going to court. If it took all that to bring about some sort of resolution of something between me and my daughter, then it was worth it. Playwrite and actor Beau O'Reilly. He is performing as the Lord of the Underworld in Euridice at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. It opens the first week of October. I carried the child on my own back from the border while escaping from Dombrowa to Miejov. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International. Next week, her on the podcast of This American Life. Saving 500, 1,000 kids, 1,500 kids simply was not going to make a difference. We had to really think big. Life inside a radical new experiment to eliminate urban poverty, that draws on new research about how kids develop and is implemented on a scale unlike any program ever undertaken, anywhere in this country. That's next week on your local public radio station and here on the podcast.
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The strangest thing about Eli's trip into America is not that he was smuggled part way from Guatemala in a tanker truck-- one of those huge trucks that usually carries fuel-- sealed in with 100 people, no windows or light, people fainting as the air got stale. And the strangest thing about Eli's trip into America was not that after they crossed the border at the Rio Grande, they were lost in the desert for 36 hours, and he had to drink his own urine to survive. Yeah, it tasted a little salty. That's it. Yeah. You don't taste it. You just drink it. You just swallow it. It left a little aftertaste, but it kept me alive. No, the strangest thing about Eli's trip into America is that the day he gets to Chicago, after a month on the road, nearly dying twice, 24 hours after he gets to his final destination, he goes to work washing dishes where a friend of his works at Charlie Trotters, one of the most expensive and exclusive restaurants in the country, where you pay over $100 a person, and they bring you whatever the menu happens to be that day. Well, I felt like a stranger in a strange world, totally different of what I was used to. Like let's say dish machine. What the hell did I know about dish machine? The kitchen well-equipped with compartments and coolers, and then walking into the dining room and the tablecloths white and neat. That's the place where I seen the biggest wine glasses, a wine glass that could fit a bottle of wine. I remember breaking one of these big glasses. When I was told that they were over $100 each, I just went like, wow. Then there's the wine themselves. Lots of people would spend $1,000 for a meal. Coming from the countryside in Guatemala, where he only needed $200 a month to maintain his home and feed his family, it was hard to comprehend. There was these wild nights, I threw away a lot of food and I thought of how many people in my country could use it. You know, how much food and money was wasted. It was amazing. It's still amazing. But I think that's just the way people live in this country and that might be what keeps them so blind about the rest of the world. How starving are people, you know, in parts of the planet. I'm not saying they're bad. It's just the way they live here. If you go someplace new, you're a stranger in a strange land, you try to make sense of everything around you. And you come to conclusions that are probably different than the things that people who live there think every day. Well, today on our radio program, we have stories of people in that very situation. You're listening to This American Life from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our show today, a man tries to reinvent tourism-- yes, tourism-- but he runs into a few snags once he gets to Africa. Act Two, Johnny, Get Your Mouse. You've probably heard about these American soldiers who are blogging from the war in Iraq, but chances are you've never actually taken the time to read many of these blogs. Well, we have done that work for you and have chosen some excerpts. Stories of strangers in a strange land filled with guns and land mines and IEDs. Very different stories from what you get on the news. Stay with us. Act One, Not Just Tourists, Tourists Who Care. A guy named Chris Tenove came into our studio to talk about his idea to change the face of tourism and to tell the story of his international-- I don't even know the word for this-- the international beta test, I guess, that he did of his idea. But before we get into any of that, you should understand a little bit about the kind of person that Chris Tenove is, and the kinds of big ideas that kick around in his head. I guess from time to time I've tried to come up with these sort of abstract plans on how to save the world. And I've done this a few times. There was at one point I had this idea-- I mean, this is a bit of a tangent. I had this idea that gay men in America who can't legally marry each other could go to Burma and marry women there, grant them citizenship, and through that overthrow the Burmese government. And that's a horrible idea for a lot of different reasons-- Right. --I think. Actually, I was smart enough to more or less-- I've more or less kept it to myself. His idea to remake international tourism is another matter. Chris came up with the idea after a dinner with some family friends who had just gotten back from New Zealand. These are people who, looked at in a certain way, could be seen as kind of obnoxious. These are the kind of people who want that authentic experience wherever they travel. In New Zealand they went to where farmers shear sheep. When they visited Thailand, they visited hill tribe villages in Thailand. But Chris thought, you know, these people are interested in the world, and if somebody could just harness that energy, they could actually do a lot of good. I guess I really fundamentally believe that there's a lot of good-hearted people with a fair amount of disposable income, who would be willing to really engage financially and emotionally with communities that are impoverished. And I thought, how do you get people to engage? And I thought travel. And maybe we can get them there, get them engaged, and do something useful, do something philanthropic. So you had this idea that people could go over to other countries and give away money? Is that the idea? What would they do once they were there? Well, all right. Let's say a small group of people would go to a country like Niger, and they would be taken to a village. And they would spend, let's say, a week there getting to know people, seeing what life is like, and developing a relationship or bond with the people there. And then when it's time to go, they would leave a sizable enough amount of money to do some good there. I mean, I bet like $500 would pay for building a school, or it would pay for anti-malarial medications for a year for the village. And then they'd go home, and they'd have this continuing bond with the people there. Now in fact, there already exists something like this, a small movement that goes under various names-- travelers' philanthropy, volunteer tourism, altruistic travel-- where you go to the places, and maybe you don't get to know the people there quite as well as Chris envisions. Maybe you're not in places quite so desperately off the beaten path, but you visit, you see poverty, and after which you donate some money. Chris didn't know about any of that, though, and he didn't know anybody had ever tried to figure out what was right or wrong about his idea. And so he started talking to experts, aid workers, about this thing that he decided to call philanthropy tourism. None of them had ever heard about the idea either. Now Chris is a freelance reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He travels quite a bit to southeast Asia, Cambodia, Thailand. And as fate had it, Chris actually was headed out to one of the poorest countries in the world, Sierra Leone, for his job. Step one was talking to a few aid workers, and they generally told me it wasn't a great idea. I mean, I was told it was a sickening idea by some. And other people thought it was a pretty good idea. Most people had reservations. Yeah, we have a clip of a tape that you made at the time. This is Anthony Lawson, a British aid worker for Action for Children in Conflict. Is that it? Yep. And here's what she had to say when you ran your idea by her. I think those who've done aid work for any length of time would probably be somewhat disturbed by that idea. Why? Because you'd then be turning the people who are the beneficiaries of the aid work into kind of gawking targets for tourists, which is completely unethical. What do you think of that? Hey, it's a really valid criticism. I guess the issue that maybe bothered me the most was this image that it would be wealthy North Americans coming and just tossing out money like bread crumbs to pigeons or something, and that you'd get these kicks helping them, and then you'd go back to life. That image of it is-- I mean, I find it repugnant. But this did not deter Chris. Sure, these were valid concerns, he thought. But the impact that this could have on people's lives could be so great, he hoped there just could be some way to do it reasonably, without the gawking, without the exploitation. And so, like a doctor in a science fiction movie who develops an experimental serum and, worried that it is too dangerous to try out the serum on anybody else, injects it into his own veins first, Chris decided to try out philanthropy tourism himself. He would do himself under the crucible. Like I said, he was in Sierra Leone anyway. He'd go to a poor village himself, meet the people, and donate some money to see if it could possibly be done without all the pitfalls and problems. It was kind of ad hoc. Planning? You know, I didn't do much planning. I'd planned to plan at some point, but then I found myself in a car going to this isolated village called Tombodu, and we were about to get there, and I just thought, well, let's give it a shot. You mean you were going to the village to do interviewing for your reporting? Yeah. Yeah, we were literally like a few hundred meters out of this village, and I was traveling with the chief's nephew, and I said, when we get to the village, I'd like to talk to the elders, because I'd like to pay for someone in the village who needs a medical operation. And he said, what? Are you sure? And I said, yeah. And he said, OK, well, we'll talk to the elders. OK, so you go there and what happens when you're brought before the elders of a small village? It wasn't very formal. The chief's nephew knew who to look for, and we stopped by a couple houses and actually just picked the guys up, and we had this little conference in the back of the car. And they said, well, we know the guy. We know the guy. We'll get him for you. And what was his medical ailment that he needed an operation on? Well, it had something to do with an infected and torn scrotum that had been bothering him for a long time, for years. And when I later met him, I could see he was having great difficulty walking. And so I just said, well, they know who needs the operation, so this is it. Did you have any sense of if he was trying to get the money together for an operation? Yeah, well, he told me that that morning he'd gone with his younger brother on the trip into a nearby town. And he'd gone to the doctors, and they'd said, this is what it is, and they wrote out how much it would cost to pay for an operation, which was the whopping sum of $150. And this was going to take, he figured, about a year long fundraising to get that kind of money together. And so I came, literally, an hour after he returned to the village. And so he told me later, he said, heaven sent you to me. I know you're an angel. $150? It just seems like so little. Yeah. It's a poor country and Tombodu is a poor village in Sierra Leone. Now I understand you then made a speech to the village, and we have a recording of that that you made. And can you just tell me, what is the setting? Who was there? Where are you? Are you just standing out in the open? As I'd been walking around the village, there'd been more and more people gathering around. So there were 10 and then 20, and then, I think, there was about 50 people by then. And we were going to be driving out of town with this fellow, and, in fact, the chief's nephew had said, you know, we can't just toss him in the car and drive off. You've got to say something to explain it. OK. Here's a recording of it. Hello, everyone. My name is Chris. I'm from Canada. Before I left Canada, I talked to some of my relatives, and I told them I was coming to Sierra Leone. And I asked them if they could give me a little bit of money to help someone. Now I'm just going to stop the tape right there before we go further. Is that true? You mean, that I'd asked relatives to pitch in? Yes. Yeah. Really? Strictly speaking true? It was probably-- what I was spending was, I don't know, half mine and half of family members. But you know what? I was really glad to be able to say that. I mean, it feels weird to say, hey, look, I'm giving this money for these people. I liked to be able to say this isn't me doing something. It's family members. I'm just sort of an instrument. Let me play a little more tape. So this is why I'm taking this man from your village to the doctor. And so then they break into applause, and you feel-- Yeah, that was my Angelina Jolie moment. On the one hand, it was a little bit giddy. It's nice to have all these people cheering for something you've decided to do. But on the other hand, I really did feel like a big fraud. I mean, the 50 people like, literally, started cheering, and I thought, this is $150 that I'm spending, but it seems like there's way too much veneration, way too much excitement, I mean. Was there a part of you which wanted to say to them, no, no, no. You don't understand. This really isn't very much for me. Yeah. Yeah, right. Like, don't get so excited. Yeah, that would have been a weird thing to say. Yeah. But also I was told-- another thing that aid workers and also the chief's nephew brought up is that there's a real problem that people come to expect every foreigner is going to give a lot of money. The aid workers had coached me, don't encourage this culture of dependency. Make sure to say that not every foreigner is going to come along with money and do something like this. I just want to say something very clear. Please don't expect every white person who comes to do this. And there are a lot of NGOs now and organizations in Sierra Leone. And one day most of them, they're going to slowly leave. Yeah, what the hell am I talking about there? I mean, it's true the UN is hugely invested in Sierra Leone right now after the end of the civil war and they are going to start pulling out. But, I don't know, it just seems sort of arrogant to say-- to be kind of wagging my finger and saying, you guys have got to establish your own health care system. You know, you can't expect foreigners to do it. Yeah. After that speech and when we got into the car and started bouncing our way back to the nearby town, I finally got the chance to start talking to this man and that was when things really started to feel right. And actually, we ended up sitting together for a couple hours and just chatting. And he told me about his life, really, and about his grandchildren and about the day he found a diamond in the pits nearby and was able to build this nice house that later got burned down by the rebels. You know, talking about his grandchildren and how he wasn't going to be a boring old man anymore. He said once he had this operation, he'd be able to garden again and walk around. And so, it was quite touching. It was nice to have gotten to know him over that afternoon and early evening. And so his first field test turned out exactly how Chris had hoped it would. And as he traveled, he even met some people in Sierra Leone who saw his vision, who got really excited about the idea of philanthropy tourism. And there was one woman who already was trying to think of how to get people to visit this little hippo preserve, this baby-- no, what was it? Miniature hippo preserve in Sierra Leone. And she was working out how much it would cost. What are you talking about? I feel like she's sitting on gold. She has miniature baby hippos? Yeah. And she can't get Westerners to come and give money? Like, that's the easiest sell I've ever heard. She basically is sitting on like wild, African, baby, miniature, baby African hippo puppies, right? Like, that's what we're talking about here. Yeah. Well, the problem is it's in Sierra Leone, the land of the child soldiers and amputation squads. So it's not-- Sierra Leone is not an easy tourism sell. It's actually such a tough tourism sell, Chris thought, that it would be prudent to do a second trial of his experiment. After all, it's not really science if you can't replicate your results. He heard about a nonprofit organization called Gracelands that had a good reputation for helping people. He thought maybe he'd try there. It's an organization for traumatized young women. Most of them were bush brides, which meant during the civil war, rebel groups would've captured them in their village and taken them off. And a lot of them would have been gang raped and forced to serve this rebel group in these sort of marriages. I'd also found out that there was a young woman there who needed an operation. And so, I was going to give them money for this operation to the organization, but I thought, you know, I'd spend an afternoon there. You just wanted to get to know them a little bit. Yeah. And I didn't even plan on getting to know this one woman whose operation I was paying for in particular. I thought, we'll just hangout and we'll have this same sort of thing that I had with the gentleman in the other village. But it didn't quite happen that way. When I got there, you know, we started talking, and then the young women there would start to tell me exactly what had happened to them. You mean, because you asked or just because you were this foreigner who was in there and it seemed like the thing to do? Well, I mean, I would ask a question like, where are you from or something like that. And they would describe being captured by the rebels and they'd talk about the difficult straits they were in now. And I kind of got the feeling that these young women thought, here's someone who can provide help, and so we've got to show to him we really need it. And so, even though it was sort of uncomfortable, they would start to describe these painful incidents. And, in fact, I don't even really know how this happened-- I mean, why the conversations took that turn, but it happened again and again. I just felt horrible. Now we have a recording of you with some of these women, and I have to say, it seems so painful. I'm not sure I even want to put it on the radio, just because it feels-- like your heart goes out to these women who just start crying when they start talking to you about this. And I wonder, at the end of that experience did you feel like, OK, well, that's it. I guess this isn't such a great idea. Like, how did you feel at the end of that? Yeah. I felt exploitative, you know, that I was coming there to-- OK, I was going to give some money, but I was also going to enjoy their company and maybe even feel good about what I was doing. And then instead of it being pleasurable for everyone it turned into what was really these heart wringing catalysts for grief while I was there. And so, I kind of think that that one was a mistake. But, ultimately, even though the second time didn't work out that well, I still think it was a good idea for me, because it just really convinced me that you can engage and with these small amounts of money, you can really do something useful. I think it's absurd how easy it is and that it's not being done. But you say it's so easy, but when you talked to that woman, it seemed like it was incredibly painful for her. Yeah. I guess what I think was the easy part in that situation, it was very easy to give. It was like $120 for this operation, which is not that much money and you can change someone's life. That's the easy part. The really difficult part is these relationships. I wonder if the thing that makes it so tough is the fact that you're trying to get something back from it. Do you know what I mean? Like, when you talk about it, you say, you thought you'd enjoy their company. You thought that you'd have an experience that would make you feel good about what you're doing, and I wonder if the nature of this kind of act is that you have to do it not expecting anything back. Yeah. I think that's true. I mean, and why do we have to have a good time when doing this? I just think it's because people need an inducement in order to do the right thing sometimes. I know, but it's almost like you're trying to take people who don't want to be generous and say, well, there's something in it for you. And I feel like, in the end, maybe charity is really just going to be for the generous. I think people will be more generous once they go and meet people and see what the situation is like. And so it's setting up that engagement. And this idea of philanthropy tourism, it's not for people who are already giving a lot of money to organizations. And I really believe that once people have actually seen what it's like, they will be generous. Chris Tenove. He still believes that somebody could get philanthropy tourism to work, somebody with organizational skills. He says that he'll still give to charity, but never again one-on-one in a village. Coming up, some of the unpleasant dangers of being an American serviceman in Iraq-- IEDs, ambushes, subscriptions to Details magazine. 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, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Strangers in a Strange Land. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act Two, Johnny, Get Your Mouse. Soldiers in Iraq are writing open diaries about their experience in that strange place on daily blogs that anybody can read on the internet. We now have excerpts of three of them. Many of the blogs that are out there very consciously try to counteract what soldiers consider the bias of the mainstream media. These blogs tell stories of successes, schools built, kids who get health care. All of that is very common, but the blogs are much more than that. One of our producers, Amy O'Leary, has been reading dozens and dozens of the blogs trying to get a sense of what they're about and get an overview. Amy. Well, I would say about 20% of them are writing with, you know, an emphatic sort of political sensibility. By and large almost all of those are patriotic and conservative, and they are talking about the war and talking about their support for it. There's another 20% that are not really writing for anyone except friends or family. It's much more private. So this is like in lieu of emailing a whole bunch of people. They just put it up there and the people who know them just look. Right. And then the last group is the majority. And those blogs are really people who are trying to write about the war to explain it to people back in the States. What are they writing about? How they pass the time. How they're doing. You know, a lot of it's counting down the days to come home. How the food is. You know, practical jokes they've played on the guys they're with. Pretty basic stuff. So, you know, if they go on missions, they talk about that. A lot about Iraqi kids. Almost everybody talks about the kids they see in the street. There's so many pictures of soldiers helping kids, soldiers handing out candy and pens and pencils. They all seem to have a really strong affection and fondness for the kids in Iraq. And so what's the picture that you get of the war after you read a lot of these that you might not have otherwise? There are so many people writing. There are so many blogs. There are so many people's lives who are encompassed by this war. And, you know, you might hear about an IED explosion. You might hear about, you know, a truck bomb or something, but then when you read about it over and over again, and you read-- like, almost anybody who's left the base has been hit by an IED. This is not, you know, a couple of isolated incidents. This is a fact of life for the people who are over there. OK. So now we're going to hear excerpts from a handful of different bloggers. And this first one is Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss. I should say that we have links to all of the URLs at our website, thisamericanlife.org. The URL for his blog is tcoverride.blogspot.com. And he, on his blog, describes himself as an unashamedly patriotic American, 15 years in the army, the commander of Charlie Company 2 3 4 Armor in Iraq and at Fort Riley, Kansas. He had about 65 to 70 guys under him and 14 tanks. Here he is. I had an interesting day. I went on another patrol, but this one got pretty interesting right off the bat. We were walking through a palm grove just looking around, and I looked about three feet to my right and saw a landmine. I immediately looked at my feet, not making the connection that if I had already stepped on a mine, I'd not have any feet. Well, we cordoned off the area and swept for more mines as some of the boys prepped it for demolition. About 30 minutes later, I was 50 yards away talking to one of my platoon sergeants, and I find another mine. This one is about 15 feet away under a piece of cinder block. Again, I look at my feet before saying, hey, isn't that a mine? We blew them both up and went about our business. The weird thing about all this was how normal it all seemed. I didn't get excited, just went about doing my job. I guess it will all end up as part of my PTSD later. I was talking to one of the villagers today, as I was watched by her seven kids. As I looked at the youngest of them, a little girl about my daughter's age, I saw a dirty face and a big toothy grin. She hid by Grandma Sabiya and just kept staring and smiling. She was wearing sandals and a t-shirt and a seventh generation hand-me-down pair of pants. Here I was standing around wearing my desert uniform, wool socks, coat, body armor, and all my gear, and I was a little chilly. But these kids are dressed like we dress in the summer. It's not a matter of acclimation. They simply have no other choice. I just wanted to give that little girl a pair of shoes and a warm smile, and tell her that people in America that have never met her care about her. I came over here thinking we should just bomb this place into a parking lot. I now think that as alien as this culture is, it may actually be worth saving. I figure that if I'm going to have to find mines, get shot at, and get blown up by IEDs, I might try to do some good here, too. God knows I'm way low on karma points. An hour later, a little kid throws a rock at my truck. It bounces off the gunner's turret, hits him in his sunglasses, shatters the lens, and gives the gunner one helluva shiner. So much for the shoes. I showed him something else. Love, parental American style. I chased him on foot through the town, pulled his pants down in front of all of his little buddies, and spanked his bare ass right there on the street. If it's good enough for my kids, it's good enough for him. Pretty dull day today. I had a meeting with the sheik's council in al Hillah, which is like a county, with a local mayor and about 20 sheiks, and maybe three of them I trust. The head sheik, Sheik Adnan, looks like a very tan Lee Marvin. There's another one, Sheik Amir, who looks like Father Guido Sarducci from old SNL reruns. The Iraqi army major I work with, Major Karim looks, I swear, just like Eugene Levy from SCTV. The sheiks all bitch about the same things. They want public works projects in their towns, and we want them to guarantee security and turn over terrorists to us. They balk and say that they can control their people, but people come from other areas to plant IEDs and attack Americans. We say, bull [BLEEP] and tell them that we can't pay for the public works until the area is secure. Lather, rinse and repeat. Third verse same as the first. I imagine this will go on for a year or so. Sheik Adnan is pretty likable and seems to be a pretty honest broker. He told me yesterday that sometimes he will have to say things to me in front of the other sheiks that he does not necessarily back. I understand that he has to do it to save face. I also told him, in no uncertain terms, that I didn't really care what he said to me in front of the other sheiks as long as we remain respectful to each other. I told him that if he disrespects me, I will drag him through the streets in cuffs and put him in a very dark place. It seemed weird to say that to a 50-year-old man, but he smiled and told me that he was glad to see that I had backbone, and that there are very few people who would ever say that to his face and he respects me for it. He asked me if I was a prince or a sheik in America, because I had so many tanks and soldiers. I didn't want to tell him the truth, because it would actually hurt my position with him. So I told him that America does not have princes or sheiks, but I was personally commissioned by the President of the United States and placed in command of the company under his authority. This, of course, is true, but not exactly forthcoming. He was very impressed by that. Did you know that in America they have machines that make clouds come? I didn't either until we found out from an Iraqi man at the gas station. And thank God our body armor has those internal cooling units. If I didn't have that micro air conditioner inside, then I'd just be walking around with a 30-pound vest in 110 degree heat. Oh, and I don't know where I'd be without my sunglasses. Unfortunately, many Iraqis have figured out that they allow me to see weapons through people's clothing. I don't know where they get this stuff from, but if myths about American technology make someone think twice about attacking us, then I guess I can't complain. This is Trueman Muhrer-Irwin. He blogs at livejournal. com under the name rebelcoyote. He's originally from Chicago. He joined the Army National Guard, served as a Private First Class in Alpha Company Third Battalion 124th Infantry. We had just finished the DVD of Friends, season three, and me, Micah, and Jared had all sat down to watch season four. We were all having a good time. Ross and Rachel were getting back together after a weekend retreat to the beach. Phoebe discovered who her real mother was. Joey dug a hole. Chandler made snide remarks. And in Baghdad, a suicide bomber drove a vehicle packed with explosives up to the Turkish Embassy and detonated it, killing himself and injuring at least two embassy workers. The blast, no more than a mile away from our compound, shook the walls. The doors rattled. The windows of our supply room cracked. The explosion was louder than the RPG that struck our compound two months earlier. It still doesn't seem real, none of this. Even the biggest explosions seem like special effects in a long, drawn out training exercise. It was still hard to believe that this is real, that people are dying. And that the events that make CNN headlines, the kind of stuff that's passed in my peripheral awareness my entire life is happening a mile away from where I sleep. After this entry on Trueman's blog, there are a couple more entries, and then on November 9, 2003, the entries stop. Five days later, this message appears on the blog from his friend, Emily. "Hi, all. This is Emy, updating on behalf of rebelcoyote. To start with, Trueman is going to be OK, however, he won't be updating for a while." She goes on to say that Trueman's been injured. He's in hospital in Germany. He'll write again when he can. Then, just over a week later at midnight, November 17, Trueman comes back to tell what happened. We were on our way to pick up a few things from our compound. If we were going to spend the rest of the week at First AD Brigade headquarters, we were sure as hell going to have all our stuff. We were just going to make a quick stop at the barracks, then head over to gunner main. As we were coming up towards River Road, I stared out at the street, pulling security from behind the 50 cal. Then all of a sudden something hit me. It felt like we'd driven under a low bridge or maybe someone had hit me with a brick. It took almost a full second to realize what had happened. The smoke and the dust were all around us. There was no sound but the dull ringing in my head, and all I could smell was blood. I began to feel frantically around my throat for wounds as the voice of platoon medic Matt Moss pierced the silence. Get away from the vehicle, he screamed. He was right. The gas tanks could go or someone could be waiting with an RPG for the dust to clear. When I lowered myself to the ground, I looked through the missing windshield and saw Wise, still motionless in the passenger seat. His head was tilted back and his face was covered in blood. Help me move him, Matt shouted. I can't, I yelled. I think my foot's broken. As I hopped off to the side of the road and sat down, I realized that my foot was not only broken, but pouring a steady stream of blood from the left side. Through gritted teeth and intense pain, I unlaced my boot and pulled it off. The left side of my sock was entirely soaked and dripping with blood, but the right side was a large charred patch of indistinguishable skin, sock, and shrapnel. I'm going to lose my foot, I thought. Then Matt's voice broke through my self-absorbed agony. Come on, Wise, breathe, he shouted. God damn it, breathe. You're not going to die here. I shouldn't be worried about my foot while one of my best friends is dying 10 feet away, but it hurt so bad. Wise and I were loaded onto a Blackhawk and evaced to the hospital at the palace. They'd gotten him breathing again. They said he'd be OK. At the hospital, they gave me morphine. It didn't do much for the pain, but Wise was going to be OK, and once the doctor pulled the shrapnel out, he said I wasn't going to lose my foot. All in all, I was in a good mood. Maybe it was just the drugs, but I knew everything was going to be fine. The doctors put me under for surgery. They cleaned out my wound and cut away the dead burned tissue. When I woke up, I didn't feel any pain. I still had my foot. I was going to be back in the States in a week. Then I found out that Wise, the guy I had spent the last nine months getting to know better than any one else, died of massive head trauma while I was in surgery. He'll be buried at Arlington National Cemetery next week. This is all a dream. Any second now, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] going to wake me up for a guard shift. Any second now, I'm going to climb grudgingly out of my bed and look across through the dim light and see Wise. He'll be making that face again, the one that's questioning how many people he'd have to kill to go back to sleep. We'll get dressed, drag our feet up to the roof, and spend a miserable three hours in the freezing wind staring down at the road. Maybe he'll tell me about his job at Greybar or an anecdote from his days as JROTC Corps Commander. I might tell him about Chicago and why things didn't work out with my last girlfriend. We'll nod and pretend we haven't heard the stories before. We'll bitch about our leaders and talk about our plans when we get home. Maybe Wise will even pull out a three-by-five card and draw up the floor plan for his house again. Any second now we'll wake up, and Wise won't be dead. Because he can't be dead. People only die in the newspapers. But the seconds pass, and I don't wake up to anything but sterile sheets and pain. I never thought I'd join the army. I've had a fairly liberal pacifist upbringing and couldn't imagine myself as a soldier. I feel funny admitting it now, but ultimately, it was the college money that got me. It seemed like a good deal. I knew that even if I got sent overseas, the worst case scenario was a rotation in Bosnia. I wouldn't be gone more than six months. I hated the way this war started. It took me a long time to come to terms with my role as a soldier in Iraq. Eventually, I came to realize that, although the method was flawed, the result was freedom for the people for the first time in 30 years. People don't hear the good things from the news, and I'll admit that even I have trouble taking the things that come from the White House Press Room seriously. But no one hears about the people who bring us food in the streets and take their children out to shake our hands. We established the first garbage collection system in Baghdad's history. We've arrested dozens of corrupt gas station managers to keep gas prices stable. And I can't think of the last time I heard someone mention the sanctions, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and are now over. We have no choice but to finish the job we started. Anything less would be disastrous for the Iraqi people. Anything less would mean that every person who died here did it for nothing. And Wise didn't die for nothing. I'm back in the US now. I have a long and difficult road ahead of me. Even once my foot is healed, it will take months of physical therapy before I can walk again. But the important thing is I will walk again. I get asked about my foot a lot. People ask me what happened or how I hurt it, in elevators, in the airport, asking about an apparently simple injury. A foot in a thick ace bandage wrap seems to be acceptable small talk, like, nice weather today, huh? It's not that I mind, it's just that it's awkward, because when I tell them what happened, they never know what to say. It sounds so weird. It was a roadside bomb in Baghdad. Sometimes I say it and it doesn't even sound true. I feel like I'm making it up. Then there's the people who ask things like, how did you break it, or did you fall down the stairs, or the lady who said, oh, I had arch problems once. Not like this, lady. I guarantee you. When I tell people what happened, some people are really nice. They shake my hand and thank me. Others just say things like, wow, that sucks, or, oh, I'm sorry, and look slightly embarrassed. I feel weird saying it, and they feel weird hearing it. I've honestly considered telling people I sprained my ankle. I think it may only be a matter of time before I do. The third blogger is Colby Buzzell, who had a really popular blog, thousands of readers, called My War: Killing Time in Iraq. Since he got back to the States, he's taken lots of these entries, added some new stuff, and published it as a book under the same name. He was a machine gunner in the Third Arrowhead Brigade Second Infantry Division out of Fort Lewis, serving in Mosul. 20 October, '03. Another brief at Carey Theater. The second half was about rules of engagement. A female captain came out and asked us a hypothetical, what-if question. If your convoy was going under an overpass and there was women and children on the overpass throwing rocks down at us, what should you do? Do you shoot or not shoot? The first answer that came to my head was, no. You don't engage. You don't fire unless you see a weapon, so, no, I would not fire. I wonder why she said, women and children, like why not say, people, instead, or was women and children for effect? One soldier in the auditorium instantly yelled out, light 'em up, which was followed by some laughter. But there was also people in the auditorium that disagreed with the light 'em up answer. As soldiers were debating with each other on what should be done in a situation like that, the battalion commander stepped up, and I could tell that he wasn't really digging on what this captain was trying to do here. And he asked us all a non-hypothetical question. How many of you been in combat? Several people raised their hands. The captain, I noticed, did not. How many of you have been shot at? Almost all the raised hands stayed raised. Then you understand that it doesn't matter if it's a woman or a child. If they have a weapon, they have a weapon. If you feel threatened, you feel threatened. He then told us all not to worry about doing the right thing, that if we wanted to do the right thing to go out and rent a Spike Lee movie. He then stressed to us that if we felt threatened, pull the trigger. It's better to be safe than sorry. Better him dead than you. We were engaged in a huge fire fight at the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] police station and the mosque next door to it. It took hours. Then at the end, the ING, Iraqi National Guard, showed up. Our platoon leader chose a couple soldiers from our platoon to talk to the media, who wanted to find out what went down today in Mosul. A high ranking army public affairs officer, a lieutenant colonel, briefed them on what they could and could not say. All three told me that he stressed to them to tell the media that the insurgents fired first, and we were there just to return fire, which is true. But he also told them, do not say that TOW missiles were used in the attack, but to instead say, internal weapon systems were used. Whatever. That's no big deal. That's like saying instead of telling the media that you returned fire with your M-4, tell them that you returned fire with your self defense mechanism. But then he told them to flat out lie when he said, do not mention the fact that the Iraqi police fled from the mosque and the police station, how they didn't even put up a fight, but instead, tell the media that they fought well and did an excellent job. To make sure I'd never run out of reading material, I subscribed to as many magazines as possible before I left the States. I went to the mag rack at the PX and grabbed as many of those annoying subscription slips as I could. I find that infantry men are into macho testosterone literature when it comes to monthly periodicals, mags like 4X4 Monthly, Guns & Ammo, Outdoor World, Soldier of Fortune, which I subscribe to just for the articles, and, of course, the soft core bubble gum skin mags, like Maxim, FHM, and Stuff. Pornography in magazines, like Playboy and Penthouse, are, of course, not allowed in Iraq for reasons that have to do with not offending anyone and being sensitive to the Islamic culture or some [BLEEP] like that. So I subscribed to magazines that I liked, but knew not a lot of other soldiers read, like Thrasher, MAD, National Geographic, TIME, and Details. To this day, I seriously have no idea why the [BLEEP] I subscribed to Details, which I caught a lot of hell for and brought up a bunch of questions about my sexuality among fellow squad members. Every mail call, I would dread whenever the new issue would arrive, because my squad leader would read off the name of whoever the letter or package was addressed to. Then he'd flip it over and show the rest of the squad the cover, which would always be some sexy cover shot of like Vin Diesel or Justin Timberlake. Then he'd throw the mag at me and say something like, don't ask, don't tell. Of course, every one in my squad would get a laugh out of this and say things like, dude, you're a homo. And I, of course, would feel the need to explain myself. Look, dude, Details is not a mag for gay people. Check it out. There's tons of hot chicks in it. And I would open it up and flip through the pages and try to prove to the guys in my squad that Details was a totally hetero mag, which kind of backfired on me, because when I did this, every single page that I opened to was a full page photo of some girly man doing his best Zoolander. Thursday, August 4, 2004. Men in black. I was in my room reading a book, Thin Red Line, when the mortar started coming down. Usually when we get mortared, it's usually one or maybe two mortars. But this mortar attack went on for like 20 minutes. Sergeant Horrach ripped open the door and yelled, grab your guys and go down to the motor pool. The whole battalion is rolling out. Holy [BLEEP]. The whole battalion? This must be big. One by one, the strikers were rolling out of the motor pool ready to hunt down whoever was [BLEEP] with us. Soldiers in the hatches of the vehicles were hooting and hollering and doing the Indian yell thing as they drove off and locked and loaded their weapons. As I turned on all our computers and radios inside our vehicle to get ready to roll out, I heard on the radio that the [BLEEP] was hitting the fan all over Mosul. Large amounts of AIF, anti-Iraqi forces, were attacking us with small arms, IEDs, and RPG fire. And there was a bunch of people wearing all black armed with AK-47s all over Mosul. I was sticking out of my hatch behind the 50 cal. I glanced over to the left side of the vehicle at which time I observed a man, dressed in all black with a terrorist beard, jump out all of a sudden from the side of a building. He pointed his AK barrel right at my [BLEEP] pupils. I saw the fire from his muzzle flash leaving the end of his AK as he was shooting directly at me. I heard and felt the bullets whiz literally inches from my head, hitting all around my hatch and 50 cal mount, making a ping, ping, ping sound. We were driving down route Tampa. All hell suddenly came down around us. Out of nowhere, all these guys wearing all black, a couple dozen on each side of the street and rooftops, alleys, edge of buildings, out of windows, everywhere, just came out out of nowhere and started unloading on us. IEDs were being ignited on both sides of the street. I freaked the [BLEEP] and ducked down in the hatch, and I yelled over the radio, holy [BLEEP]. We got [BLEEP] Hajis all over the [BLEEP] place. They're all over, god damn it. Bullets were pinging all over our armor, and you could hear multiple RPGs being fired and soaring through the air in every which way, and impacting all around us. All sorts of crazy, insane Hollywood explosions were going off. I was like, this is it. I'm going to die. I cannot put into words how scared I was. The vehicle in front of us, Bravo Victor 2 1 was getting hit by multiple RPGs. I kind of lost it and was yelling and screaming all sorts of things, mostly cuss words. With RPGs still flying, our driver floored it, pedal to the metal, and red lined the vehicle right through the ambush as fast as he could. Finally, we fired our way out of the kill zone and made our way over to bridge five. We parked the vehicle and dismounted. I lit up a smoke and started to scan my sector. The Pepsi bottling plant across the street was all up in flames. Then after a couple minutes we were told to load back up and go back to where we got ambushed. I'm not going to lie. I didn't want to go back. I didn't want to get killed. I was scared to death, but we had to go back, and we did. We drove back to the area where we had just dodged death and were taking fire from all over. I fired and fired and fired and fired at everything. We were running low on 50 cal ammunition at this point, and my platoon sergeant, Sergeant Horner, told me to reload. He told me that the ammo was dropped down on the outside of the vehicle over on the right side. Why the [BLEEP] would the ammo for the 50 cal be on the outside of the vehicle? With my hands I did the sign of the cross on my chest, said a prayer, please, God, I don't want to [BLEEP] die. And as my platoon sergeant laid down some suppressive fire with his M-4, I got up out of the hatch, got my whole body completely out of the vehicle, and walked on the top of our vehicle to find the box of 50 cal ammunition. I was shaking and scared out of my [BLEEP] mind as I did this, and thinking to myself that having ammo located on the outside of the vehicle has got to be the dumbest, [BLEEP] idea in the world, and whoever thought of that idea should be [BLEEP] shot. I saw a crowd of people suspiciously peeking around a corner at us. I pointed this out to Sergeant Horner and asked him what I should do. As he was shooting nonstop from his hatch in the heat of the moment, he told me to just [BLEEP] shoot them, and he explained to me that these people have no [BLEEP] business out on the street whatsoever right now. So I pointed the crosshairs at them, but then I moved it right above their heads and fired a burst, which got them to disperse in a hurry. I could tell that they were just spectators. Suddenly, about 300 meters away from us, over by the traffic circle, I saw two guys with those red and white jihad towels wrapped around their heads creeping around a corner. They were hunched down hiding behind a stack of tires. I could tell by their body language something was up. I placed the crosshairs on them and was about to [BLEEP] waste them, but for some reason I didn't pull the trigger. These guys were not dressed in black like the guys earlier, and from what I could see, they didn't have any weapons on them. Something told me that I should just wait one, maybe two, more seconds. Then I saw another guy creeping around that corner with an RPG in his hand. As soon as I saw that, I yelled, RPG, as loud as I could into the CVC. My crosshairs were bouncing all over, so I gather my composure as fast as I could, put the crosshairs on them, and engaged them with a good 10 round bursts of some 50 cal right at them. Nobody moved from behind those tires after that. This gun fight has been going on for four and a half hours when the ING's, Iraqi National Guard, finally showed up to the party-- about [BLEEP] time-- in their ING pickup trucks all jam packed with ING soldiers in uniform armed with AK-47s. We had to return to FOB Marez as we were running extremely low on fuel, ammo, and water, so we all mounted up and drove back to the FOB. I was smoking like a chimney, one right after another. My nerves were completely shot, and I was emotionally drained, and I noticed that my hands were still kind of shaking. I was thinking how lucky I was to be alive. I've never experienced anything like the fear I felt today. A couple times today I thought about that guy who jumped out from the corner of that building with that angry look on his face when he pointed the AK at my head and pulled the trigger. The attacks on my platoon up to this point had been just chicken [BLEEP], hit and run bull [BLEEP]. Every time we'd get hit, they'd be nowhere in sight. These guys today were on the offensive. They held their ground and showed no fear of us whatsoever. Before that ambush, I received a lot of emails from people and I'd just scan over them briefly, but then when I posted the men in black entry, my blog blew up like an IED on route Tampa. I was getting emails from people all over the United States, Europe, Canada, South America, as well as soldiers in Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Soldiers I didn't even know at FOB Marez were emailing me. Even the helicopter pilots that flew above us on missions were emailing. That's when I knew my blog was huge, once I started getting emails from the helicopter pilots. Every now and then I'd get an email that said things like, thank you for serving. I enjoyed your articles until you took off with the bad words. I, for one, am sorry that I won't be able to read about your experiences anymore. I always ignored and deleted those kinds of emails. [BLEEP] them. If they don't like the swear words, they can go read somebody else's [BLEEP] blog. About a week or so before this in the back of the Striker during a mounted patrol, Specialst Cummings asked me if I knew anything about a soldier in Mosul who did a blog. Habee and I just kind of looked at each other, and I asked Cummings why. He told me that his parents emailed him, asking him if he knew anything about it. Habee and I just laughed, so I told Cummings all about it. And he told me all about how his father saves all the entries that I write on a separate file and goes through it all and deletes all the cuss words and swear words out of it, so that way his mom could be able to read it. Sergeant Horrachs sister also read the blog, and she emailed Horrachs to have him tell me to save the profanities for the movie. Honestly, I didn't even realize that I was swearing as much as I was. Sometimes I'd get an email that hit close to home and put everything into perspective. Like the email I received from the mother who lost a son here in Mosul several days before he was supposed to return home on R&R. She thanked me for writing about what was going on. She said, I read many entries and felt blessed, comforted in a way, as you have given me a peek into what my son had experienced in Mosul. You have thoughts like he would have had, I think. I just want to thank you for sharing in this way. God works through people by stirring their hearts and sometimes people never know how they're helping others. I thank you, pray for your safety, and your safe return home. I read her email, and I sat there at the computer monitor for a moment. And I didn't know what to say. What do you say to someone who's lost a son here? I don't know if I did the right thing-- probably not-- but I never wrote her back. I didn't know what to write. Colby Buzzell. His book based on writing from his blog is called, My War: Killing Time in Iraq. We also heard from Trueman Muhrer-Irwin, who recently was tattooed with his friend, Wise's name. His foot is healed now. And Chuck Ziegenfuss. He's at Walter Reed Medical Hospital for surgeries, trying to recover feeling in his left hand after being injured by an IED. Web addresses at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Our website, where you can listen to our shows for absolutely free or do your Christmas shopping. You can buy programs on CD, Best of collections, our comic book and, especially, the DVD of the story I did with cartoonist Chris Ware. That's at www.thisamericanlife.org. 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 came by our office this morning with doughnuts-- yes, doughnuts-- and a warning. Please don't expect every white person who comes to do this. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are? [SIGH] God. PRI, Public Radio International.
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It's a classic David and Goliath situation. Younger sister and older sister. In this case, it's a big age gap. The older sister's 12. That's Kennedy. The younger sister's just 5. That's Zadie. And their mom, who was an only child, found their fighting to be kind of overwhelming. They bicker constantly. They just fight and are at each other. It's not physical, but it's a constant natter. It's a constant back-and-forth. So, two months ago, their mom, Lisa, came up with an idea, a way to change things between the two girls. She and I talked about it back then. You're going to notice in this recording that I have a pretty bad cold when we had this conversation. At the time, Lisa described for me the girls' history together. Once Zadie realized, when she was about two, that Kennedy wasn't going to play with her, she would do things like pinch her. She would scratch her. She would bite her. She wants her attention. Notice me, you know. I want to adore you. Let me. Yeah. I have this relationship with my wife. We'll be sitting on the couch, and she'll hit me. Play with me. Exactly. She'll literally say, pay attention to me. I like you. Zadie, get up. Get off of Kennedy. I like her. Zadie, please get off. I like her. Mute that for a second? So as Zadie got older, Kennedy now sees her as this little kid who can't really play, who is a nuisance, who can pick out what's going to bug Kennedy and do it. And what was the low point of all this? When did you look around you and just think, What am I doing as a parent? I guess this summer, when they were both home from school and fighting all the time. And I just realized, it's not changing. And if it doesn't change now, it's not going to change. Because they're both getting-- I think Zadie's now getting old enough to form this opinion of her sister. And I thought, I don't want that opinion to be that they're not allies. I don't want it to be that they're not friends. Now's the time to do something. And so what's your plan? What we're going to do is this little experiment called the Kill Her With Kindness Experiment. I gave it a name. So are you some sort of behavioral psychologist or something? Oh, God, no. No, I just went on the internet to junior high science experiments and got a whole bunch of stuff and presented it to Ken. Whoa, whoa, whoa. OK, you have the two people who are most precious to you in this world, and you have a problem, and the thought that occurs to you is not, I'm going to seek professional help. I'm going to go to a family counselor. No, what you did is that you went onto the internet and found experiments at a junior high school, not even at the high school level? No. OK, that's the end. That's not where I started. I read all the books, and I talked to all my friends. When David is facing off against Goliath, nothing normal is going to work. Normal is just going to keep you stuck. If you've got a situation where one side is super-powerful, one side is very weak, normal is just status quo. Nothing is going to change. Your only chance is grand, extraordinary measures. A junior high school experiment? That is about as good as a slingshot. And today on our program, we're going to bring you three stories of people trying extraordinary things to balance the scales between David and Goliath. Act One is about a little girl and a big girl. Act Two is about a little country and a big country. Act Three is about some small-minded people and some very big-minded retail chains, and something about American commerce that happens all the time, everywhere, that no one has noticed is a national phenomenon except David Sedaris. Stay with us. OK, so you remember where we are with Act One. You've got Zadie, you've got Kennedy, and their story. Their mom, two months ago, was explaining to me how she was going to try to solve one of the oldest struggles that humans have ever had, the struggle between big sibling and little sibling. Again, we've got a 12-year-old. We've got a 5-year-old. Two months ago, the mom, Lisa, went to the older girl, Kennedy, with a plan. And Kennedy is the kind of 12-year-old who loves reading, who loves science, who loves experiments. And Lisa explained the idea of this one to her. We're going to have a month-long experiment where Kennedy is actually really kind to Zadie and plays with her. And we're going to see if that chills Zadie out at all. We're going to see if that changes Zadie's behavior. So the whole thing, I guess, has been sold to Kennedy as behavior modification. Wait, wait. Are those the words that you used with Kennedy? I did. I told her it was a behavior modification experiment. Yeah. How I see it as a parent is, I want them actually to interact with each other. But that's not what I sold to Kennedy. I haven't really sold it to her as modifying her behavior at all. I sold it solely as modifying Zadie's behavior. So this is going to cut Zadie down from irritating Kennedy, from being a pain to Kennedy, touching her stuff, going in her room when she doesn't want her to. If Kennedy's drawing on a piece of paper and Zadie comes by and will step on, like, that kind of behavior that Kennedy sees as an absolute pain. I've sold it to her as, Let's see if what Zadie actually wants is you to play with her and pay attention to her. So let's see if you doing that is going to stop all the negative behavior. So what she's going to have to do is, after school, spend-- I say an hour. She says that's going to be too long, and Zadie's not going to want to play for an hour. But that's what I'm envisioning, an hour playing together. Every day. Every day. I'm going to pay her, which is probably what she likes the best. How much is she going to get? She's going to get quite a bit. She upped it. She actually negotiated her price. I said $50 for the whole month. And she said, No way. It wasn't worth buying in for $50. So she's going to get $100. But she's got to actually do it. She's got to actually play with her sister. And they think my idea of what siblings-- how they interact is totally unrealistic. Because your ideal is based on? The Sound of Music. I mean, my ideal is that they get along, that they love each other, that they stand up for each other on the playground, that they-- --sing together. --sing together. Which is so funny, because that has a lot to do, probably, with being an only child and always wanting a sister or a brother or just a sibling, another relationship. I was raised watching that movie over and over, and really having that sense of all these kids band together. But, of course, they band together-- like, those poor kids, they're traumatized. Their father's a tyrant. Of course they band together, right? And they're running from the Nazis. Exactly. Not till the end. Have you shown The Sound of Music to the girls? Yes. And do you say-- This is what you should do. You haven't. No. I've said things like, Just stop fighting and love each other. Though I have said that, and meant it. And I've said-- yeah. I mean, Kennedy says to me, Your idea is absolutely unrealistic. Yeah. Yeah, you didn't have siblings. I mean, I think it's very, very possible that, because of the age difference-- you've got two kids, they're seven years apart. They're never going to be peers until they're adults some day. I just think it's possible that there's nothing that you can do. You're right. The thing is, I am not expecting them to interact as peers. But right now, it's the opposite of that. I think Kennedy actively dislikes her. She says it like that. She says it like, I really don't like this kid. What do you think the chances are that this is going to succeed, if you just had to lay odds? 80% chance? 70% chance? 90% chance? I'm optimistic. I'd put it high. I put it at 80% that it's going to decrease the amount of fighting. Yes. I'm going to put this at 30%. So, Lisa LaBorde, many weeks have passed since our first conversation. And you have run your experiment. Did it work? A qualified yes. Well, let's get right to results. Are your kids fighting less? By the end of the experiment, they were fighting less. By week four, less fighting. You are blowing my mind. No, it's actually true. Could we just talk hard numbers? OK, sure. Do you have a bar graph that you could hold up to the microphone or something? Yes, I can describe it to you. What we did is-- it's just a graph. So I took the baseline-- a normal week, before we started the experiment, of fighting. But I didn't do all the fighting, because that's all I would have categorized. All day, I would have sat there checking off things. So I checked the number of times I had to intervene. In a normal week, I charted 31. Per day or per week? Per week. OK, and so now, after four weeks? By week four, we're down to 14. A drop of 50%. Now, you made recordings of these days where they were playing, where you would just set the tape recorder down with the two of them as they played and you just would let it roll. And we have some of those recordings here. And here's a typical one. They start off OK. And then they start to fight. Can I mine out? No, you can't do that. That's cheating. I want to get mine out. Zadie, Zadie, wait, stop for a second, please. And then Zadie howls. Mom! And then, in these early recordings, you step in, usually to Zadie's defense. Kennedy? You're supposed to be playing together. And that was sort of what happened. I stepped in often. I mean, it got to a level where, rather than have them fight, I would just stop it. And I cut Zadie a tremendous amount of slack. So I could see how I fed into Kennedy's frustration and into Zadie's sense of entitlement. So in a way, I was setting up a dynamic that didn't allow them to sort it out. It's interesting, because I think the experiment-- I didn't expect the effect that it would have on me. It made me step back. It made me step back a lot. Yeah, I had to say, by the end of the taping-- because you keep taping the whole way through-- it totally changes. Here's a typical tape. What happens is that they're playing together, and they'll start to fight. Zadie, do you hear me. Yes. There's a recording of them playing Memory. And Zadie screams. No, I don't want to do that. And then Kennedy just basically keeps the game going, and starts talking to her about who her friends are at school. Are you making friends at your new school? Yes. What are their names? Emma, Becca. And you never enter the room. And then Kennedy basically takes it by the reins. She keeps the game going, and she basically engages Zadie in conversation. And they start to talk like real sisters. And then Zadie wins. Look, you won. Mama, I won. And that interaction wouldn't have occurred had I jumped in, which I probably would have done two or three weeks prior. So, by the end of it, it was like, you know what, back off and just leave it alone. So when you started, you were saying this was going to be an experiment that was secretly on the two of them. But Kennedy thought it was just on Zadie. But in fact, it turns out that the secret is that it was actually an experiment on your behavior. Exactly. And that my behaviors probably needed more modifications than Kennedy's. But yeah, I wouldn't have thought that a shift in my behavior would have the impact that it had. Now, this thing has totally changed your expectations and your picture of them. In some ways, yeah. I'm loathe to admit it. I think my overriding angst or questions over whether they would be friends, and whether the fighting meant something-- and I realized, that's not what being siblings is. It's so complex. Zadie will say, straight out, I don't like Kennedy. I don't want to play with her, and at the same time, be absolutely worried about what's happening to her sister. And I realized those two coexist. And I don't have that. There's nobody I have a love-hate relationship like that with. And I don't get it. And I'm prepared not to get it. I'm prepared to leave it alone and let it be, and realize, on some base level, they're connected. I don't see the connection quite yet, in some ways, and that's OK. I can trust it, whereas before-- I guess that's the big difference for me. Before I didn't really trust it. And so, how many weeks has it been since you actually stopped the experiment? It's been a couple, a week and a bit, like two weeks. And so, what's going to happen? Is Kennedy going to keep playing with her? Who knows? I don't know. I would love to think yes. I don't know. It doesn't seem like it. It's certainly not the first thing on her mind when she comes home from school. It's not like Zadie's endeared herself to Kennedy through the four weeks. That certainly hasn't happened. I think she engages her a bit more, actually. So in terms of actually talking to her about, What was school like? What did you do? There were a couple of times where Zadie got quite upset over-- she got in trouble for going into Kennedy's room. And I got very upset with Zadie and made her sit on the stairs. And she ended up crying and Kennedy went and consoled her. That's the first time that's ever happened. It's made everything so much easier, like being a sister easier. But I can't imagine Zadie and I singing together. I just-- yeah. This, of course, is Kennedy, age 12. So, Kennedy, did it work? Did the experiment work? Yeah. It did? It did. She's considerably nicer and easier to be around. Do you like her more? Yeah, I do. I do like her more. She's easier to be around. I feel like I can really connect with her now, which is good. Is she less annoying? No, we have to work on that. We'll have to device a whole new experiment to get her to be less annoying. Really? Yep. And just, realistically, do you really think you're going to be able to keep it up? I'm going to try. Maybe I can get my mom to still give me-- increase my allowance, maybe, if I keep it up. I don't know. I actually don't think it's right for somebody to keep paying you to be with your sister. It'd almost be like if you found out like somebody was paying your mom to be nice to you. It would break your heart. It would. And that's sort of what it would be like, if your sister would ever find out. Like, oh, there were five years where actually you were taking money in order to be nice to her. It would be the worst thing that she would ever hear. Yeah, I see. In that case, yeah, I'm going to stop, But yeah, it's a constant struggle. So, what's going to happen? Because it's hard to figure out games that you can keep playing with her. Yeah, it's really hard. Because, like, Memory, I'm beyond that. I think we can safely say that. You can find the two kittens without a lot of trouble. Pretty easily. Do you get anything at all from playing with her? Yeah, $25 a week. Yes. I get paid. And if you're not getting paid, do you get anything else from playing with her? I could say that I get a sense of emotional fulfillment, but not really. Can you imagine you guys are going to be friends someday? Sort of. Right now, it's pretty hard to imagine us inviting each other over to dinner. I mean, she can't even read, for God's sake? I know. So, do you recommend this for other families? I really do. You do? That they should bribe one kid, and that it should be the older kid? Yeah, for the people with kids who are constantly fighting, this is a good idea. We could patent it and then write up charts and sell it. That's Kennedy, age 12. Coming up, David Sedaris finds a David and Goliath story where we believe that you will probably side with-- well, that would be Goliath. 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 and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, David and Goliath, stories of people doing extraordinary things to try to even things out between the two sides, give the little guy a shot. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Dreams of Distant Factories. What if there were a battle between David and Goliath that meant a great deal to David and nothing at all to Goliath? And maybe Goliath doesn't even show up. From Cambodia, Rachel Louise Snyder tells this story about the garment industry there. We first put this on the air two years ago, which was a crucial turning point for everybody involved. The garment industry is 90% of Cambodia's exports, so when the minister of commerce visits a factory, he's greeted like a movie star. Hundreds of workers, all of them women, stand along the factory driveway in traditional Cambodian silk dresses in maroon and gold, waving hundreds of Cambodian flags. They offer the minister flowers and fruit. As he walks through each section of the factory, workers stand up from their stations and cheer. Plexiglass cases hang from the ceilings and show the kinds of things they make. Fleece sweatshirts, cotton blankets, flannel pajamas. The minister, Cham Prasidh, is particularly happy about the pajamas. There is one thing that we feel very proud, is that there is one year when Cambodia was ranking number one, in terms of pajamas, women's pajamas, for-- Women's pajamas? Yes. That's when 20 million American women are wearing Cambodian pajamas. And we are ranking number one for that in the US. Sleeping soundly and having sweet dreams. We hope they would have us all thinking of Cambodians who are producing these for them. They're not, of course. And that's Cambodia's entire problem in a nutshell. The clothing business has transformed Cambodia in a way most Americans can't imagine and know absolutely nothing about. In the 1970s, between one million and two million Cambodians died, about a third of the population, in the country's civil war. The Khmer Rouge eliminated business of every kind, and even money itself. The middle class was slaughtered. For two decades after that, the country's economy was flattened, and chronic drought affected hundreds of thousands of families. But in the mid-'90s, outside investors began opening garment factories, and within five years, clothes were the country's biggest export. Two things made this possible. First, an international quota system implemented decades ago kept any one country from being the sole provider of clothes to the American and European markets. That meant more than 50 countries got a shot at the industry. The second thing was that, under the Clinton administration, Cambodia was part of an extraordinary experiment. It got special access to US markets in exchange for good conditions for workers and factory monitoring by the International Labor Organization. The Cambodians didn't just make child labor and sweatshops illegal. They adopted some of the most progressive labor laws in the world. Eight-hour work days, paid overtime, three months' maternity leave, 43 days' vacation, annual health checkups, and free health clinics on site. The access Cambodia got to US and European markets made the industry explode, growing from nothing to 250 factories in just 10 years. The experiment was a huge success. But as of January 1, 2005, both trade deals-- the quota system and the agreement with the Americans-- ended, and that's left Cambodia in a strange situation. It's the only poor country in the world that's agreed to all these strict labor laws. Left to the free market, it'll have to compete with neighbours like Thailand and Vietnam and industry mammoths like China and India. And so, the question facing Cambodia is, can a poor country survive if it treats its workers fairly? The minister sees the dangers as keenly as anyone. Because we were successful only in the garment sector so far, and we have not been able to diversify a lot, it's a kind of time bomb. And if you cannot defuse this time bomb, you're going to maybe explode in the future. If the garment sector does not survive in Cambodia, we are going to have a social crisis in Cambodia. Girls who came from the countryside to work in factories, if they lose their jobs, they would never return to their village. And you know what would be their fate. I don't want to elaborate on that. What he doesn't want to elaborate on is that some of these women might turn to prostitution. Over a quarter million women work in the garment factories around Phnom Penh. They, in turn, support their entire families, often back in whatever village they came from. Minimum monthly wage is $45, and with overtime, most workers make $70 a month. That's two and three times what a police officer or teacher makes here. Garment workers send their brothers and their children to school, and subsidize farms that barely survive. The good news is, so far, even with the trade deals expired, they've managed to stay afloat. None of the biggest buyers have left, and exports have even grown a little, 7% compared to last year. Though, in previous years, growth was more like 20%. But since January 1, and the end of all their trade protections, Cambodian factories suddenly are being asked by their customers to lower costs and prices. Some factories have closed. Thousands of people have lost their jobs. Workers are getting less overtime and management is feeling the pinch. It's actually very worrying. Our cost is actually very high. Voren Van runs a relatively small factory of 800 workers on the edge of Phnom Penh. They mostly make Levi's jeans. To hear Voren tell it, business is bad. Making clothes is more expensive in Cambodia than in most countries. Cambodia doesn't manufacture any of the materials it needs, so to create a pair of jeans, Voren has to import not only the fabric, but the thread, the zippers, the buttons, the rivets, everything. Then there's utilities. Voren says a recent study found that the cost of electricity is the same in Cambodia as it is in downtown Tokyo. And there's labor compliance, which is hugely expensive. Just to give you an example, the cost of electricity that I'm paying every month is about $6,000. Now, if I do not bother about compliance, I will switch off the lights and my workers can sew in a dimmer light. And I can save maybe 20%. And that's a lot of money. And you're just talking about electricity. How about drinking water? If I don't give my workers proper drinking water, I can save $600 every month. If I employ, for example, kids under 16, I don't even have to give them anything. I just have to give them a bowl of rice and they will work for me. But, of course, I shouldn't do that. It's not right. To be clear, Voren's factory has a reputation for some of the best working conditions around. He believes in fair labor laws, that they're eventually going to transform society and the country by turning peasant farmers into an educated middle class. But doing the right thing, not dimming the lights, means Voren's only scratching by. And he's not the only one. The danger is that factories will pick up and move somewhere, like Vietnam. Voren says it's pretty easy. All you have to do is rent a space, ship your machines, and hire some workers. You can be running in two months. I can say that 70% of the factories here are struggling. I don't think any of us are making money. I think it's just to maintain the workforce here. You're just surviving. Just surviving, yes. And not only surviving. I know a lot of factories are not doing very well. They may close down any day. If I can plan three months ahead, with confirmed order, I consider myself very safe. The situation is very bad now. The situation right now is that I cannot even plan for more than two weeks. So I do not know what to do. How do you get orders? Cold calls. You cold-call? Oh, yes, we cold-call everyone. But you personally cold-call? Oh, yes. And not only me. Every time I call a bigger factory, they will say something like, Oh, Mr. Van, I'm so sorry. Today, you are the sixth person that calls me to ask me for orders. How does it-- I cannot imagine being under that kind of stress. I just think I would have ulcers, and I would be awake all the time. Thank goodness I have an understanding wife. I'm getting thinner, but that's part of the job. I think everybody outside, if you see them-- if you see factory managers, I think they're now a lot thinner than they were. One afternoon, I go with a translator to one of the main manufacturing areas of Phnom Penh, a neighborhood called [UNINTELLIGIBLE], where I've been many times before. It's the main route out of town, and it's lined with food stalls and other vendors that cater to factory workers. The thing that's interesting about this area is that I first came here close to two years ago now, and it was a thriving area. There were just thousands and thousands of people out, and constant activity here. It was just so lively and so noisy and everyone's just sitting around now. It's not even hot season. Sometimes when I would come down here before, it would be so busy that you could walk faster than the traffic moved. And now it does seem like a highway. We see a woman slicing pork and beef into tiny strips. I ask her why the pieces are so small. Normally, the garment worker, they don't buy a lot, so she has to cut the small pieces, which weigh only one gram. One gram? They buy one gram? Yes. A lot of people buy one gram of pork. She said, before people made more money, and now people make less money for some reason. She don't know, but they just make less. It's been bad for the last six months, and it keeps going down. Here's a shoe salesman. I haven't seen this before. Selling flip-flops. Here's a pair of Barbie flip-flops, palm tree flip-flops. How's business? Not so much. So are there days where she doesn't even sell one single pair of shoes? She said to talk about that, almost every day, I don't sell. Almost every day? She said, "I used to sell a lot before. But these days, I don't do good business. I don't know why. I wonder why I don't make good business these days. I really don't get it because I used to make about $300, $400 a month by selling these old-- credit it to workers. And they pay when they get paid. Like yesterday, they-- worker got paid, but I didn't sell any pairs of shoes. And yesterday was their payday. Since the trade deals expired, Cambodia's had to hustle for new business, now that it's competing in a new way against so many countries. This is where Souieng Van comes in, Voren's brother and the owner of the factory Voren manages. He's also the head of the Garment Manufacturers Association. One morning, we meet for coffee at a hotel in Phnom Penh, just two days after a smarmy factory owner skipped town and blew off paying nearly 1,000 workers. Mr. Van was furiously text messaging, arranging to sell the company's assets, mostly sewing machines and chairs, to cover as much as he could of the lost wages. I feel I have a duty to do it, because the factory closed is a bad one. It is like a thief running away. And they don't even take care of the wages. But it's in everywhere, in all capitalists countries, even in the States. But in America, in other countries, citizens have money to survive for a few weeks, a few months. In Cambodia, they cannot survive without their wages for over seven days, 10 days. So they are hungry. They're hungry. Mr. Van comes from a powerful family, and has the kind of money where he's imported a stable full of horses from France. He could be doing anything. But he happens to believe in what Cambodia's trying to do, and he considers it his duty to help save the garment industry. To do that, his days are crammed with meetings, often with the Factory Association's secretary general, Ken Loo, at his side. So, good morning, lady and gentlemen. They're sitting at a table with two dozen Singaporean men and women in Western suits. Tropical fruit and bottles of water sit on three big trays in the middle of the table. The Singaporeans are all members of a manufacturing association, and they're on a fact-finding mission, looking for a new country where they can open up their businesses. They've also been to Vietnam on this trip, and Mr. Van and Ken want to do everything they can to persuade them Cambodia's the better choice. They have two days. Ken does most of the talking, and he starts with Cambodia's trump card, really the only thing they have to sell. Cambodia has a good reputation with many international buyers, especially the big buyers that are concerned about their corporate image, concerned about corporate social responsibilities. And GAP has been our largest single buyer. The GAP alone has 40 factories in the country, and constitutes 25% of Cambodia's entire clothing industry. Lots of other big names are here, too. It's weird to be sitting in a tiled conference room in Phnom Penh while vendors push wooden noodle carts outside, and hearing Asian executives recite every brand name you'd see in your local mall. Levi's, H&M, Nike, Adidas, Reebok, all have indicated their intention to increase sourcing from Cambodia. Of course, Cambodia is not a panacea for production. We have our own internal problems, and these are the problems faced by all developing economies in the world, namely corruption, bureaucracy. The Cambodians are amazingly frank about the problems of doing business in their country. The corruption is notorious, and pretty much everyone in the region, including the Singaporeans, knows it. And there's not much point pretending otherwise. Then there are the unions. Just to give you an idea, we have, at present, 223 garment factories. And, at the last count, 785 unions. At last count, and growing, and growing. That's right. An average of three unions per factory. Sometimes one group of workers in a factory will go on strike while the others work away at their posts. It makes negotiations totally unwieldy. Corrupt unions have extorted money from factory owners and other workers, and demanded ridiculous benefits. Owners already feel a number of the rules, based on French labor laws, are unfair. In the meeting with the Singaporeans, for example, a lot of time was taken up with questions about breastfeeding breaks, which are required for new mothers. How do they happen? the Singaporeans wondered. Do the babies come to the factories? In Cambodia, working women leave their kids with family, so the breastfeeding thing is a logistical nightmare. There are a bunch of laws like this, headaches that are the cost of fair labor. But Ken tells them these costs will all be worth it, and then he tells them Cambodia's new strategy to keep the country competitive. It's a bill before Congress-- the US Congress-- called the Trade Act of 2005. If it passes, Cambodia and a bunch of other poor countries would get tariff-free access to the US market. Right now, they're paying an average of 17%. Ken explains that Cambodia is asking for the tax break along with 13 other so-called least developed countries, or LDCs. They included Sri Lanka, hoping the tsunami there would earn the bill some sympathy votes. Ken and Mr. Van will be flying out to Washington to lobby for the bill in a week, and Ken lays out the pitch they're using with the American lawmakers. The angle is very logical. There are 50 LDCs in the world, five-zero. And the US has provided preferential access for 35 out of the 50 LDCs, basically in the sub-Saharan African region and the Caribbean and the South American. But 15 LDCs in the Asia-Pacific region have been left out. We are approaching the Americans, we are approaching the politicians, to say, Look, you have left us out. We are not asking for anything extra. We just want to be treated fairly as an LDC. You have given this to other LDCs. We feel it is fair you give the same treatment to us. And we have gotten very good reactions. Some of the politicians were very surprised. Oh, really? 14 LDCs in Asia-Pacific were left out? Which includes a couple of countries that have a lot of interest in the House, namely Afghanistan. We have got very strong bipartisan sponsors of the bill, meaning we have got Republican and Democrat sponsors. For example, we just had-- what's-- Obama? Barack Obama. We just had Barack Obama sign on as a co-sponsor for our bill. Barack Obama is seen as the leader of the young generation of politicians in the US. We are also in the process of convincing Senator Clinton, because having her on board would be very influential, because she represents a lot of the female voice. This is what it's like to be the little guy up against the giant. You have to know everything about the giant, and the giant doesn't even know you're there. The Singaporeans ask for details about the bill, and the likelihood it will pass by the end of the year. They say the way Congress votes will sway their decision. The meeting adjourns. What Mr. Van and Ken didn't tell the Singaporeans is that if the Trade Act doesn't pass, and soon, by the end of 2005 or the first few months of 2006, it might be too late anyway. At Mr. Van's factory, Voren says all it would take is two months without orders, and his factory and others would close. In July, Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh, Mr. Van, and Ken flew to Washington, DC to lobby for the Trade Act of 2005. The trip had been planned months in advance, and they'd banked on the fact that CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, would be resolved by then. It wasn't. For two days, they lobbied any member of Congress who would see them, which turned out to be eight people. Mostly, when they heard the Cambodian story, they were sympathetic, and three of them signed onto the bill. But Ken says the congressmen were preoccupied with other issues. They were all obsessed with CAFTA at the moment. And when we asked them whether they were ready to support the bill, they said, Not at this moment. This bill is not going to move unless we defeat CAFTA or unless we get CAFTA approved. So that was a bit disheartening. They'd also hoped to meet with President Bush, or at least someone from his administration. But the president was also preoccupied with CAFTA, and with his new Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts. Their previous trips had gone about the same. Their bill only has 25 sponsors, short of the 70 they ideally want, though this is way further than anybody thought they'd get. Every single person we speak to tells us, Impossible. No chance in hell. When we speak to the US administration, when we speak to the US Embassy, they say, quote, "No chance in hell. You're not going to get it." But still, we commit our resources, we commit our time for this cause. And it's really a lot of money. In Cambodia, the garment industry is front-page news every single day. Factories open or close. New brands come in or leave. Workers strike or lose their jobs. And while this bill means everything to the Cambodians, the sad fact is that Americans don't even know any of this is happening. Here's Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh. Actually, for me, when I go, I have the feeling that I'm coming like a beggar. But I need to go, despite I feel like a beggar, because right behind me, I have 2 million and a half people who are counting on this Trade Act to survive. You'd think the one natural ally Cambodia would have for this bill would be the labor unions, who are always trying to get the US to include workers' rights overseas in its trade bills. But, in fact, Cambodia's most vocal opponent of the Trade Act is a labor union, and the most dramatic moment of their trip to Washington came when the minister was speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And Mark Levinson, the chief economist for UNITE, the textile union, stood to argue with him. Levinson said that since the US trade deal with Cambodia ended, workers' conditions have gotten progressively worse. What we hear from workers in Cambodia is that since that link ended, there's backsliding in Cambodia. The situation is deteriorating in Cambodia, because the experiment, which was a success, is now over. Here's where he's coming from. Even though conditions have improved for Cambodian workers when they're on the job on the factory floor, when workers hold demonstrations, even small ones of a dozen people or so, police come and run them off. There have been threats, intimidation, and beatings of union organizers by thugs trying to repress dissent. Two years ago, a wildly popular union leader was gunned down on a Sunday morning while he was reading the newspaper. Most everyone believes it was a political killing. 15,000 people attended his funeral. But when Mark Levinson brings this up, it utterly galls the minister. From his point of view, established democracies like America don't have realistic expectations of brand-new democracies like Cambodia. A new country isn't going to solve all the corruption and civil rights abuses all at once. And without help like this trade bill, it'll just make the problems harder to solve, not easier. You have to understand the context in which we are living. You know the history of Cambodia, but you have not known everything. We have gone through six successive political regimes in Cambodia within 30 years. People of my age, we saluted six different national flags of Cambodia. How many have you saluted so far? Only one. And through this type of conflict, genocide, and everything, we come out and try to find peace first. We are all new. Six years ago, there is almost no unions in Cambodia. There are not unions in factories because there are no factories in Cambodia. We are all young. The workers are young, the unions are young, the factories [? are building, ?] the factory managers are new. And we have a system that is also new. We are open to democratization, but the question is that we need a kind of transition period where people mature in learning the laws, in abiding to the laws. Before they leave DC, Mr. Van and Ken check out a few chain stores in Georgetown. They never miss a chance to do this when they come to the States, to see the actual "Made in Cambodia" clothes that trendy Americans buy. Their first store is Adidas. It doesn't go that well. No, made in Vietnam. Thailand. Indonesia. Turkey. The same scenario is repeated at GAP Kids and at Abercrombie & Fitch. At The GAP, things seem more promising. Ken spots some familiar shirts on the table, striped ladies' tops he swears he's seen in Cambodia. But when they check the labels, they see Sri Lanka. Not only aren't they finding Cambodian products, they're finding stuff they could be making in Cambodia, stuff they want to be making. Mr. Van seems almost mystified by his country's lack of representation. He picks up a tiny pair of khaki pants at Baby GAP. We can do it better in Cambodia. Look at this stitch. Look, it's lousy. They're not finishing. We can do better. This stitch would be rejected by quality control. We do better. Something Baby GAP has to do in Cambodia. Something wrong. Why is Baby GAP not down in Cambodia? I don't know. Good question. Why can't we make that? Finally they have some success. They spot a blue soccer jersey costing $50. Cambodia will get roughly $10, or a fifth of the selling price. The few other Cambodian-made garments they see are simple t-shirts or sweat tops, nothing more complex, like ornamental stitching that commands higher prices, the kinds of things that China, Vietnam, and Thailand do. All in all, pretty discouraging for them. Cambodia is still a small, struggling player in the industry. And the way they see it, the success or failure of their experiment at fair labor practices is now in the hands of the US Congress. But the legislation that could help Cambodia, the Trade Act of 2005, doesn't stand any chance at all to make it to a vote in 2005. Mr. Van and Ken and the minister aren't giving up. They had scheduled another lobbying trip for October, but it was canceled at the last minute because of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. They haven't rescheduled yet. They're waiting for a time when US politicians can give them more attention. It's hard to imagine when that time will be. Rachael Louise Snyder lives in Cambodia. This story also appears in her just-published book, Fugitive Denim, about the people who make blue jeans in the global economy. Lisa Pollak did reporting and recording for this story in Washington, DC. It's been two years since we first broadcast that story, and the Trade Act of 2005, which Cambodians thought would save the clothing industry in their country, never got to the Senate floor. It was reintroduced this year, but is now currently sitting in committee. While the future of this particular act remains uncertain, the US has put limits on the amount of clothing that could be imported from China. Those limits on China will continue until 2008. Ken Loo says that Cambodia is likely to lose a fourth of their garment revenues if those limits are lifted. For now, though, the Cambodians have actually done pretty well. Despite their fears, exports were up nearly 20% between 2005 and 2006, and they've remained up ever since, mostly because of companies like The GAP and Levi's, who want to buy from Cambodia because of their fair labor practices. Cambodia continues to send their lobbying delegation to Washington, DC, hoping to get a version of the Trade Act passed, so they don't get creamed when Chinese quotas end. Act Three, Adventures at Poo Corner. Well, now we have this David and Goliath story, where the Goliaths are giant American retailers and the Davids are everyday people, a very particular kind of everyday people. This is a national phenomenon that David Sedaris noticed when he was out on the road. A book tour allows one to travel the country and see almost none of it. The airport, the hotel, the store that's hosting you, that's usually the extent of it. But you do get to meet people and enjoy the sorts of exchanges you probably couldn't otherwise. Take this woman I met outside of Detroit, I think it was. We got to talking, and while signing her book, I learned that she worked at Target. "Do a lot of people defecate in your store?" I asked. And she placed her hand over mine, saying, "How did you know?" "Well," I told her, "It's like this." In my boyfriend Hugh's last year of high school, his family moved back to the United States and he got a job at a certain clothing store. OK, it was The GAP. Hugh got a job at The GAP. And on more than one occasion, a customer entered the dressing room and defecated on the floor. The carpeted floor, to be exact. He mentioned this about six months ago, and I was like, "We've been together for how long? And you're only telling me this now?" Because this kind of story is right up my alley. What kind of a person would defecate in The GAP? It could be seen as a political statement, or an attempt to even some sort of a score, but that's probably giving credit where it's not due. There are bound to be exceptions, but from what I've gathered, the store itself is unimportant. In this woman's Target, people will crouch down in the middle of those circular clothing racks, do it right there with no door to hide them. In Pier 1, they'll just lean against the wall and lower their pants. The place is an outhouse, from what I've heard. So are Sears and Penny's. And this sort of thing has been going on for ages. As an author on book tour, I believe it's my duty to spread pertinent information from one part of the country to another. Night after night, I addressed the subject of chain store defecation, and 97% of the audience would shake their heads, no. "You're putting me on," they'd say. "I don't believe it." The other 3% would nod, yes. And these were the ones who worked in retail. One man that I spoke to stocks shelves at Kroger, and swore that it happens all the time. "In my case, it's mainly kids," he said, which is something I heard from quite a few people. Some poor four-year-old will ask to go to the bathroom, and the mother will point toward a dark corner of the shoe department or to a pyramid of canned pineapple. I guess they figure that, because it's a child, it doesn't really count. But I mean, come on, of course it counts. In Chicago, I met a librarian who decorated her children's department with an elaborate cardboard castle, something she'd crafted by hand and painted to look like stone. The castle went up, and come the second day, what did she find lying just inside the drawbridge? A turd, that's what. Though, in this case, it was left by a teenager, who confessed after committing a similar crime in the elevator. It's sort of a different category, but in Las Vegas, I spoke to a guy who worked for casino security that told me that people are so reluctant to leave a favorite slot machine that they'll often defecate in their pants. He orders them to leave, but instead of skulking out in shame, they'll put up a stink, or most of them will, saying they'll go back to their rooms when they're damn well ready. The nerve. I said to Hugh, "You'd expect that kind of behavior at the craps table. But slot machines?" As my tour advanced, the stories got meaner and more senseless. I learned of a woman who'd entered the restroom of a bookstore and defecated into the center of the toilet paper roll, which is not one of those things you'd get right the first time. It would require a certain amount of practice, but practice where? When she had finished, the woman placed the roll back on its holder, which is inconsiderate, but not as inconsiderate as a college student who has taken to defecating into his dormitory's washing machines, the customer who defecates into the urinal of the delicatessen I heard about, or into the standing ashtrays of a once-grand hotel. I'm guessing that most of these cases have to do with leaving your mark on the world, an impulse we all share on one level or another. Some shoot high, creating lasting works of art, and others-- well, who am I to judge? As a form of self-expression, defecating into a washing machine falls somewhere between scratching your initials into a bus window and setting fire to a trash can. Whatever notoriety there is to be gained is destined to be private, and hopefully short-lived. But that's what you get when you settle for number two. David Sedaris is the author, most recently, of the book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and editor of the book, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. Our program was produced today by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Sam Hallgren, Chris Ladd, Seth Lind, and Bruce Wallace. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Our website, where you can get our weekly podcasts free, 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 show by Mr. Torey Malatia, who feels this way about working with us. I could say that I get a sense of emotional fulfillment, but not really. 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. Mrs. Treanor, can you hear me OK? Yes, I can. What were your in-laws doing in the building? This is The Larry King Show the day after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. His guests are a young couple, the Treanors, who lost their relatives in the bombing, and a young charismatic preacher. Joining us from Tulsa is Reverend Carlton Pearson, who spoke at yesterday's very moving prayer service. What do you say to people like the Treanors? Well, Brad already mentioned his faith in God. And I said yesterday that experience is not only what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you. Carlton Pearson, at the time that he talked to Larry King, was a rising evangelical megastar, a Republican activist who prayed in the Bush Senior White House, a guest on The 700 Club. Host of a national TV show, he traveled all over the world in chartered jets, lecturing to fundamentalist gatherings. But at the height of his popularity, he became involved in a scandal, though not in the kind of scandal that you usually think of when you hear the word scandal. He didn't have an affair, didn't embezzle money. He didn't admit an addiction to prescription painkillers. No, no, none of that. He stopped believing in hell. And what happened to him next was the kind of thing that happens from time to time here in America, even now. He became a heretic, a very prominent heretic in the middle of a religious community, in the middle of our country. Every century in our nation, there have been heresy trials and people who've been cast out of their own communities. It didn't end with the Salem witch trials. And things happened to Carlton Pearson. He had an experience that most Americans do not imagine still happens today in modern America. We're devoting our entire show today to his story. We first broadcast today's show back in 2005. And we're rerunning it this week because we just made a new movie about Carlton Pearson's life. We're excited about that. It's on Netflix, called Come Sunday. Our reporter for the radio story is Russell Cobb, who's from Tulsa where most of the story takes place. And when you look at the rise and fall of Carlton Pearson, his rise is almost as remarkable as his fall. And that's where Russell Cobb starts his story. Carlton Pearson says there are two kinds of people in his family, preachers and convicts. He grew up in an all-black ghetto in San Diego in a strict Pentecostal denomination-- no smoking, drinking, cursing, or dancing. But there was lots of churchgoing. And church is where the really wild stuff happened. People spoke in tongues, got slain by the Holy Spirit. And they definitely believed in hell, to the point where even the faithful could get possessed by demons. Carlton's father and grandfather were ministers. And at an early age, he was following in their footsteps. Well, the first time I ever cast the devil out of somebody, I was like, 17 years old. 16, maybe. And the girl was my girlfriend. This was a tiny storefront where the church was having a youth revival. She just let out this scream. And it startled me and everybody else. She fell to the ground. I looked at the pastor, and he just stood there. And nobody else moved. So I started rebuking the devil, and binding the devil in the name of Jesus, and commanding him to come out, and pleading what we call plead the blood. The blood, the blood, the blood, the blood, come out. You lying wonder, in the name of Jesus I command you to cease and desist. Loose her. Come out in Jesus-- Come out. Come out now. The things we'd been taught to say. My grandfather used to do that. She kind of thrashed a little bit. And she's, I'm not going out, you know, talking back to me like this. So I was freaking out. But I was the leader of the meeting. It was my revival. So I couldn't-- I had seen people cast devils out before. I never expected that, certainly not from a girl I was dating. It took me probably an hour, maybe an hour and a half, before she got through thrashing and talking back to me and screaming. And then it went out of her into another person, supposedly. And they-- the whole pew hit the floor. And there were all these crazy things happening in that little storefront church. It was very frightening, very serious. And that kind of thing happened every night for three nights in a row. And I became a hero after that because Carlton Pearson cast the devil out of people three nights in a row. Looking back at this episode right now, I mean as you're telling it, how do you think about it right now? Well, I expected devils. I expected demons. I saw them everywhere. So that was a part of my life. The devil was as present and as large as God. He had most of the people. He was ultimately going to get most of the people. Demons were all over-- in the church, in the schools, in the neighborhoods. Everything was a devil. So if you believe it, you experience it. Carlton was still curious about what went on beyond the world of devils and demons. But intellectual curiosity wasn't really encouraged where he grew up. This wasn't a place where church leaders had PhDs in divinity. All my pastors but one were janitors. They cleaned banks and restaurants. And I'd sometimes go with them. A lot of them couldn't read. They had no formal education, certainly not seminary. And so we were trying to fit into a big, broad world that we didn't understand, that we felt was basically hellbound, and we were to reach them, but we couldn't relate to them. They couldn't relate to us. So my world was getting smaller. And the world was getting larger. And I was smothering. But I had to find a way to get out of that world and still go to heaven. And ORU offered that to me in a sanctified way. ORU was Oral Roberts University. Roberts was one of the few outside influences that made it into the Pearson home. He had a TV show, and Carlton's mother loved it. And I'd like to take a moment here and talk a little bit about Oral Roberts and the school he founded because it forms a backdrop for much of what happens later. Oral Roberts was a half-Cherokee charismatic preacher who claimed to heal disease with the touch of a hand, sometimes even through the TV screen. He was one of the first preachers to take TV seriously, the first televangelist the way we think of them now. And his weekly show, The Hour Of Healing, reached tens of millions of viewers. And he tried to change the image of Pentecostals from dusty tent revival Holy Rollers into something respectable and higher class. I grew up in the Christian faith and was taught to give, but was told not to expect anything back. And we listened. And we gave, and received nothing back. We had old rattletrap cars, many times no place to live. Our clothes were not fit to wear, and mete out trying to tell people the good news. And people out there saying, yeah, to be like you? No. He also tweaked the Pentecostal message, making it more optimistic. His catchphrases-- expect a miracle, God ain't poor no more, plant a seed and it will grow-- were all about the idea that faith would lead to wealth and happiness on this earth. He called donations to his church investments. And he guaranteed a high rate of return. God said return unto me, and I'll return unto you. That's right. Amen. When you give to God, you're putting money into your account. You won't believe it's true, how the bank of life pays interest. Amazing what a little love can do. You're listening to another front in the Oral Roberts campaign for mainstream acceptance, the World Action Singers. They were sort of musical emissaries, a group of about 20 Oral Roberts University students who traveled around the world performing Christian-themed variety shows to religious audiences. Carlton joined the group when he first arrived on campus at ORU in 1971. By this time the singers had already started to cross over to a more secular audience. Carlton's freshman year, he went with the group to the headquarters of NBC in California to appear on a prime time Oral Roberts special. 37 million people watched it. For a kid who wanted a sanctified way to see the rest of the world, it couldn't have been better. I remember going to NBC, and Johnny Carson had a star, Redd Foxx had a star. They all had-- and Oral Roberts was a star on the-- and he would come in a Rolls Royce. And here we are, the Pentecostal kids, singing on nationwide television, sometimes with Johnny Cash, or Pearl Bailey, or Robert Goulet, and movie stars. And we saw Dale Evans and all that kind of thing. So it changed my worldview pronounced. He brought an elegance to the Pentecostal expression, a dignity to it, that we had not known in California. I was elated. It'll come back to you someday. Through all this, Carlton was getting closer to Oral Roberts. He'd go to dinner with Oral and his wife, Evelyn. Oral and he would talk for hours. But it wasn't until a problem arose with Oral Roberts' son, Richard, that Carlton realized how close they'd become. Richard Roberts ran the World Action Singers when Carlton sang for the group. They butted heads on a few occasions. And Carlton decided he'd had enough. At the time, coincidentally, Kathie Lee Gifford was also a World Action Singer. And she and Carlton decided to quit together. Word of all this made it to Oral, and Carlton got called into his office. To my surprise, when I went in the office, Richard was sitting in there. And he had explained to his dad that Kathie and I were getting out. And he was sitting there in front of his father and me. And it was like whatever the son had done to make us not want to be in there was not good. Because Oral didn't want particularly his two favorites, one of his two favorite singers, me and Kathie, to leave. That's the impression I got. I could be wrong, but I think that's what was going on. And so Richard was the heir apparent, the likely successor. It never crossed my mind that it would be any different than that. I just was close to his father. His father was intrigued with the fact that I was from the ghettos of San Diego. Oral was always for the underdog. He saw me as pulling myself up by my own bootstraps. And so he said, "We like you around here. 25% of my support is consistently African-American." He would've said black in those days. And he said, "I need a black son. Richard is my biological son. He has the indispensable name of Roberts." I remember him using the term indispensable because I didn't know what that meant, indispensable name of Roberts. "But you are my black son, and I need you by my side." Carlton still decided to leave the group, but he stayed Oral's black son. And let's put this in context. Civil rights came late to Tulsa. Schools weren't desegregated until the 1970s. South Tulsa is still almost all white, North Tulsa almost all black. But Oral Roberts had always been sympathetic to the plight of black people. As early as the '50s, he integrated his tent revivals. And he was sincere about his feelings toward Carlton. The two were very similar. Because of their sheer charisma, they could walk in seemingly contradictory worlds-- black and white, religious and secular-- which explains what happens next. Carlton, with his best friend and roommate from ORU, a white man named Garry McIntosh, started a church. They called it Higher Dimensions. And it was different from all the other churches in Tulsa. Here are some early members. First, Jeff Voth. The church can be really, really a cloistered place. You know, white folks kind of worship the way they do. And people of color worship the way they do. And never the twain shall meet. And Higher Dimensions, it really blew that stereotype away. And here's Martin Brown, who joined Higher Dimensions right after it started in 1981. It was very integrated. And that was one of the things that I really respected him for, and I was really proud of him as an African-American man to have accomplished in South Tulsa. And I had never seen it before. I had never seen it in a black church or a white church. One of the things that made the integration possible at all is a characteristic everyone points out about Carlton Pearson. He's a very funny man. Here's a sermon from 1998 where he starts off talking about the need for strong discipline with children. Sometimes she was a sweetheart. No, darling. That don't work. Not with coloreds, it don't work. It may work with some of you Anglos. No, I'm kidding. The coloreds are becoming more like the Anglos, and the Anglos are now starting to whip their children. Isn't that a blessing? All this soft talking ain't working no more. So you finally convinced you going to have to beat them like we beat ours. Strike that from the record, please. This one's from 2001. They started saying I was the most available bachelor. Church was full of beautiful, Holy Ghost filled women. Everywhere I traveled, the place was packed. And I thought it was my anointing and the blessing of the Lord all over me. And then I got married. And the balcony cleared out. I went and messed up my whole ministry. First time I had an argument with her, I knew she was of the devil. He done tore up my life and my ministry. Satan, the Lord rebuke you. Hail Mary, whatever works. One time, we was both trying to cast the devil out of each other. Have I ever told you that story? Can you imagine two folks in love? Satan, the Lord rebuke you. Satan, the Lord rebuke you. I command you to come out of here, you foul, tormenting spirit. I command him to come out of you. Look at me. I don't care whether you're homosexual, heterosexual, or asexual, or bisexual, or try-- trying to have sex. Whatever it is, if it's unclean or unholy, you need your mind renewed. The renewing, everybody say the renewing. The renewing. Anakainos in Greek, and ana meaning back or again, kainos meaning new, not recent but different. It felt good to go to church and have someone who could give you more than just a cursory explanation of scripture. Martin Brown says another thing a lot of people mention, that Carlton's sermons weren't just funny. They were scholarly. I mean he could give you an in-depth analysis of the scripture. He could tell you what the Greek of this word meant and so forth. And I really appreciated that because it gave me the sense that you cannot take everything at face value. You have to study it and know it for yourself. Say it with me. Demons, daemon, it is an inferior deity. Dae meaning to distribute. It also in Greek means a knowing one. So these are little spirits that supposedly have a certain knowledge, a secret knowledge. Things kept growing. Higher Dimensions built a mega church on the predominantly white south side. They hired more pastors, formed a youth group. There were plans to build a ranch and a hotel. And Carlton Pearson's profile was rising as well. He flew around the country, guest preaching with some of the biggest names in the evangelical world, people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. He was in and out of the White House, under both Bushes and Clinton. And when George W. Bush started his faith-based initiatives program, Carlton sat on an advisory panel and became a spokesman for the plan. He hosted a show on TBN, Trinity Broadcasting Network, a Christian cable channel. He was appointed to the Board of Regents at Oral Roberts University and made bishop in 1995 by the International Communion of Charismatic Churches. And he started a revival called Azusa, a modern-day evangelical festival, which was sort of like a South by Southwest for evangelical preachers and singers. Once again, we are live at Azusa. Come on. Let's praise God and put those hands together for our bishop and doctor, Carlton D Pearson. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Brother Alvin. And hello, Azusa. We have come this far by faith. Let's sing it. (SINGING) And we've come this far by faith. Carlton would pack out the Mabee Center, the convention hall at ORU, for his conference and bus in 30,000 people from all over the country. (SINGING) I'm trusting in his holy word. Trusting in his holy word. He introduced new talent, bringing up other preachers. One of the most famous is T.D. Jakes, who Carlton introduced in 1992. Jakes went on to found a church in Dallas called The Potter's House, which has over 28,000 members. He also has a TV show and might be the most important black preacher today. President Bush very publicly sought his support and appeared by his side in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In 2000, eight years after Carlton introduced Jakes to a national audience, Jakes welcomed Carlton to The Potter's House. Let's clap our hands for the visionary Bishop Carlton Pearson and his lovely wife Gina. My, my, my, my, my, my, we salute you. And we celebrate you. We celebrate you for being a trailblazer, for your conviction, for your tenacity, and for your relentless spirit. We celebrate you, you lion. And attendance at Carlton's own church continued to grow. Higher Dimensions added new seats, a balcony, and bought state of the art audio and video recording equipment. I used to worry that it would ever be filled. We could seat about 1,200, and it was full. Then we put the balconies in, another 800 seats. We're running about 2,200 per service, 5,000 on a Sunday. And every person in my position wonders each week, will they come back? And after a few years of driving up here, and there's police directing traffic, and parking attendants, and crowds, and security meets my car, and I go in my garage-- and one day, it dawned on me. And I said, I guess this is the way it's going to be. We are there. So here he is at the top of his game. It's the late 1990s. But something didn't feel right. Carlton had always preached a pretty conventional evangelical theology. Hell was a horrible place-- weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth for eternity. And the only way to avoid it was to accept Jesus. But he was always reading and studying the Bible's origins, boning up on the original Hebrew and Greek. And he'd begun to doubt some of the stuff he'd been preaching. And it all came to a head one evening in front of the television. When my little girl, who'll be nine next month, was an infant, I was watching the evening news. The Hutus and Tutsis were returning from Rwanda to Uganda. And Peter Jennings was doing a piece on it. Now, Majesty was in my lap, my little girl. I'm eating the meal, and I'm watching these little kids with swollen bellies. And it looks like their skin is stretched across their little skeletal remains. Their hair is kind of red from malnutrition. The babies, they've got flies in the corners of their eyes and in their mouths. And they reach for their mother's breast. And the mother's breast looks like a little pencil hanging there. I mean the baby's reaching for the breast. There's no milk. And I, with my little fat-faced baby, and a plate of food, and a big screen television-- and I said, God, I don't know how you could call yourself a loving, sovereign God, and allow these people to suffer this way, and just suck them right into hell, which is what was my assumption. And I heard a voice say within me, so that's what you think we're doing? And I remember I didn't say yes or no. I said, that's what I've been taught. We're sucking them into hell. I said yes. And what would change that? Well, they need to get saved. And how would that happen? Well, somebody needs to preach the gospel to them and get them saved. So if you think that's the only way they're going to get saved is for somebody to preach the gospel to them and that we're sucking them into hell, why don't you put your little baby down, turn your big screen television off, push your plate away, get on the first thing smoking, and go get them saved? And I remember I broke into tears. I was very upset. I remember thinking, God, don't put that guilt on me. I've given you the best 40 years of my life. Besides, I can't save the whole world. I'm doing the best I can. I can't save this whole world. And that's where I remember-- and I believe it was God saying, precisely, you can't save this world. That's what we did. You think we're sucking them into hell? Can't you see they're already there? That's hell. You keep creating and inventing that for yourselves. I'm taking them into my presence. And I thought, well, I'll be. That's weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. That's where the pain comes from. We do that to each other. And we do it to ourselves. Then I saw emergency rooms. I saw divorce court. I saw jails and prisons. I saw how we create hell on this planet for each other. For the first time in my life, I did not see God as the inventor of hell. Here's what makes me right. I'm sitting next to a little Tibetan monk. He's been a Tibetan monk for the fourth generation. Here's a monk that all he does is every morning, he takes the goats. He milks the goats, takes them to another pasture. He works in the garden. He says some prayers. He burns some incense. He never married. He doesn't kill, cuss, fight, lie. He never heard the gospel. Never seen a television or a radio or a tract. He lives way up there in the cold. He's taking goats to one pasture, slips off a cliff, falls into a valley, and dies. Is there a Jesus anywhere? To receive that man? Or is the devil there, sucking 'em all into hell? And I would say, no, no, no, my God loves you. The way the God of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is presented, he's a monster. The God we've been preaching is a monster. He's worse than Saddam. He's worse than Osama bin Laden. He's worse than Hitler, the way we've presented him. Because Hitler just burnt six million Jews, but God's going to burn at least six billion people-- and burn them forever. He has this customized torture chamber called hell, where he's going to torment, torture, not for a few minutes, or a few days, or a few hours, or a few weeks-- forever. The more Carlton started to think about it, the further away from conventional teaching it led him. If there was no hell, then you didn't need to accept Jesus to avoid hell. And if you didn't need to accept Jesus, it didn't matter if you were a Christian. It didn't even matter if you came to church. Everyone in the world was saved, whether they knew it or not. And at first, Carlton didn't understand just how problematic this would be for pretty much everyone in his life. Remember, he had a 5,000-person congregation and eight pastors on staff, all of whom believed that hell was real. And the only way to avoid it was by being reborn in Christ, as they'd been told all their lives. So he had a series of meetings with his pastors, saying he wanted to rewrite the theology of the charismatic world. This turned out to be a pretty tough sell. They were asking me questions. And I couldn't answer them to their satisfaction, and neither to mine. I knew it spiritually, but I couldn't answer it theologically. Because the Bible clearly-- I can take that Bible and denounce what I'm teaching. There is plenty of scriptures that say that salvation is limited to only those who confess Christ. The Bible clearly says that. Hell's enlarging its borders. And that, depart from me, workers of iniquity. I never knew you. Jesus said that. And he will separate the wheat-- the goat from the sheep. And Jesus makes several references to Gehenna, which is translated hell and fire and all that stuff. If you take it literally, Jesus preached hell-- the way King James translated is translated, which is inaccurate. Jeff Voth was an associate pastor at the time. We would talk about his perception of scripture. And he had begun talking about just that scripture had mistakes and errors. And so the demeanor of the conversation would get heated at times. Because it was apparent that we were on two different pages. Open to Matthew chapter five. The average person, even preacher, that you approach and ask, where did we get the Bible? Most of them can't tell you that. Men sat around tables in rooms for weeks drinking wine, eating and taking breaks, fussing and sometimes cussing, arguing over what would be in the Bible and what would not. So I won't get into great detail. But I'm just saying that which we revere as the most sacred lexicon of truth on the planet is not necessarily-- and any true scholar will tell you-- infallible or inerrant. The logas, the logic of-- For all the scripture that doesn't support Carlton's ideas, there are passages that do, like first Timothy, chapter four, verse nine, which says that God is the savior of all men, especially those who believe. Or there's this. First John, chapter two. My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. My dear children-- watch this-- I write this to you that you don't sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the father in our defense. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the father in our defense. His name is Jesus Christ, the righteous one. Read on. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. And not only for ours. And not only for ours. But also for the sins of the whole world. But also-- look at me, babies. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins-- but not only ours, but for the sins of the whole world. He started formalizing his thinking into an actual doctrine, what he calls the gospel of inclusion. Everyone's going to heaven. Atheists, Muslims, gays-- Jesus died for them all. For people like Martin Brown, who'd been at Higher Dimensions since it started in 1981, this was a pretty confusing switch. Here was their pastor-- who'd married them, baptized them, counseled them, and advised them for decades-- all of a sudden saying that the premise of their faith was wrong. It got to a point where-- and I remember the day my wife and I decided to leave. We were sitting in church. And I can't remember the particular scripture. But I remember the scripture said faith in Christ. And he looked at the congregation. And he said, that does not mean faith in Christ. It was written in ink in black and white. And he looks us in the eye and says, that's not what it means. I felt insulted by that. And he could tell by the looks on the members' faces that he had stepped into something. And so he said, wait a minute. Before you react, let me explain. And he gave an explanation for it which I didn't buy. And I think that was the time where we decided, OK, well, we need to find another church that's solid in the word because this is not-- we don't believe what he's telling us. Around this time, a lot of people were making this decision. And the congregation was shrinking. Word started getting out around town that something funny was going on with Bishop Pearson. His own pastors had reached a breaking point. Four of my pastors-- all white-- my four pastors left here at once. And almost all my white members-- at least 85% of the white, non-black members left when they left. It was just a mass exodus. And we were at this table. And they came. I thought they were coming to tell me that they were recommitting themselves to me and to my wife. They had called a meeting, and for me and my wife to come. But I thought when they asked us, they were going to reaffirm. So we're going to pull together and make this thing happen, pastor. We know you're going through a lot of criticism and a lot of judgment. And we just want you to know we got your back. That's what I was expecting. But they came totally different. They said we-- very calm, they just said, we just wanted to tell you that we love you. But we've prayed together. And we've talked. And we've decided that we are going to resign our positions and start our own church. And would you be offended if we started one close? Because we can't find a building far away. We can only find a building down here close. And of course, me being the Christian pacifist, I said, oh. I mean I burst into tears. My wife did too. We were just crushed. I was just devastated that these guys were going to do this. It just totally caught me off guard. Those guys have had nothing to do with me since. They didn't ask me to come to any dedication. They've never asked me to speak. They've never come to anything I've had. They don't even like for people to know they were here. They just-- You don't talk to them at all? No. Well, if I see them around town or something like that, we hug and shake hands and grin like nothing. But there's still a lot of pain there. Again, here's Jeff Voth. There was a lot of crying, and it was difficult. I mean we didn't know. Like I said, it was emotional for us on many fronts. He was a dear, dear friend. And we loved he and his wife and kids and the church. And we'd spent a decade there almost and raised our kids there. And to be thinking that we were going to-- what's going to happen now? Coming up, what does happen next and the actual price in dollars and cents of heresy. That's 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 program today to the story of Carlton Pearson, who was declared a modern-day heretic. These things do still happen in various denominations. We first ran today's story back in 2005. And we're rerunning it today because we just released a film based on today's show-- not a documentary. We have actors playing everybody in the story. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Carlton Pearson. Martin Sheen does this amazing job playing Oral Roberts. Jason Segel, Danny Glover, Condola Rashad, and Lakeith Stanfield also star. Joshua Marston directs. And one of the things that was exciting about making this into a movie is that Carlton spent hundreds of hours, literally hundreds of hours, talking to the screenwriter, Marcus Hinchey. And so the film covers way more of the story than we get into in the radio show. And especially fascinating, I think anyway, are the private conversations that Carlton Pearson had with his mentor, with Oral Roberts, about everything he was saying from the pulpit and what he was doing with his life. And we put those into the film. It's also very dramatic what all this did to Carlton's marriage. We also have the meeting where Carlton appeared before the Pentecostal bishops and made his case. And they declared him a heretic. That's in the movie. Anyway, it's emotional and very different from the experience of listening to the radio show. Again, the film is called Come Sunday. It's on Netflix. OK, back to our story. People stopped coming to Carlton's church. They were upset about his teachings. They stopped coming. Word spread about what he was saying. Russell Cobb takes it from there. After that, the floodgates opened. A series of negative articles came out in Charisma Magazine, an evangelical monthly-- headlines like "When Heresy Goes Unchecked." "In the case of Carlton Pearson's universalist doctrines, we can't soft-pedal. We must confront." Evangelicals from all over the country piled on, denouncing him, saying he was mistaken or even possessed by the devil. Even people whose careers he'd launched attacked. TD Jakes was quoted as saying, "I believe his theology is wrong, false, misleading, and an incorrect interpretation of the Bible." One especially negative article came out just weeks before Carlton's big conference. We had like 10,000 rooms booked every year for this conference. And 350 busloads I think canceled on us just two weeks before the conference. We'd already put the money on the rooms. And so I was left with that bundle. So things start really getting fast. And then the Charisma wrote another article, and another one, and another one. And it didn't stop for about a year, a solid year that Charisma was on us. And then there were other-- then it became a topic of conversation around the country in that evangelical, charismatic community. The one person who could've helped him, his white father Oral Roberts, remained silent. Privately, Oral told Carlton that he loved him. And he still considered him part of his family. But Oral's university forced Carlton to step down from the Board of Regents and banned him from holding his Azusa Conference on campus. By this time Oral was in his 80s, and had retreated from the spotlight. His son, Richard, was the university's president, and Oral Roberts' ministry's public face. Richard, much like he had done 30 years before in the World Action Singers, became Carlton's nemesis. He denounced Carlton's gospel on TV. Here's that disastrous Azusa Conference in 2002. A strange thing to go from a very popular, sort of loved person that everybody seems to like, and everybody wants you, and then overnight, your name is a scandal. Overnight, you are suddenly a pariah. And you adjust. And you wake up one day, and the headlines are different. And people don't like Carlton Pearson. And they're saying things. And fathers who've been precious to me suddenly are not as close. And people that I know love me, and I love them, but there's a silence going on. And I'm not saying something you're not aware of. Or someone will tell you what I'm thinking, because you're going to have to go home, and they're going to tell you that you were stupid for coming, and why did you come? And just the things I've heard the last few weeks, I'm not concerned about me. But I want you to be all right. I can handle my stuff. OK? I know what God spoke to me. So I'm cool. God said, in order to get attention, you might have to create some tension. Because I want you to represent me to the world. He said, y'all have not done it accurately. You've not done me justice. People don't like me because of the way you represent me. And he said, you're not preaching me like I am. And that's why Trade Towers will continue to fall. And religious wars will fight. Finally, in 2004 in an official ceremony, the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops formally named him a heretic. Carlton's congregation, once 5,000 strong, dropped to around 200 people, with some very worldly consequences. I mean I couldn't-- my offerings dropped 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 a week. $30,000 $40,000 $50,000 dollars? Yeah, my offerings. My Sunday morning offerings. I have a million dollars a month almost-- I mean, it's a couple hundred thousand dollars a month. How can you operate if I'm paying $100,000 a month in salaries? More than anything, it was just painful. In the middle of the denunciations, with his congregation leaving, Carlton turned 50 years old. And my 50th birthday was the one birthday I was looking forward to. It was the saddest of my whole life. Everybody was gone. I was in debt. They tried to have a birthday celebration for me, but it was just so sad for me. I just didn't enjoy it all. I wish they hadn't done anything. I miss ORU. I miss the board. I miss being Bishop Pearson, the celebrated preacher. I miss my people that packed this place out and came by the thousands. And I baptized them, and dedicated their babies, and saw them play together. Ran into them at theaters, and saw them in the mall. They'd hug my neck, and the babies would kiss me. And I would hold their little babies, and preach to them on Sundays, and pray with them on Saturday nights. I'd have been studying right now, getting ready for them in the morning. Built this whole place for them, and I miss being able to pick up the phone, and call my friends all over the country, and say, I'm going to be in your city in a couple of weeks. Let's get together. Oh, would you come and speak for us? And that whole world, that's all gone. At least, it appears like it is for me. I'm not celebrated among those people. They don't think about me anymore. It's like I died, and they mourned my death. And they're pretty much over it. I only got a sense for how complete the break was when I tried to get people in Tulsa to talk about Carlton Pearson. Only two people who left the church, Martin Brown and Jeff Voth, were willing to talk about the gospel of inclusion. Nobody else. None of the professors at Oral Roberts University, Oral Roberts' own son, or ex-parishioners, would talk on tape. But I asked the people who did talk to us, why is it so important to believe in hell? They said they didn't want to sit around thinking about God condemning people to writhing and gnashing of teeth. They didn't want to think people like me, people who aren't born again, are bound for eternal damnation. But that was just the point. They didn't make the rules. God did. And he put them in the Bible. Belief in hell was just a test of faith. Carlton received hundreds of letters from around the country making this point, like this one. "Dear Bishop Pearson, You are playing right into the enemy's hands. With all due respect, you can't rewrite the Bible and put it the way you think things ought to be. Stick to the scriptures because that's the way it is, whether we like it or not." Who do you think you are? That's what basically they're saying to me. Who the heck do you think you are? I mean Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, the whole charismatic church, the whole Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, TBN-- you've been denounced, dude. Don't you know you're wrong? Or, you're so arrogant to think that you're right, and all these people are wrong. They're absolutely right. I'm being grandiose, way out of-- I'm saying what we were taught was wrong. We've been sold a bill of goods. I'm assaulting 1,500 years of tradition. That tradition is powerful. People told me it was hard giving up hell after a lifetime of believing in it. Steve Palmer is still with Higher Dimensions. He's a youth pastor. He says hell is one of the first things he learned about as a young person, growing up in an evangelical church. The approach was, let's see. What's the best way that we can get the kids' attention? I know. We'll scare them. We'll say, do you like to burn? No. Do you want to spend forever in darkness? No. Well, then you better turn. And that's how most of us got saved was we chose because the alternative was just scary. And there were movies and things like that. I remember a movie called A Thief in the Night. It was some low-budget, B Christian-- I don't even know if B. It would be like C or D Christian movie that came out in the '70s with this real weird, funky music. And it was a dramatization of what would happen if the rapture happens. When the rapture happens, of course, all good Christians get lifted to heaven, leaving us sinners here on earth. Of course, there's this whole big series out now. And there's movies that have been much milder even than what we saw. But it scared the fire out of me when I was a kid. Because they had these images of a kid walking across the street with a pound of butter that she borrowed from the neighbor. And then the next scene is the butter's laying there on the street. And kids are screaming. And people are panicking. And there's this world order with this police and choppers and things like that. Man, it scared me because every time-- and I lived in the country. If we're out pulling weeds in the garden, and all of a sudden I turn around, and Mom's not there anymore, I'm thinking, rapture. And sure enough it'd get dark, and Mom and Dad weren't around. I'm looking-- I had my list of people that I could call that I knew would-- I knew they would get Raptured if it ever came to that. And sure enough, I actually put it to the test a couple of times because I thought the rapture had happened. So I went to the phone, and I'd call just to hear their voice answer. I was like, oh, good. She's there. OK. The rapture didn't happen. Because she's my Aunt May. And she was a missionary in Haiti for 28 years. She's definitely going on the first round. At this time, has everyone gotten a plate? Because we have plenty of food and plenty of service. It's September 2005 at the Higher Dimensions 25th Anniversary Banquet. It's a big meeting room packed with 100 people or so. Despite a huge cake and colorful streamers and children running around popping balloons, it doesn't exactly feel like a celebration. Carlton hadn't been looking forward to it, thinking it was going to remind him too much of what he'd lost. There's something melancholic in the air. I wander around and talk to people. Most of the people here have stuck with Carlton through the whole controversy. It wasn't easy for anyone. Youth Pastor Steve Palmer jokes, this is what happens to a church when you get rid of hell. Threat of judgment day sure is easy to pack a church out. That and a good fried chicken meal, you will get people to come. That fear factor is definitely effective. And I think if we take away the requirements of coming to church and paying your dues and say that that's nice but it's not necessary, you can put some guys out of a job. Here I am. I'm believing this stuff, and I may be putting myself out of a job. I've heard newcomers say that the first question they get asked when they move to Tulsa is what church do you go to? The question isn't meant to be confrontational. It's like asking someone what they majored in in college. But when your minister's a heretic, you're a heretic too. Teresa Reed is a longtime member of Higher Dimensions. She used to believe it was her duty as a Christian to save everyone from hell. Now she can't talk to her family about church. Friends have stopped associating with her. Even going outside is dicey. One time, we were out just for a walk, minding our own business. And some neighbors down the street, they knew that we went to Higher Dimensions and the theological shift. They came. They knew that was their opportunity. So they came, and they kind of accosted us on our walk and asked us what our beliefs were. Only in Tulsa, right? They stopped us and asked us. They said, you guys still go to Higher Dimensions? And we said, yeah. And they said, and your pastor doesn't believe in hell anymore? And I said, well, we have questions about it. Oh, we think that's a really dangerous thing. You shouldn't tamper with hell. And they wanted to have a conversation with us. They wanted to stop us in the middle of our Sunday afternoon walk. We're in our subdivision. And so I was pretty ticked at that. And I said, look, let's talk about this another time. We're out having our walk. And we just sort of brushed them off. But they felt no inhibition about letting us know that we were going down the wrong path. I've had that experience in the grocery store. You're kidding. In the grocery store? Yes, at Walmart going to get groceries. And how did that make you feel? I mean your neighbor comes up to you and basically tells you you're going to hell. I mean what's your reaction? It makes it seem even more ridiculous to me, the whole mindset that I grew up with. When I look at it and I experience it from the other side, as the target of the proselytism, it makes it that much more clear to me that what we have done from my background to people of other faiths has been really pretty insensitive and pretty mean, even though we did it in the name of God and even though we meant well. When someone comes up to me and tries to tell me that I should change or else I'm going to hell, I kind of have compassion on that person because they don't really know how that sounds. They don't realize how mean-spirited that sounds. It kind of pisses me off sometimes. I'm not going to lie about that. But I understand where they're coming from. And I'm thinking, oh my god, did I ever do that to anybody? It's not all bad. People here say the church is a freer place than it once was. And there are some new faces. One thing Carlton's learned is that if you say gay people can go to heaven, gay people start coming to your church. And he's not in a position to turn anyone away. On the day I saw him preach, several people in Muslim dress sat in the pews. A man from the United Church of Christ, the only denomination to openly accept gay marriage, gave a guest sermon. All of his detractors-- who predicted that once you stop believing in hell and sin, you start down a long, slippery slope to decadent universalism-- were wrong. It's a lot faster than they could have imagined. My friend, Bishop Yvette Flunder of Fellowship International in San Francisco, is a same gender loving female who has been with the same partner for about 18 years. I spoke for one of her conferences two or three years ago. And they're mostly-- most of the people that were there, if not all of them, were gay, but followers of Jesus-- and Spirit-filled, tongue-talkers-- you know, deliverance. The whole thing. When I finished speaking-- and this has never happened to me in the history of my life-- when I finished preaching, they stood and applauded me. And I preached the gospel of inclusion. They stood. And she asked me to walk down through the center aisle and let the people hug me. Because she knew I'd been bruised from my other people that had kicked me out, the charismatic world. So these people start hugging me, and holding me, and loving me, and shaking my hand. And everybody was crying and stuff. And when I turned around, she had come off the-- from where she was. And they had a little vat, a container with warm water in it. And they asked me to sit down and take my shoes off. And they washed my feet. She washed my feet. That's one of the holiest moments of my life. When we finished, they brought in her vestments-- African-style things-- The guy that was in front, it was a dancer, a male dancer. And he was very, very flaming gay, just very feminine. And this guy was dancing conspicuously. Beautiful music was playing. This guy was dancing down. But he never looked at anybody but her. He just looked straight at Yvette. And he got all the way down to her, like this close, and their eyes locked. And for a moment, there was nobody in the room but that man, that woman. And I heard the spirit of God say inside of me, she saved his life. And you saw nothing but incredible love. When the service was over, I went back to my room. And she called. How'd it go, Bishop? How are you? Are you-- everything OK? I said, oh, it was wonderful. It was wonderful. And I told her some of what I just told you. And I said, now, tell me about the young man who danced in front. I said, Yvette, when he got down to the front, you guys, your eyes locked. And there was nobody in that room but you and him. And I heard the Holy Ghost say, you saved his life. And she started crying. Because he walked over and whispered something in her ear and then kissed her. And that's what he said. She told me on the phone in my room that night. She said, he kissed me and whispered in my ear, you saved my life. And she said, that is the son of a preacher, Pentecostal preacher, whose dad won't talk to him, and won't receive him, and has rejected him totally. He came to me dying. He's dying of AIDS now, she said. He was supposed to be dead. When he came here, he was just gaunt and nothing. But we've been ministering to him and nurturing him and what have you. And he's still here. And when I saw-- I spoke for them last summer. He's still there. Carlton Pearson says that if he'd known when he first started preaching the gospel of inclusion that it would cost him so much, he would have never opened his mouth. To the man he was then, the life he leads now, consorting with sinners and gays and Unitarians, was terrifying. But he says that God doesn't show you everything at once for a reason. And now that what's done is done, there's no way he'd go back. After all, when you get down to it, it's a lot easier to believe in a world without hell. For one thing, you don't have to worry about saving everybody. The guilt of not witnessing to every single person you meet-- I'd get on an airplane-- having preached my brains out, stayed up all night, worked the altar, then ate with the preaches, and got up early in the morning to get a flight. I get on the plane. I need to go to sleep. But I should witness to the guy next to me. Somehow, I have to figure out a way to open up a conversation. So I need to put my Bible on my lap so he can ask me about the Lord, or wear my cross, or something to open up the door. Or either, I have to basically confront him and say, well, how are you doing, sir? Do you know where you're going to spend eternity? You're probably going to hell, but I can help you. Then I have to talk for two hours on a plane and either tick the person off, or be insulted by the person, or insult the person. It's horrible, guys. In a way, what Carlton's doing isn't so different from what Oral Roberts, the man he calls his mentor and tormentor, did half a century ago. Roberts took Pentecostalism and made it mainstream by emphasizing the positive and downplaying the hellfire. Carlton took it to the next step and got rid of the hell. It's unclear whether there's a market for Carlton's new gospel. There are liberal wings of many Protestant denominations, and the Unitarians stopped believing in hell a long time ago. So for evangelicals looking for a more inclusive message, there are plenty of other places to go. But these places don't deliver the message the way evangelicals are used to hearing it. Carlton still preaches that the blood of Christ is the way to heaven. He just says it covers everyone. Listen to me when I tell you this. God is not angry with humanity. He said, I'm not going to strive with them, because they're mortal. So Jesus, fix it. You're the only-- as my dad would say, you're the "onliest" perfect one I could find. You are the lamb without blemish or spot. Go down there and cover them. I've got to see them through you. I see them all through the blood. Glory to God. He doesn't just see Americans through the blood, or Tulsans, or people living in the western hemisphere. He sees them all through the blood. That is the gospel of Jesus Christ. (SINGING) All you gotta do is know the truth. The truth you know will set you free. That story by Russell Cobb. He's a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada. In the years since we first broadcast today's story, Higher Dimensions Church went through foreclosure and shut its doors. Carlton Pearson does still preach in Tulsa at All Souls Unitarian Church. And he travels, lecturing and speaking. He's written a book outlining where his beliefs have landed and explaining his reading of the scripture. It's called The Gospel of Inclusion. Look at somebody and say free. Free. From all of my bondage. Free-- Free. From all of the hangups. Free-- Free. In my mind. Free in my spirit. Free in my body. Oh, yeah. I know I'm free. Our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself with Diane Cook, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Production help from Alvin Melathe. Musical help from Jessica Hopper. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where we have links right now to the trailer for our Netflix film, Come Sunday, and really entertaining video of the real-life Carlton Pearson. Again, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who is always saying to me-- "We like you around here. You are my black son, and I need you by my side." I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Hello everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, happy holidays. Ira Glass here. And this, of course, right here is the book which contains every Christmas story ever told. It's a big book. It is a very big book. And as I turn the pages for our stories today-- oh, wait a minute-- A Christmas Carol has been torn out of this book, and The Night Before Christmas. The pages are gone. The Original True Story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, it's just been ripped out of here. The Grinch, Frosty the Snowman, Miracle on 34th Street-- they're all gone. How will there be Christmas without Christmas stories? Wait a minute. We can make new Christmas stories. I'll just sound the emergency horn. Hold on for a second. We'll get David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell and John Hodgman Jonathan Goldstein and Heather O'Neill to write new Christmas fables. We've got just one hour. From WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International it is a This American life Christmas Spectacular in which we head out on a mission that could not be more important. If the old Christmas classics are gone, why we'll make new classics. And with them, we are going to do nothing less than save Christmas. And responding to this Christmas emergency distress call first is Mr. David Rackoff. 10:00AM in December in midtown Manhattan, Helen sits at her desk in a dress of blue satin, a vision of evening in the mackerel light, she is garbed for the company party that night. It is too far a trek out to Avenue J just to go home to change at the end of the day. So she sits doing work, ignoring the mounting whispers and jokes led by Joan in accounting. She's aware that her dress makes the other girls laugh as they congregate over the mimeograph. Helen gamely endures not the kindest of stares with aplomb, for you see, Helen no longer cares. Well, that's mostly the truth, though some doubts still impinge, each year around Thanksgiving an unwelcome twinge starts to niggle and rankle so that by mid-December all that Helen can think is, do they still remember? Time's gone by since that silly, regrettable business when she became known as the girl who ruined Christmas. Helen harbors the hope that the passing five years have made folks forget both the vomit and tears, and the throwing of glassware and drunken oration, that half-hour tirade of recrimination where-- feeling misused-- she got pretty plastered and named his name publicly, called him a bastard. The details are fuzzy, though others have told her how she insulted this one and cried on that shoulder, how she lurched 'round the ballroom all pitching and weaving and ended the night in the ladies' lounge, heaving. Helen turns a blind eye to the smirks and the winks. Surely by now they've forgotten, she thinks. How had it begun, before things all turned rotten? She can pinpoint the day. She has never forgotten how he came to her desk and leaned over her chair to look over some papers and then smelled her hair. "Gardenias," he'd said-- his voice sultry and lazy-- then was back to all business. Helen felt she'd gone crazy. She was certainly never an expert at men, but an inkling was twinkling, especially when the next day he all but confirmed Helen's hunch. He leaned out of his office and asked her to lunch. Their talk was all awkward and formal to start. He said that he found her efficient and smart. She thanked him, then stopped. She was quite at a loss. She'd never before really talked to her boss. They each had martinis, which helped turn things mellow. He asked where she lived and if she had a fellow. He reached for her hand and asked, "Will you allow an old man to wonder who's kissing you now?" It was close and convenient, his spare midtown rental. And after, more drinks at a bar near Grand Central where they sat once again in uncomfortable silence, like two guilty parties to some kind of violence. They sipped among other oblivion-seekers while June Christy sang from the bar's tinny speakers. Helen touched up her lipstick. They got to their feet and emerged from the afternoon hush to the street. He patted her cheek and said, "I'm replenished," then was off through the crowd for the next train to Greenwich. Helen pictured his house with its broad flagstone path, the windows lit up, children fresh from the bath. Helen wondered if she might just smell on his skin the copper-y scent of their afternoon sin. At her desk the next Monday, it was business as always. There were no words exchanged, not a glance in the hallways. With relief, Helen thought, well that's that. Never more. But next Friday found them at his pied-a-terre door, and the Friday thereafter, and the one after that, 'til sometime in late June when their actions begat what such actions are wont to, when caution's ignored. The solution was something she could not afford. They talked in his office behind his closed door. She could tell from his face that he'd been there before. In the envelope Helen found the next day on her desk was $200 and a downtown address. She'd never had visions of roses or cupids. From the very beginning, she wasn't that stupid. He was older, that's true. But they'd both played the game of never once speaking the other one's name. And what you don't hope for can't turn round to hurt you. This wasn't the first time she'd given her virtue. You have to want something to then feel rejected. This wasn't that different from what she'd expected. Expected, she said, and it sounded absurd. How long had it been since she'd heard that word? She'd heard stories of girls all summarily sacked. She was just glad for a job to which to come back. Which she did one week later. He was surly, a jerk. She should have walked out, but she needed the work. Some minimal kindness was not a tall order. Instead, he was rude or he outright ignored her until she decided that this wasn't right and stood in the door of his office one night. He was coated and hatted and ready to go when she asked, would it kill you to just say hello? He took a step backwards as if sensing danger and fixed her with eyes of a cold-blooded stranger. "I don't know what your game is, and frankly don't care, but don't threaten me, Helen. I warn you. Beware." The very next Monday, from others, she heard that-- without her agreement-- he'd had her transferred. The company didn't just outright demote her, but Helen became what is known as a floater-- doing steno for this one or helping with filing. And through it all, Helen made sure to keep smiling. The salt in the wound was the sight that then faced her-- those looks he exchanged with the girl who'd replaced her. Helen made herself steely, was ever the stoic. She held back her tears with an effort heroic. But something was growing with each passing day till it burst forth that night of her shameful display. Perhaps there are those who consider her dumb or a patsy for even agreeing to come, simply showing herself in the very same setting each year cannot help to ensure folks forgetting. But she will not stay home or remain out of sight, for to do so-- she thinks-- would prove that they're right. That was then. This is now. She needn't be pliant. So she stands there each Christmas, alone and defiant. While others quaff cocktails and gradually lose inhibitions that slowly dissolve with the booze. There's jostling and coupling, embracing with brio, all being scored by the hired jazz trio. Helen just stands, observing it all, sipping her brandy against the far wall. The evening progresses, the room now quite loud. And here's Joan from accounting. She weaves through the crowd, a man on her left arm, a drink in her right, "All alone are we, Helen? No fella tonight?" Joan wears on her face an expression of utter concern, like her mouth couldn't even melt butter. Helen almost begins to explain or appease, until stopped by this knowledge-- and it makes her blood freeze-- for here is the truth Helen long had resisted, in all of their eyes she barely existed except as a source of some acid-tinged mirth. For them, she's a person devoid of real worth. They don't think of that time. Indeed, they don't care. She has always, to them, barely even been there. The time when this might have been painful has passed. Nothing hurts Helen now. Her heart has been cast in bronze or in iron, or chiseled from lime, or some other substance as adamantine. Her biggest regret is the wasted five years that she's chided herself over shedding those tears. Instead of her wishing for eyes that stayed dry, she should cherish that Helen so able to cry, that Helen who felt things and then wasn't scared to express them in public, that Helen who cared. She takes Joan's hands in hers with no rank or no bile. Helen looks in her eyes and breaks into a smile. "You're right," Helen says, "I should probably go home." Helen smiles one more time then adds, " [BLEEP] off Joan." Helen takes off her dress and gets ready for bed. There is peace deep within her where once only dread. She watches the window-- for most of the night-- turn from black to pale blue in the gathering light. Then she rises, not tired, sets the coffee to perc, for once looking forward to going to work. For now she's immune to the power of them. She repeats what came to her around 3:00AM, that alone isn't dead. Alone's just alone, Helen thinks as she surveys her tidy, small home. A place for each thing and each thing in its place-- this order alone puts a smile on her face. There are others out there for whom life is more rough, so if this is my lot, well then, this is enough. She washes her cup, puts it back on the shelf. Merry Christmas to me, Helen says to herself. David Rackoff's latest book is called, Don't Get Too Comfortable. That's the band Marah. All this hour, we're going to be hearing Christmas songs from them. If you're just tuning in, this hour we've turned to our contributors for brand new Christmas stories. Oh and I'm being-- oh thank you-- I'm being handed a note. OK, a transmission is coming in over the short wave on an emergency holiday channel from a rooftop somewhere in New York City, one of our regular contributors trying to get through to me-- bring this up on the board-- with some seldom told stories about the origins of our holiday traditions. Hold on, triangulating here. Triangulating. Are you receiving my transmission? Hello. Hello. Greetings, my name is John Hodgman. It is holiday time. And though I speak to you, as always, from my small, soundproof booth in my Upper West Side observatory, I am nonetheless surrounded by the trappings of the season. I have mixed up holiday my famous eggnog-- secret ingredient, alcoholic eggs-- and I have lit a merry little yule log here at my feet, where I am roasting chestnuts to give to the inevitable carolers and Persian Magi and crippled English children who come to the door this time of year. I have decked my soundproof booth with boughs of holly and, of course, poinsettia or, some say, poin-settia. Though it is actually pronounced pon-see-ha. Did you know that it is a Mexican plant? It is. Named for the ambassador to Mexico, James Poinsett, it was brought to our country in 1828 and quickly became favored over its predecessor, the Christ-odendron. Some might argue we've ended up with an inferior, less godly plant. But in fact, history shows us so little of Christmas is actually Christian. Most scholars now agree, after all, that Jesus could not have been born on December 25, pointing out that shepherds did not tend their flocks in winter, and thus, could not possibly have seen the star of Bethlehem. And of course, there is no way that Christ was a Capricorn. Take this mistletoe above my head, for example. It was the symbol of Frigga, the Norse goddess of love. And it was equally prized by ancient druids as a bane against witchcraft and lightening, which I find especially comforting, as both are out to get me. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that the Christmas tree itself was generally accepted into the American home. The tradition originates in Germany. Originally a pagan custom, for many years German Christmas trees were dark or else lit only by natural luminous mosses. It was Martin Luther, the great reformer, who first suggested draping the dry branches with lighted candles, presumably because he felt the custom was not sufficiently dangerous for the thrill-happy protestants. Still, most considered the tree a crude, Germanic fancy until 1850, when Prince Albert-- consort to Queen Victoria-- brought the Christmas tree to England. Albert, of course, was a Bavarian by birth. Many in England feared his foreign influence upon the queen and the nation. This wounded Albert. And the wee hours of Christmas Eve, 1850, found him at Osborne House, the great Germanic castle he had designed on the Isle of Wight. He was unable to sleep and overcome with despair. Despite the children he had given to the nation, despite his beautiful morning coats, and for all of Victoria's devotion to him, it seemed he would always be loathed as an alien. Now he faced another drab, tree-less, English Christmas. And having consumed perhaps one too many alcoholic eggs, the prince consort fled the house, wandering desolately under the starless night until he reached the sea. There he peered from the esplanade into the icy, churning waves, "What use am I to anyone?" He said quietly in German. He fingered the Bavarian life insurance policy in his coat pocket. "I am worth more dead than alive. I wish I had never been born." And at that moment, he instructed his footman, Clive-- who had, of course, accompanied Albert-- to suicide his master on the spot. But before he could act, Albert was startled to see another figure on the key toss himself into the abyss. Stirred from melancholy, Albert leapt in after him and saved the strange man from drowning. As they dried off at a nearby guard house, Albert regarded him-- a foolish little man in flowing white robes. "A druid?" asked Albert. "Only a Druid Second Class," corrected the druid, who called himself Cathbad. The time of the true druids had long been over, he explained. But there were still a few adepts like himself, hoping to earn his golden sickle It was then that Cathbad reminded Albert that, long before there was Christmas, the long nights of December were illuminated by other holidays. Albert's own Germanic Yule, for example, or the Roman feast of Sol Invictus, both celebrating the return of the sun in the darkest part of the year. "Remember," said Cathbad, "Christmas is not a birthday so much as it is a rebirth day. Like the evergreen itself, this holiday is a celebration of endurance, of life, of hope, in winter's longest night, which itself is not an un-Christian sentiment," said Cathbad. "But wouldn't it be better celebrated with a great big fir tree, all the same?" And so at last, Albert ceased trying to belong and embraced his German heritage, pulling a great silver fir from the frozen earth with his bare hands and dragging it back to Osborne house, where he festooned it with candles and household servants. Images of Albert and Victoria embracing paganism within the royal home were circulated in magazines throughout the world, quickly becoming the picture of Victorian Christmastime that every American home would anxiously aspire to. Both Christmas trees and, curiously, Albert would soon become immensely popular. And it is still said that every time a bell rings, a Second Class Druid gets his golden sickle and a British heathen witch king finally finds the love of his people. Ah, I hear the carollers coming and my soundproof booth is now on fire. But before we part, allow me to share with you some of Prince Albert's own advice for caring for and keeping your tree fresh and healthy throughout the season. First, before displaying your tree, always cut off about two inches of the stump. Always keep the tree well-watered. Remember also that it watches you and keeps within its dark and sticky pitch the memory of a thousand winters. And finally, despite what you may have heard elsewhere, you should never add sugar to the tree's water, or aspirin, or any other sort of food, unless it is a little human blood. Now I must bid you farewell. God bless us, every one. And Merry Christmas, you old building and loan. From a soundproof booth that is now on fire, that is all. John Hodgman. He's the author of the book, The Areas of My Expertise. Coming up, David Sedaris and Jesus. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. I'm Ira Glass and you're listening to a This American Life Christmas Spectacular. We have sounded the alarm asking our contributors for brand new Christmas stories, because they and they alone can save Christmas. This next one-- about a savior come to earth living as a human-- is about the difficulty of being a savior, or a profit, or anything like that, amongst us humans. It's from Heather O'Neill. Jesus and I were pretty good friends. And after he disappeared from our neighborhood and all those TV reporters started showing up on our street, I was a pretty hot property. My mom would freak out and call them vultures when they tried to ask me questions. But I'd try and chill her out. "Be cool," I'd say. And it wasn't just that I liked being on TV, I truly liked talking about Jesus. I still do. And to this day, people are always asking me to tell them everything I know about him. Jesus and I were in grade six when we first met. And back then, not everyone was allowed to hang out with me. A part of the reason was the way I dressed. I was the only girl in class who had a pair of high heels. And for my birthday, my mother bought me a ton of black bracelets with studs on them. Other people's parents said I looked like a whore and they didn't want their kids to get my whore cooties or something. But my attitude has always been just to be who you got to be. A part of this way of thinking comes from me. But a good part of it also comes from the stuff that Jesus taught me. But more on that later. Jesus first showed up in the middle of the school year and sat in the back of the class. On that first day, when our chemistry teacher put on this movie about molecules, Jesus held up his hands in front of the projector and made a shadow puppet of a dove. That's how I first noticed him. It was about a week later when everybody started to notice Jesus. In moral ed., we had to give a presentation on a social concern. And Jesus did his on world hunger. He went up to the front of the classroom without a loose leaf paper or anything and started going on about how there wasn't such a thing as world hunger, which as well as being a downright weird thing to say was also factually incorrect. We'd all seen pictures of Ethiopia on the news. And those poor kids were definitely hungry. Jesus said that if God fed the sparrows and butterflies, then he would also feed humans. The teacher pointed out that a lot of animals had gone extinct because the environment hadn't provided for them. But Jesus shrugged and went back to his seat. So we just figured he was really stupid. Since Jesus and I lived on the same block, we'd walk home from school together. One day on our way home he invited me over to his house to play with his Ouija Board. As we walked to his house, Jesus told me that his father didn't really love his mother. He didn't believe that Jesus was his child. He told me that while swinging his lunch pail. He told me that the same way you'd tell someone that you liked apples. When someone tells you something like that-- all casual-- it sort of takes the pressure off. You don't have to start rocking them in your arms and stuff. I appreciated Jesus for going easy on me like that, since we've all got our own troubles. His family lived in a building that had a huge billboard advertising beer on the roof. And there were dogs walking around in the stairwell like they owned the joint. We went into his room, closed off all the lights, and set up the Ouija Board. As soon as we touched the marker, it started zipping around like a cockroach high on roach poison. I'd never seen such a thing before. Jesus and I took our fingers off the marker, but it kept sliding around just the same. It spelled out, "I am with you Jesus." Jesus and I screamed our heads off. We jumped off the couch and ran right into the apartment hallway. Under the stairwell, I let Jesus put his hand against my T-shirt to see how hard my heart was beating. Jesus continued to get into trouble for ridiculous things at school like photocopying his head in a copier in the school library and giving himself a haircut in art class. He wore his ski mask one day-- even though it was April already-- and impersonated Gollum's voice underneath it. I told my mom about it and she said he might be schizophrenic. But she changed her mind about him when she met him. One really warm spring day, Jesus showed up at my apartment. I never invited people over. So I was a little put off having Jesus in our house. Once I had Georgie over and he said he found our apartment depressing. "I like your place," Jesus said, leaning against my bedroom window pane, "You have a great view from here, right out onto the record store. It probably helps you dream of music. We have the best neighborhood." "Wouldn't you rather we lived in Westmount?" I asked. Westmount was the fanciest neighborhood in the city. And my mother was always going on about how-- if she won the Lucky Seven-- she'd set fire to the building and move us there in a smoke cloud of glory. "Being rich is stupid," he said. "It's way better to have less. It makes you cooler. No one from a rich background can ever really be cool." He said all of this just the way he dropped the news about his dad, very matter of fact. Maybe that was why I bought it. It seemed to just make sense, like he was saying something that I had already thought of myself, but I'd never actually gotten around to putting into complete sentences. Jesus' words made me feel like, no matter how much there was something deep down wrong with you, there really wasn't anything wrong with you at all. Jesus liked absolutely everybody in our school in a way that I'd never seen before or since. I learned this one day at lunch time. It was sunny and beautiful out so we went to sit on the picnic tables that were at the end of the school yard. "Uh, we'd better turn right back," I said, "Look who's at the table." It was Sam, a boy no one talked to. He lived across the street from the school, so his mother assumed she didn't have to get dressed when she came over. She'd show up with his lunch in her housecoat and slippers. His dad had a beard that came down to his chest. And he walked down the street looking straight ahead of him, never using his neck. And once at the grocery store, I'd seen them using a sock as a wallet. "I think he's all right," Jesus said. "He reminds me of Willy Wonka." "I saw him trying to burn the bottom of his shoes with a lighter," I said. There was no stopping Jesus. So we walked over towards him. Sam looked at us both, expecting us to tell him to get lost. "Can we sit with you?" Jesus asked, sitting down. "OK," Sam said wearily. "Do you like the White Stripes?" I asked, to make conversation. "When they're in the middle of the street I guess I do," he said nervously, not knowing what the hell I was getting at, as though this was a setup to a joke that would end with me brushing liquid paper across his face. I spent the lunch looking at my feet, not really knowing what one should say to the insane. Jesus just smiled, peacefully chewing his peanut butter sandwich. "Did you ever go to a fair last year?" Sam said suddenly. "They have these fancy horses with hair that goes down to their feet." He took a photograph out of his pocket of the skinniest, prettiest white horse I'd ever seen. It was more beautiful than a unicorn. What could I say? The world was filled with mysteries. Then our teacher, Mrs. Dumont, went on maternity leave. And we got stuck with Mrs. Allison. On the first day, she told the class that this boy, Quincy, hadn't paid his lunch fees yet. She said the only way you could be excused from lunch fees was if your father didn't work. She asked if this was the case and Quincy just shifted in his seat. She told him to bring in a note the next day from his dad explaining that he didn't have a job. Every day for the rest of the week she would ask Quincy where the note was. Another thing Mrs. Allison had a problem with was the way Jesus fluttered from desk to desk, helping the weaker kids with their long division. Mrs. Dumont used to look the other way with this. But Mrs. Allison said that, as well as being disruptive, it wasn't giving her an accurate sense of who the class knuckleheads were. "Where's your lunch?" asked Jesus. I was sitting in the cafeteria with my head down on the table. "Mrs. Allison," I said. "She tossed it." I explained how she saw me eating a mock chicken sandwich and how she held it up for everyone to see. I explained how she picked it up with the tips of her fingers, like it was a dirty sweat sock, and said she was going to send me home with one of those nutrition wheels to give my mother so she could know better. Jesus stormed off. I followed him down the hallway. He kicked open the door to the teachers' lounge and walked right in. A terrible whiff of stale cigarette smoke hit me. It was the first time that anyone had ever stood up for me. It was terrifying and wonderful at the same time. It made me feel like I'd found a $100 bill and was being chased by a rabid dog all at once. All the kids in the hall got hysterical when they saw that Jesus had just walked into the teachers' lounge. It was magically off limits. They all started banging on their lockers and calling out for joy, like the power had just gone off. But this was even better than that. It was as if the whole building was coming down. There are all kinds of stories about what Jesus had said to Mrs. Allison in the teachers' lounge that day. In my mind, I imagined her crumpling to her knees as he made her realize everything bad she'd ever done to me. Jesus was suspended from school for a week. In class, Mrs. Allison said Jesus wasn't the big shot we all thought. The principal agreed with her that he was a troublemaker and that he was messing with everyone's heads. His father wouldn't let him stay at home alone during the day. He said he didn't want Jesus messing up the house. So Jesus rode the bus back and forth and hung around downtown. I heard how he hung out in the pool hall and the older teenagers would hoist him onto the table and he would just talk. They said he was funnier than Robin Williams. But if I knew Jesus, he was just telling it like it was. Then on the third day of his suspension, Jesus never came home. The story went that he was abducted. But nobody could really say for sure. The thing is, he would have been really easy to kidnap. Jesus trusted everyone. There are pictures of Jesus plastered to every telephone pole in the city, and practically the whole school had to be treated for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Sam said he saw Jesus in the park a little while after he vanished, picking up litter. But you couldn't believe what Sam said. He'd become totally obsessed with Jesus after the disappearance. Every composition he wrote in class was about him. The teacher said it was just his way of coping with the stress. I guess I was dealing with some serious stress of my own, because one day in art class, when the teacher told me that little girls who wore black tank tops didn't get into college, I looked right back at him and said, "What makes you so perfect? You've done too many lousy things yourself to be judging children." And the teacher got all red in the face because he knew it was the truth. "Stick to your teaching from now on," said someone from the back of the class. And we all nodded and muttered our consent. I knew that Jesus would have loved that. These were the kinds of things that he would say. And it felt good to say them. Heather O'Neill has a new book coming out from HarperCollins called Lullabies for Little Criminals. You're listening to a This American Life Christmas Spectacular. And of course, the classic Christmas stories are like little Christmas fables. And with our next, brand new story to save Christmas we have David Sedaris. The cow was notoriously cheap. So it surprised everyone when she voted, yes, for the secret santa program. It was the horse's suggestion and she backed it immediately saying, "I choose the turkey." "That's not exactly the way it works," the pig explained. "It's secret, see? So we each draw a name and keep it to ourselves until Christmas morning." "Why do you have to be like that?" the cow asked. And the duck sighed, "Here we go." "First you ask me to give someone a Christmas present," the cow continued, "And then you tell me it has to be done your way. Like, oh, I have four legs so I'm better than everyone else." "Don't you have four legs?" the pig asked. "All right, just because you have a curly tail," the cow said. The pig tried looking behind him. But all he could see were his sides. "Is it curly, curly?" he asked the rooster, "Or curly, kinky?" "The point is that I'm a little tired of being pushed around," the cow said. "I think a lot of us are." This was her all over. So rather than spending the next week listening to her complain, it was decided that the cow would give to the turkey and that everyone else would keep their name a secret. There were, of course, no shops in the barnyard, which was a shame as all of the animals had money-- coins mainly, dropped by the farmer and his children as they went about their chores. The cow once had close to $3 and gave it to a calf the farmer planned on taking into town. "I want you to buy me a knapsack," she told him, "Just like the one that the farmer's daughter has, only bigger and blue instead of green. Can you remember that?" The calf had tucked the money into his cheek before being led out of the barn. "And wouldn't you know it," the cow later complained, "Isn't it just my luck that he never came back?" She'd spent the first few days of his absence in a constant, almost giddy, state of anticipation. Watching the barn door, listening for the sound of the truck, waiting for that knapsack, something that would belong only to her. When it no longer made sense to hope, she turned to self pity then rage. The calf had taken advantage of her, had spent her precious money on a bus ticket and boarded thinking, so long, sucker. It was a consolation then to overhear the farmer talking to his wife and learn that taking an animal into town was a euphemism for hitting him in the head with an electric hammer. So long, sucker. Milking put the cow in close proximity to humans, much closer than any of the other animals. And she learned a lot by keeping her ears open-- local gossip, the rising cost of fuel oil, and countless little things, the menu for Christmas dinner, for instance. The family had spent Thanksgiving visiting the farmer's mother in her retirement home and had eaten what tasted like potato chips soaked in chicken fat. Now they were going to make up for it. "Big time," the farmer's wife said. And with all the trimmings. The turkey didn't know that he would be killed on Christmas Eve. No one did, except for the cow. That's why she'd specifically chosen his name for the secret Santa program. It got her off the hook and made it more fun to watch his pointless, fidgety enthusiasm. "You'll never in a million years guess what I got you," she said to him a day after the names were drawn. "Is it a bath mat?" the turkey asked. He'd seen one hanging on the clothesline and was obsessed with it for some reason. "It's a towel for the floor," he kept telling everyone. "I mean really, isn't that just the greatest idea you ever heard in your life?" "Oh, this is a lot better than a bath mat," the cow said, chuckling as the turkey sputtered, "No way," and "What could possibly be better than a bath mat?" "You'll seek come Christmas morning," she told him. Most of the animals were giving food as their secret Santa gift. No one came out and actually said it, but the cow had noticed them setting a little aside. Not just scraps, but the best parts-- oats from the horse, thick crusts of bread from the pig. Even the rooster-- who was the biggest glutton of all-- had managed to sacrifice and had stockpiled a fistful of grain behind an empty gas can in the far corner of the barn. He and the others were surely hungry, yet none of them complained about it. And this bothered the cow more than anything. How could they be so corny? She looked at the pig who sat smiling in his pen and then at the turkey who'd hung a sprig of mistletoe from the end of his waddle and was waltzing across the floor saying, "Any takers?" Even to other guys. It was his cheerfulness that irritated her the most. And so, on the morning of Christmas Eve she pulled him aside for a little talk about the future. "The farmer will be cutting your head off at around noon," she said. "His son wanted him to use a chainsaw, but he's a traditionalist so we'll probably be sticking with the axe." The turkey laughed, thinking it was a joke. But then he saw the pleasure in the cow's face and knew that she was telling the truth. "How long have you known?" he asked. "A few weeks," the cow told him. "I meant to tell you earlier, but what with all the excitement, I guess I forgot." "Kill me and eat me?" The cow nodded. The turkey removed the mistletoe from the end of his waddle. "Well, golly," he said, "Don't I feel stupid?" Not wanting to spoil anyone's Christmas, the turkey announced that he would be spending the holiday with relatives, "The wild side of the family," he said, "Just flew in last night from Kentucky." When noon arrived and the farmer showed up, he followed him out of the barn without complaint saying, "So long everyone," and "See you in a few days." They all waved goodbye except for the cow, who lowered her head toward her empty trough. She was just thinking that a little extra food might be nice when a horrible thought occurred to her. The rooster was standing in the doorway and she almost trampled him on her way outside shouting, "Wait, come back. Whose name did you draw?" "Say, what?" the turkey said. "I said, whose name did you get? Who's supposed to receive your secret Santa present?" "You'll see," the turkey said, his voice a little song that hung in the air long after he disappeared. David Sedaris. He has a collection of Christmas stories called Holidays on Ice. His most recent book is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Of course, no Christmas extravaganza could be complete without a new Christmas carol. And we have one from writer Sarah Vowell, author of two books of historical essays-- the most recent, Assassination Vacation. And this song is not just about Christmas, it's also about patriotism and supporting our troops, our troops in the Revolutionary War that is. These ones were not far from Philadelphia and-- incredible as it may seem-- there was a time when we would send American soldiers into battle without proper equipment and supplies. The band Marah composed and performed the music. Sarah did the lyrics. [SINGING] If you cracked your teeth on fruitcake and Santa did you wrong, listen up, kids, you'll forget your crummy little Christmas after you hear this song. General, General General George. Valley, Valley, Valley Forge. 'Twas 1777 and the general's name was George. His shoeless, shirtless army starved and froze at Valley Forge. Barefoot marched through the winter woods with the snow like candy canes, but the red and white tracks weren't peppermint sticks, they were blood stains. George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette crooned a "Baby It's Cold Outside," duet. "You're hands are like ice," sang the Marquis to George. That was Christmas at Valley Forge. You can't deck the halls when you have no halls. It's a real blue Christmas when your lips turn blue. The yanks were spared from red coat attack, but alas, not from the flu. And dysentary too. Well, they didn't have blankets and they slept in tents, and it's not a merry Christmas if you long for Lent. Alone in the woods, Washington prayed, "Lord, for heaven sakes, make us free, make us warm, make us Philly cheesesteaks." So if Yuletide fills you with jitters and fear, just recall the brave men in that terrible year. They started out a country, defeated the Brits, and Christmas has been so much better, better ever since. George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette crooned a "Baby It's Cold Outside," duet. "Your hands are like ice," sang the Marquis to George. That was Christmas-- that was Christmas-- that was Christmas at Valley Forge. Marah, performing a song with lyrics by Sarah Vowell. Marah has an album of Christmas songs that does not include this song, but includes all of the other songs you're hearing this hour and many more, called Christmas Kind of Town. And this brings us to our very last story in our Christmas Spectacular-- the inevitable story that we all know so well-- this time retold by Jonathan Goldstein. The thing with pregnant women is that they glow. I know you've heard this, how they walk around like uranium Buddhas, spreading joy and light. But the way my Mary glowed was for real. Mary was like the sunrise. And when she smiled her kind little smile, you had to literally shield your eyes. Another thing about pregnant women-- or at least it's something I've noticed with Mary-- is that they're supremely confident, like their bellies are puffed-out barrel chests and they're looking for a tussle, but a tussle that will end in bear hugs. Because not only are they confident, but they're filled with love. Mary sometimes calls me over while I'm sanding a chair or something and just quietly strokes the side of my face. "You're OK?" she asks. "Of course I'm OK," I say, "I'm the one who should be asking if you're OK." But of course, I know what she's getting at. "How's the holy baby?" Ezekiel-- my foreman at work-- asks me, like 10 times a day. And I have no choice but to bite it. It's either that or be out of a job. Being chosen by the Lord is an honor. I'm not saying it's not. It's flattering to think that your girlfriend is good enough for God. But if the guys at work don't act like it's an honor, and none of your friends or family acts like it's an honor, it stops feeling like an honor. And so you end up just feeling like your everyday, garden variety guy who has been cheated on. Sure, you've been cheated on with the Lord, but still. I should also say that even getting to the point where I believed Mary was an ulcer wrapped in a hernia. She had never lied to me before. And I knew her heart like I knew my own. But when she told me this business about being visited by an angel, I had an honest to God conniption. "Is that the best you can come up with?" I asked. "Don't you have enough respect for me to create something a little less-- I don't know-- completely insane?" She stared through me as though in a dream. My dad used to say that Mary was like a sleepwalker, sleeping while she was eating, while she worked, while you talked to her. I went outside to try and cool off. Sitting on a tree stump, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and there he was, an angel-- the whole bit, wings and everything-- just squatting there. Talk about a lack of stagecraft. I almost went back to chewing on my knuckle skin and ignoring him entirely. "Are you the one?" I asked, not looking at him, "With Mary?" "No," he said softly. "I just came here to tell you that what Mary says is the truth." "This is a lot to digest," I said. The angel withdrew his hand from my shoulder and left me sitting there outside my house, digesting until morning. Even after all that I was still a mess. "What did the angel look like?" I'd ask every so often. "What difference does that make?" she'd say. "I just want to know," I'd say. In the early days, I was all about the little details. What was he wearing? What did he say to you? Was he a handsome angel? What do you mean there was a blinding flash of heavenly light? So it was pretty soon afterwards that I moved on from jealousy to worry. Who was I to be raising an angel baby? What could I teach a baby of any kind? Worry that the baby might not even look like people, that he might be born with wings, or worse, be born with just one wing. The thought of Mary holding a one-winged baby on her lap was just about enough to make me get all weepy and sick to my stomach. If that son-of-a-bitch Ezekiel made even one little crack about my illegitimate, one-winged baby-- job or no job-- I'd strangle him with my bare hands. Now the very last thing I needed in the midst of all this was to load up the mule and take Mary and myself out of town for a census. The Romans were obsessed with counting things. And so everyone had to pack up and be counted in their city of birth, which for Mary and me was Bethlehem. What a sight, the two of us hobbling along on a mule. Did you know that a mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey? It's a hybrid like the way a Pegasus is a hybrid, the offspring of a horse and-- I'm guessing-- an eagle. Now, can you imagine how that Pegasus' horse's mother's horse husband felt when the eagle first swooped down with roses and sweet talk? Do you see what I'm getting at here? I'm just going to stop myself now. When we got to Bethlehem, it was like everyone and their Uncle Nimrod was there. Every place in town was booked. But on the edge of the city we found a little dive. And it was there-- exhausted after a day of refusals-- that I decided I simply wasn't going to take no for an answer. Mary saw how I was getting, the stress vein on my forehead two seconds from bursting. And so she kept telling me how everything was going to be OK. But of course, when you're living half in a dream, frolicking with the angels, you can sleep on a mule, on a daisy, on the head of the pin. Me? I deal with cold, hard reality. And if I can't even get a lousy bed for us, what kind of a job am I going to do for Mary and the kid? A little bearded man greeted us at the door. Right off the bat, he raised his hand blocking me. "No dice," he said. "Listen," I said, putting half my body through the door frame. "You have to have something. I have a pregnant wife here." He looked over my shoulder at Mary on the mule. And he took pity on us. He handed us a blanket and told us that we could say in his stable. A stable. The word was like a gob of spit dripping off my eyelashes. Tears of rage burned my throat. A stable. I've worked my whole life only to have my wife give birth to an angel-baby in a lousy manger. Inside the stable, the animals were completely silent-- not asleep, just quiet. I don't know if you've ever been in a room full of silent animals, but it's eerie and unnatural. I looked at them and they looked back at me. "You know," said Mary in the quiet, "I really feel like things are going to be different somehow, after this baby is born." "That's the way it goes," I said, clumping up some hay for us. "My dad used to say that too. 'After the kids are born' he'd say, 'Nothing is ever the same.'" "I just feel," Mary went on, "That this is a very special kid we've got here." "All mothers feel that way," I said. "I know." "Looking at you in this stable, I could just punch myself in the face," I said. Mary reached out and rubbed the side of my face. She did it like she always did, like an old man. Her hand was cold. "I'm just so happy you're here," she whispered. "I know." I turned over onto my stomach and Mary started in on the knots in my back. As she rubbed, I complained and told her my worries. And as I complained, she laughed. And the sound of Mary's laughter was like angels' wings clapping. And for the first time in a long time, it felt like things were going to be OK. In about three minutes, I'd be asleep. And sometime after that, Mary would be too, her head resting on my back. The thing with me and Mary is that whenever we fall asleep, somehow, in the middle of the night, we end up holding hands. And that night in the stable, when Mary woke in the darkness with a sudden start, like always, our fingers were entwined. And when Mary squeezed my hand, I sprang into action. Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the CBC program WireTap, which we can hear here in the United States on Sirius Satellite Radio, channel 137. Our Christmas Spectacular was produced by Jane Feltes, Diane Cook, and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Sarah Koenig, Chris Sliden Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. 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 Torey Malatia, who hopes that all of the shows that we've done in 10 years, Have made folks forget both the vomit and tears. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week for more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Paul's a cop in New York-- Paul Bacon. Officer Bacon. No jokes, please. And one night he did his regular 4:00 to midnight shift, and then he was told that they needed him to cover a second shift in another part of the city. In a little security booth. In an area they were protecting from terrorists, basically. At 2:00 AM the other officer who's working in this booth with him takes a lunch break. Goes and takes a nap. And then at 3:00 AM it's Paul's turn for a break. He's exhausted. Remember, he had already worked a full shift as a patrolman. And he decides that he's also going to take a nap. So he gets into his patrol car. And he drives it out into this parking lot a little ways away from the security booth. I parked my car in the one available spot thinking, no, this is a parking lot. Nobody's going to be coming by here. It's going to be fine. And so I turned off the ignition and just sat there. And I realized I can't-- I don't think I'm going to be able to fall asleep sitting up. So I got out of the driver's seat, got in back, and closed the door. And I was asleep within seconds. I had set my alarm watch to go off so that I would get up in plenty of time to go back on post so my partner wouldn't worry where I was. And everything would be fine. It would be smooth. But I woke up a few seconds before my alarm with this terrible realization, which is that I was locked in the back. I just-- I was like-- [GASPING] I'm trapped. That was my first thought. Because you don't get out of the back of a police car. The back of the police car is for prisoners. And you know, I never really thought about it, that a police car is really just like a rolling jail cell. That's exactly right. And also, it's hermetically sealed. And remember, it was very cold that night. It was February. And I had closed the grating to the front. And the windows were up, so it was really-- you could just feel there was less oxygen in the air. And also, all the windows were all fogged up, so I could barely see out. And I started to panic. I reached for both of the door handles. Neither of them worked. And so I rolled over on my side, and I pounded against the door as hard as I could with both my feet. And there's just no way out of this car. It's dark. It's cold. But he's only 60 feet away from the security booth where his partner is. And he's right next to a sidewalk. All he needs is for somebody to see him, come over, and lift the door handle from the outside. And he gets lucky. A Pepsi truck parks right on the street right in front of him. He waves frantically at the driver. He pounds on the glass. He can see the driver peering in at him. And then the driver flees. He flees. Who is going to help some maniac trapped in the back of a police car? My next thought was, well, maybe somebody else will come by. And so I wrote-- in the steam on the window I wrote the word "help." And I did it backwards. But then I got to thinking, well, that's not going to be any more convincing. So I wrote-- underneath help I wrote, "I'm a cop." But unfortunately, nobody came by to read my message. His police radio's in the front seat, out of reach. And 3:00 in the morning, exhausted, panicked, it takes him 25 minutes to remember that he is carrying a cell phone-- a cell phone he says he almost never uses. But here's the problem. He's working with an officer that he's never met before in a place he's never been before. He has no idea what the phone number is to that little booth just 60 feet away from his parked car-- that little booth where right now, his partner is expecting him back on post, wondering where he is. His first great idea of the night was to take a nap. Now he had a second great idea. I did what I thought I would never have to do ever in my life. And that is to call 911 as a cop. When the operator came on very shortly, she says, well, don't worry. We'll put this through to your central dispatcher. And she was about to get off the phone with me. And I said, well, wait. There's this very, very important thing to tell the dispatcher. And that is that this needs to go over the radio as a non-emergency. Because any time that a cop requests help and it's not qualified in any way, it sends out the cavalry. Everybody drops everything they're doing and comes very quickly to that location. And that's a dangerous situation, and all because I made this stupid mistake. So I said, please, make sure that you specify it's a non-emergency. I swear, within a minute, lights and sirens coming from all directions. Now, part of the chaos is coming from the fact that Paul wasn't really exactly sure where he was. Remember, this is not his regular precinct, so cops are zooming around, just trying to find him. This seems like way too much commotion even for that. Something has gone very, very wrong. So Paul dials 911 again. They tell him that his call had gone out as a 1013. 1013. Officer down. Like, as if a cop was being beaten, or had just been shot. And that's why everybody was going all over the place. My call had basically woken up the entire midnight squad. Probably half that squad was also sleeping, and now I had gotten everybody's blood going. So my partner up in the booth finally got up and started walking down into the parking lot. And I saw him coming. And I took my flashlight off my belt. And I'm shaking my flashlight like crazy, just to show him that this is not a headlight of some car. This is a person being very creative, and very emphatic about letting you know that this is somebody stuck. And he sees me from about 50 yards away. And he takes his flashlight off and jingles it back at me, and then starts to walk away. He's just thinking I'm having a good time, you know? Like, ha ha ha. He was walking away. So I had to rap really hard on my window again. And I rapped so hard that I cut my knuckles, but he got the point. And he came down to my car, just lifted the door handle. It took him two seconds to let me out. So he's free, and they call off the cavalry. Nobody in his regular precinct ever found out about it. Today on our radio show we bring you stories like this one. Stories that begin with a bright idea-- like, for instance, you're going to park your car 60 feet from your partner, climb in, and take a nap. And then things happen. More than you bargained for, more than you wanted. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week we bring you a bunch of stories organized around a single thought. And this week, that thought is "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time." Our show in four acts today, each of which starts off with great hope and a shiny new idea. Act One, Luck of the Irish. In that act, a bunch of people become very convinced that with one simple purchase, they can change their lives forever. Act Two, Taxation Without Inebriation. In that act, how to make a decision to hire somebody who absolutely, positively is going to do you no good-- and you can tell they're going to do you no good-- and why you may never fire that person. Act Three, Bad Morning America. Davy Rothbart goes onto morning television and does a little experiment on his hosts. Act Four, The Function of the Heart. An 11-year-old girl comes up with a simple scheme on how she can finally get to really know her dad, her dad who is not so keen on being known. Stay with us. Act One, Luck of the Irish. This first story takes place far from the New York police force. This is a very different kind of job, maybe about as different as you can get. Well, I was in Riverdance. But I don't actually dance. I just sing. There's a lead female singer. It must be a terrible thing to be the singer in Riverdance because nobody actually-- it's all about the dancing, right? No, exactly. And every now and then, someone will say something like, it's called Riverdance, not Riversing. Mr. And Mrs. America, please meet Katie Else. Katie was touring with Riverdance, doing eight shows a week, working every day. Any day that they weren't on stage, they would be traveling. 70 people in the company. That's four singers, a band, assorted tech guys and support people, and 40-- yes, 40-- dancers doing that Irish stepdancing thing they do. I don't even know if it's called stepdancing. You know what I'm talking about here? The Michael Flatley-- of course you do, because you've seen television. Anyway, two months into the tour, a time when working every day, they're getting kind of tired with the monotony of working every day. And they needed some excitement. And this idea spread through the company like wildfire. I think it was the idea of the lead dancer and dance captain. He has this ridiculous luck with raffles. We have a raffle every Friday, and he has won it like five times. And he just has ridiculous luck with this. And he just happened to notice, on the internet I guess, that Mega-Millions had gotten up to like $360 million or something like that. So he suggested that we all do a syndicate ticket. It's like you pool your money. So $5 gets five tickets. But everybody has a share in all the tickets. Not to complicate it, right? They're playing the lottery. So the company's physical therapist, who's a guy named Scott, he is the one who organized the whole thing and collected everybody's money. And the reason why it's him is-- OK, if you picture this company of 40 dancers, it's like-- and I hate to bring up this analogy, but honestly it's very, very apt-- the Starship Enterprise. Remember this? I always thought that it was really a little weird that the one job besides actually flying around and exploring space, the one set that they bothered to build on this television show that wasn't actually adventure related, was the doctor's office. I mean of all the things, right? And basically, it's like that with Riverdance. Scott, the physical therapist, has a very big role behind the scenes in Riverdance. Well, his office is like a center for gossip, and people gather there during the show. And how'd the pitch go? Give me the pitch. Well, he didn't-- it was just basically like, everybody's doing this. We want everybody to get involved. Because then our chances will be better, which is kind of a ridiculous thing to say when you're talking about the lottery because your chances are so slim. To be like, one more person. But we figured out the stats. I guess the stats on the Mega-Millions at that point was 1 to 760 trillion. But we figured we had like a 340 to 760 trillion chance, which sounded better than one. Because you guys would buy 340 tickets. Yeah. But did it seem in some way reasonable? I'm sitting here, actually. And you're saying these numbers. And I'm writing out on a piece of paper 760. And I realize like, I don't even know-- wait. Is trillion the next one up from billion? And then I'm writing 340. And then honestly, then you start to cross off a zero and a zero. And then you've got the 34 and the 76 and then a lot of zeros. And it just still seems like there's a lot of zeros there. (LAUGHING) You're still up in the kind of billions, aren't you, to 1? Yeah. I mean the chances are so unreasonable at that point, we just kind of forgot about the stats. I don't even know. I mean it just got unreasonable. We just thought for some reason if we focused all our energy on this, we were going to win it. People even brought up theories of quantum physics and how we're all energy. And if we just focus our energy on winning this lottery, we'll be able to create our own destiny if that makes any sense. It does indeed, yeah. No, because when math fails, what do you have left but sheer faith? Faith, yeah. There'd be dissenters. They would be like, you know, the chances of us winning this-- and we'd be like, no. No, no, no. You're the chink in the chain. We need to focus all our energy on winning the lottery. And then it just became kind of like a group psychology thing, right? Like everybody's holding everybody else up. Yeah. It's kind of bizarre how worked up you can get yourself. And one of the girls even said-- she had been reading Deepak Chopra, or something. And she was like, we can't say we're going to win the lottery. We have to say, we've won the lottery, and then we'll win. How far did this go? They all started planning what they were going to do with the money. Katie, for example, was going to pay off her parents' house. She was going to buy a house for herself. She was going to put a little recording studio in the house for her singing career. And as they came closer to the night of the Mega-Millions drawing, a Tuesday night, it was clear what most of the cast wanted. I have to say it's kind of touching. It tells you so much about them and their lives, what it is that they wanted. See, a lot of the people are quite young in the show. So they're like, I'm quitting Riverdance. I'm going to school. Everybody was quitting. All right. I'm going to stop that tape right there. Can I just say this is such a sad statement about the state of education funding in America that if you're young-- you're young. You're in your 20s. You think, OK, how can I get to college? What might be a good way that I might be able to finance that? What would be a good plan? And the plan that seems reasonable to you-- and not just to you, but to you and several dozen of your peers is "I'm going to play the lotto." Everybody was quitting. But we decided that we would stick out the rest of the tour because it would be a while before-- because at first people were like, this will be our last show. This will be our last show. We realized we wouldn't get the money for a while. And so we decided that we'd stick out the rest of the tour. And then I'll quit after that. Well, that's sporting of you to honor your commitment to Riverdance. Yeah, isn't it? Because we were just going to call our producer the next day and tell him we were done. Well, we also had a plan too, because we had a break a week later of a few days. And he's like, well, I'll just go pick up the money in Georgia during the break. I'll bring somebody else with me. And he's like, first things first, we've got to hire ourselves a lawyer. We had the whole game plan. That's important because, as anybody who's ever been to the movies knows, you have to have a game plan. Because somebody has to go with the physical therapist to Georgia to pick up the money. Or suddenly, you're in a whole Billy Bob Thornton movie where things are going wrong, and people are running off. And you definitely want to avoid that. All right. This brings us to the big night. All right. Let me cue some big event music here. OK. Here we go. All right. It's the big night, Mega-Millions drawing, Tuesday night, a show night for them because every night is a show night. Backstage before the show, they all gather in a big huddle around the dance captain for what basically amounts to the Saint Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. He kind of made this speech and said, we want you to put all your energy into this show. And maybe we can win this thing. You mean while you're dancing, you're dancing-- For the lottery. And you're focusing that dance at those little balls somewhere. Exactly. You're sending that dancey energy through space. Yes, towards winning the lottery. So it was sort of exciting. It was quite exciting. And I mean, we kind of got worked up into a frenzy almost. People were just going insane. There is one point where I actually dance. I dance for about 30 seconds. And we're kind of spinning in this circle in the middle. And usually you're kind of like yip, yoo, woo. But people were screaming. And they were yelling things like, do it for the lotto. Do you think the audience could hear "do it for the lotto?" I really hope not. I mean you can see why they would get so worked up about this. They had been working every day for two months, which actually brings us to one of the difficult things about doing theater, especially a show like Riverdance. You have to find ways to break up the monotony of doing something like that. Because it's not even like you have a role to throw yourself into. And half of what I sing is nonsense anyway. So to have something else to add to the show or spice up the show I think helps a lot. Because otherwise, you can just easily just be going through the motions. That's right. I hadn't thought about that. It's actually a job where you don't get a day off. And every single day, you do exactly the same thing. Yes. And exactly the same thing. It's not like other jobs where you're working a cash register, and it sort of seems like you're doing the same thing. But you're actually talking to different people, and you're doing this and that. But you're actually literally making exactly the same motions around the stage and uttering the same sounds out of your mouth. It's exactly the same every day. Yeah. See, we try to find other ways to try to spice up the show. Like, OK, in this number, you have to do as many random 360-degree turns as you can. Really? Yeah. Or, in this one, you have to do as many head twitches as you can fit in. This is-- I don't know. This is just a universal thing with performing, I guess. I mean I feel like I-- even I, in my limited way, understand this. I, for our radio show, go out, and I visit public radio stations around the country and give these talks about our show in theaters. And years ago, when I first started doing this, the way that they would send me out is I would go out five or six nights in a row, like one city each night. And the thing that I learned is that I am not a good enough performer to say the same thing on stage five or six nights in a row and sound sincere, or even speak with any feeling at all. I have to do them weeks apart. And even then, it's best if I change the speech a little each time. Otherwise, I find myself on stage talking about these things that mean so much to me, about our radio show and what we're trying to do. And I'm on stage, and I'll be talking. And it'll just feel like nothing, like nothing, like-- blah, blah, blah. Like gum that's been chewed for way too long. And this is the thing about doing dance as a job, or any kind of performing-- music, or comedy, or acting. It's like once you turn it into a job, once it's a job, it means that every night, you have to get on stage and take something that means so much to you, that means the world to you, and you have to repeat it until it does not mean anything at all. So if you're somebody like Katie in a big professional touring production, you have to consciously do stuff to keep up your energy when you're on stage. Sometimes if you're on stage, and the dancers are dancing, and I'm not singing, I'll just be talking to people. (LAUGHING) Talking to people. Smoking a cigarette. You get a cell phone call. Excuse me. I have to take this. No. But I know. And I feel bad in the same regard with the audience when we perform. And they think you're giving them all this energy and this amazing performance. And you're really just like, where are we going to go tonight? What are we going to do? Though, on the night of the big Mega-Millions drawing, that was definitely not a problem. The audience was really reacting to the amount of energy that we were putting out. They were going nuts. They'd be breaking out into applause in the middle of numbers. And just the amount of volume coming from the audience, you could just tell. Definitely the best show on tour. So much energy we were giving them, but it was because we wanted to win the lottery. It wasn't because we necessarily wanted to give them a really good show. It's because we were greedy. Was it the actual best night of Riverdance you ever were in? Yeah. At the end of the show, I almost felt like I was on some kind of crazy drug. Because I was like, yes, do it for the lottery. You'd gotten yourself so worked up at that point. At least for me, I've never had so much energy on stage. I'm usually a little bit lethargic and just kind of-- I basically just kind of stroll around, turn my head out to the audience, and sing. So they come off stage. It's 10:15, 10:20, something like that. And it's like they are stoned. They are buzzing. They are totally hyped up. And the lottery's at 11:00. And they gather at the hotel bar. And Scott, the physical therapist, actually went to the trouble to type the numbers of all their lottery tickets out onto a page, which he duplicated and handed copies to everybody. So that's all over the bar. And he also had the original tickets sealed neatly in these little plastic bags in numerical order. Such care. And pretty much everybody was there. We're at a bunch of different tables. And every table has a different computer printout to read over the lottery numbers. So we get the numbers. And we're just poring over these sheets. And we're just getting nothing, nothing, not even anything remotely close. Wow. So then someone's like, I want to see the originals. What if you made a mistake in the computer? So we're going through the originals and collectively-- Yeah. I love the instinct of that, though. The instinct is, this must be wrong. I mean clearly we won. Exactly. There's been some sort of mistake here. He made a mistake. But it wasn't even like there was one that was close. And someone actually brought up-- someone actually posed the idea that maybe Scott had put the numbers in wrong, and we had won the lottery. He had won the lottery and was going to take all the money. Wow. It's amazing how worked up you can get yourself, and especially-- it's like gang mentality-- how worked up you can get each other. And then you just crash. Nobody even hung around, she said. They all went straight to bed. And the next day, they did a lousy show, incredibly low energy. And here's the disturbing thing. The audience loved it. Couldn't tell at all, which either means that A, they are such solid performers and this material, the Riverdance material, is so solid that even on their worst day, they are pretty damn good. Or B-- and this is kind of ugly to say, but I'm just going to say it. When you and I and a lot of people, when we get together in a mass group, and we get together in an audience, and we're sitting in the theater in an audience, we just get stupid. And it doesn't matter if the performers try. Katie actually sees it somewhere in between those two. They're going to see kind of what they want to see. They came wanting to see this thing. They think you're giving them all this energy and this amazing performance. And that's what they're going to see. Which in a way is just people being nice, assuming the performers are doing their best onstage. You know? We want to laugh at the comedian's jokes. We want them to be funny. It's a nice thing. This whole experience raised some very basic questions about performing. And in theory, I guess-- we were talking. We were like, you know, I guess that's how much energy you're supposed to give the audience, ideally, every night. But you can't. Like I couldn't do-- after we lost the lottery, obviously, I turned to one of my friends. And I was like, I don't think I could do another lotto show. I don't think it would be possible. It's just too draining. Because I would think it's more fun to perform if you're more hyped up. You know? It definitely is more fun. It kind of puts performing in perspective because-- I don't know. Maybe some people just get themselves really hyped up and can do that every night. And good for them. But eight shows a week, that's a lot of shows. I don't think I could. One of the conclusions that you all could come to is that, although you were dancing your hardest and trying to direct that energy towards the Powerball, perhaps that isn't really what determines how the Powerball falls. Perhaps. Well, or possibly you weren't dancing quite hard enough. Yeah. Or there was a touring company of Chicago that really danced. Well, I think the people who ended up winning was-- it was another syndicate ticket, but it was nurses. So I don't know what they did. They put as much energy into changing bedpans and putting in IVs as they could. Or saving lives. Or saving lives. One little dance troupe can't compete with that, man. No. They get in there, and they save a couple lives for the lottery. That's some energy. That's true. I bet they saved a life. Damn it. Singer Katie Else. Since doing this interview, she's quit Riverdance. She has an album coming out. Info at katieelse.com. Act Two, Taxation Without Inebriation. So you need help. You're in over your head, and you turn to a professional. Often, that is a good idea. It just depends on who the professional is that you turn to. A couple years ago, Joel Lovell and his wife had financial problems. Tax time was coming around. And for once, he says, they got the bright idea to take appropriate steps. The first time we went to see Len, he spent an hour and a half talking about movies and musicals and the actors he'd had as clients way back when nobody knew their names. "F. Murray Abraham owes me," he said. "I've saved his ass for years." Eventually, my wife Kate cut in and explained that we were pretty worried, that the bulk of our income that year had been untaxed, and that we hadn't paid any quarterly estimates. Kate made most of her living then as an improv actor, and I made most of mine as a freelance writer. And the truth was we'd spent everything we'd earned and more. Len looked at us incredulously. "Can one of you explain to me," he said, "how the hell Ordinary People beats out Raging Bull? Does that make a lick of freaking sense?" It's a little hard to explain now. But at the time, it seemed charming rather than worrisome that our accountant was more concerned about what won best picture in 1980 than about our unpaid taxes. On the subway ride from Len's Manhattan apartment back to Brooklyn, I went on and on about how reassuring it was to take our financial mess to a guy like him. His whole attitude was comforting, I kept saying. Even the fact that he was drunk while we sat there in his office, it helped put things in perspective. When we got home, there were three messages on our answering machine, each one more slurred than the one that had come before it. "It's Len," the first message started. "You kids are screwed. I'll do what I can, but this is a horror show. You should know that." Then a beep and, "It's me, Len. I don't know what the hell we're going to do here." And finally this-- which we had to play over a few times to understand. "Kate, you're a comedienne, for Christ's sake. If you go out to drinks with Steve Martin, you can-- you can write that off. That sort of crap, that's legit." Kate, who had never met Steve Martin, stared at the answering machine for some time. Eventually, she looked up at me and said, "We can't ever go to Len again." The next year, I went to Len again. I know it doesn't make any sense. I knew it even then. But the thing was he saved us a ton of money. And while he did it in a way that was not technically legal, he made it all seem perfectly justified. When I went to pick up our return and paused for a moment over some figures that were utterly fictional, Len scoffed at me. "Look," he said. "They want to screw you. And I'll lie up the "waz" to make sure you don't get screwed. [BLEEP] them. That's how you have to think about these things." It was more than just the money, though. There was something-- I don't know-- kind of cool about having a tax preparer who couldn't have had less regard for the government's rules. Len did the taxes of artists and writers and actors. And the thing he valued about them had nothing to do with their money. At a time when a few of my friends had become suddenly, inexplicably rich, just sitting in Len's shambles of an office, looking at his albums and books, at the paintings and sculptures he'd accepted from clients in lieu of actual payment, it made me feel like I was a part of this creative community. It was about 10:00 in the morning when I saw Len, a week before the filing deadline. And he was chain-smoking Parliaments and drinking scotch from a stainless steel tumbler. His desk was covered with manila folders, dozens of them. They were coffee ringed and cigarette stained, his calculations scratched across them in a tiny, illegible hand. There was a drum kit in the corner of the room piled high with even more folders. And next to Len's desk on a metal cart was a computer that looked like it had just come out of the box. "They told me this freaking program would make it easier," Len said. "But I don't know what the hell." He looked exhausted and distracted. "There's this kid they keep sending over to help me out, but everything he says just confuses me more." He slouched in his chair and rubbed his fists in tight circles around his eyes, then gave his head a little shake. "Ah, crap," he said. "Your old lady's a kick in the pants. She's a funny chick. I'm sorry she's not here." He started to chuckle, but the chuckle turned into a coughing fit. And Len hacked away for a solid half a minute, waving me off with one hand and resting his forehead on the edge of his desk. Eventually, a tremendously thin and wrinkled woman appeared in the door. "You OK, Lenny?" she asked. He lifted his head. "Yeah, good," he said. And the blood began to slowly retreat from his face. The woman handed him a handkerchief. And Len pulled a wad of crumpled bills out of his breast pocket. "Go buy us some steaks," he said. "Wine too if there's anything left over." Then he looked at me and smiled. "My ex," he said, "she's helping me out of a jam here." I nodded and held on to my folder filled with another year's bad news. I said something about how great it was that they could still work together, he and his ex, especially under the gun like this. "Yeah, we've been through it," he said. And then he went on to tell me about how the two of them went on this trip to Puerto Rico years ago, shortly after they were married. "We drank rum drinks and sat around burning our asses off all week. It was great. On the last day, we barely had two nickels to rub together. So this is what we did. We went down to the pool for a few last drinks-- you know, just left all our crap in our room, right? Then caught a cab to the airport and got on the plane with nothing but our towels and sandals." He started laughing again, hard. And I braced myself for another coughing fit, but it didn't come. "Ah, Christ," he said. "Those were good days. You could do stuff like that back then." I just sat there trying to take in what that meant. 30 years ago, you could check into a hotel in Puerto Rico for a week, then not pay and leave all your belongings in your room, then go to the airport in your swim trunks and fly back to New York City? While I considered this, Len pulled himself upright and surveyed the mess on his desk. He let out a long, dramatic sigh and said, "Ah, crap. There's no use putting it off any longer, right? Let's have the mess." I thought of my wife, the funny chick, back home in Brooklyn. She was really tired of us being jackasses about money, and I couldn't believe that she'd look kindly on this scene. "I don't know, Len," I said. "It looks like you have your hands full this year. Why don't I take all this to someone else this time?" "Just give me the freaking folder," Len said. I started to make an excuse. But before I could get anything out of my mouth, Len heaved himself out of his chair and fell across the width of his desk. He grabbed my folder with one of his hands, and I watched his face go crimson. "Come on," he said. "I need this." I let go. Len fell back into his chair with my folder in his hands and closed his eyes. I knew I shouldn't leave it at this. That I needed to stand up, and maybe get a little mean and self-righteous, and tell him to give me my folder, and then walk out of there. But I couldn't. I'd like to believe that it was out of some sort of compassion. That I was looking at a broken man and choosing not to break him further. And maybe that was part of it. But it also had something to do with my own private disgrace at how little money I had and at how badly I managed it. It felt to me like it was just a facet of something larger and more troublesome, an inability to take much of anything very seriously. Without Len, I'd have to show that folder to someone else who'd probably look down on me. Len was less my accountant than the guardian of my shame. And in that respect, I still needed his services. So I said OK, and walked out and waited for the elevator. When it arrived, Len's ex-wife stepped off with their steaks and wine. We smiled at each other, embarrassed. And she said, he'll be better next year. This one's a toughie. Len never called us to sign our return. I assumed he'd filed for an extension. And I called him a few times and left messages trying to find out, though I didn't try very hard. Several months later, we received a letter telling us that Len had died in April, days before the filing deadline. I called the accountant who'd sent the letter. And he told me they had taken over a bunch of Len's clients. Our return had never been filed, he said. My wife and I owed a lot of money. He'd do what he could to explain the circumstances, but there were going to be some fines and penalties to pay. I understood that, right? I thanked him, and hung up, and called the IRS. "I know I should have done something," I found myself admitting to a woman who repeatedly insisted that I and no one else was responsible for my taxes. I know I should have taken care of it differently. And then I thought of the bulk of Len's body on top of his desk, the wad of bills he handed to his ex-wife, the thousands of dollars we owed that we couldn't possibly pay. I imagined that figure circled in marker, sitting on the pile in Len's office after he died. "Can you tell me?" I asked her because I genuinely wanted to know. "Can you tell me how someone else would have handled this?" Joel Lovell, he's no longer a freelancer. Now he's the executive editor at Pineapple Street Media. Coming up, can garbage be a force for justice? That's in a minute on Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Every 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, "Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time," we've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Bad Morning America. But every so often it actually happens-- the idea that seems so good at the time actually is. Kind of. Which brings us to Davy Rothbart's story. Davy's been on our show before. He's the creator of Found Magazine, where he publishes notes and scraps of paper and pictures just kind of randomly discovered by people on the street or wherever. A couple years ago, Davy was promoting a book based on the same material. He was on this book tour that went to 136 cities. And in a lot of these cities, he did the local morning TV shows. This story he's about to tell was recorded in front of a live audience. Some of the names of cities and people have been changed. Early on in the tour, I took these gigs pretty seriously. But by the third week of the trip, I was starting to wonder who exactly, if anyone, was watching the local news at 7:00 AM. Also, while a couple of the hosts of these shows were real cool and genuinely excited about the book, most of them didn't get the whole idea behind it. For some reason, this only increased their chipper-ness. "Those pants are so fun," they'd say, looking me up and down. "Plaid pants. You're fun, huh?" The one thing that kept me excited about these morning TV gigs was getting to meet and hang out with my other fellow guests. These were local chefs with recipes of the week, mayoral candidates, a team of Irish dancers, a kid with an 80-pound pumpkin. On Fox 45's Good Morning Baltimore I did my little song and dance, and then the anchor asked me to stay on her couch while she brought out the next guest, Baltimore's best mom, an 87-year-old woman named Darnelda Cole. She sat next to me on the couch. And on the far side of her sat her 50-year-old son Dice. Darnelda had no idea why she'd been asked to come on TV. They'd plotted this as a surprise. The anchor asked Dice Cole to read the letter he'd written. Darnelda grew weepy. At last, the anchor declared Darnelda Baltimore's Best Mom and produced an oversized plaque from somewhere and presented it to her, at which point Darnelda fell sobbing into my arms. I gave her a wild bear hug, caught up in the moment. A moment later, the anchorwoman joined our embrace. Dice, meanwhile, had lit up a cigarette, which an alarmed producer raced over and doused with a splash of sparkling water. Darnelda took this in and began hollering at her son and whacking him with her new plaque. "Dice, you can't smoke in here. This is TV we're making. Put that damn thing out." There were other high points. And by high points, I mean low points for the stations and their guests. In Cleveland, two city parks employees showed off an injured hawk and falcon they'd rescued. Then the falcon got loose and started flapping about, peeing on everything. The anchors had to forge on through the local news and sports and weather while the falcon continued to dive-bomb them, rationing its urine so it could drip a few drops on them with every sortie. It was [BLEEP] amazing. In Chicago, a young soccer champ demonstrating his fancy moves booted a ball off the wall of the set, knocking it over backwards-- revealing the fact that we were not actually in the host's living room, as it might appear, but in the middle of a big, dank, concrete hangar. In Phoenix, I was sandwiched on air between Cedric the Entertainer and the governor of Arizona. Cedric came on right before me, dropped a couple F-bombs, and then sheepishly left, telling his chaperone, "I didn't mean to say that [BLEEP]. It just came out, I swear to God." I was traveling with my little brother in a van I'd bought off eBay. Often, we would do a Found event in one city, take turns driving all night to the next one, and get to the TV station parking lot around 4:00 AM. I could get a couple hours of sleep before it was time for me to unfold myself, "plomp" inside all rumpled and bleary-eyed, and do my thing for 90 seconds on air. In the wee hours, security guards in the station lots would poke flashlights in our van windows and roust us. And I'd explain that I was going to be a guest on the morning show. And they'd disappear for 20 minutes to check into it, then come back and wake us again to tell us that things had checked out and everything was cool. In Seattle, after a young security guard played this game with us, I asked him if I could come inside to use the john. We ended up talking for a while. His name was Pico. It turned out that the station was moving soon to brand-new, larger digs and that Pico was going to be replaced by an automatic gate with a swipe card. Pico asked why I was going to be on the morning show. And I explained to him the Found book, all notes and letters and photos that folks around the country had found and sent in to us, little scraps that gave a glimpse into the lives of strangers. Pico got excited. He told me that earlier that very same night, he'd been sifting through boxes that were being tossed out before the station's big move. And he'd found a bunch of racy notes written by the morning show's old, dour anchorman to a young camerawoman. Pico and I, we galloped out back to the dumpsters and mucked about until we found the stack of steamy pages. "You should read some of these on the show," Pico cried. I thought this could be a terrible idea. But Pico was vehement. "This guy's a class-A [BLEEP]," he said. "I'm telling you. He got a janitor fired for throwing out his lucky tie that he left on the bathroom floor. She had worked here eight years." Three hours later, we were on the air. And the anchorman was turning to me with a grumpy look. "So tell me about this book. You collect trash, is that it? You like trash, trashy trash? One person's treasures, another's treasure." He might very well have been drunk at 7:15 in the morning. "Yes, sir," I said. "People are finding this stuff all over the country, all over the world really, and sending it in to us. It's amazing how powerfully you can get a sense of someone just from a little ripped piece of paper you pick up off the grass-- like this one, for example. Seems like it's a guy who's trying to woo a girl by describing what he'd like to do with her breasts." I held his note up high and read it out loud. "Stacy, you've got a rack on you. Now that's a pair. I will [BLEEP] and [BLEEP] on them. Quit playing hard to get." What an expression that fellow had on his face. For a moment, his mouth, his nostrils, his eyes, and each eyebrow seemed to burst with separate looks of stunned confusion, outrage, remorse, and panic. Then, in an instant, he recovered-- a true professional. And he asked me, "So did you bring any other kinds of notes?" I had to admit, Pico was right-- great idea. Back in the lobby, Pico stood with two janitors by a big TV set. And as I walked out into the bright, blurry morning sun, they applauded and whistled and called after me, "Good job, man. Good job." Davy Rothbart, he's the creator of Found Magazine. And he writes essays and books. You can find his work at myheartisanidiotbook.com. Act Four, Function of the Heart. When you're a kid and you're frustrated with something in your life, your strategies are kind of limited for how you can fix what's wrong. When Elspeth was a kid, she saw an opening. She got an idea. And she got results. She definitely got results. Mainly, she wanted to get closer to her dad, who was a doctor. She says what she knew about him already was mostly, well, he worked in a hospital with a lot of old men. It was always a relationship where I was always just desperate for attention and for knowledge of him. I wanted to know what he was like, what he did, what he was interested in. And he was extremely un-forthcoming on every front. So I would ask him things like, where are you going? And he would say, out. And I would say, out where? And he would say, just out. And it would turn into that kind of incredibly frustrating word game, which he would-- he would sort of treat it as though this was playful fun. And I just remember by the end of it, I was just enraged. Was he actually around? Like would he be home at night? Yeah. He was home. But it was important to him to have quiet. So when he'd come home, he would want quiet. And of course we were-- we would scream with enthusiasm that he would be there. And he would be clearly kind of affronted with all the noise. So I was 11 sort of at the height of, I would say, desperation to get something from him. And this was a thing that was set up by the Unitarian Church. Parents would come in, and they would teach a little class in their specialty. And so my dad had volunteered. Being a doctor, he was going to give a class on the function of the heart. It was going to be on the function of the heart. And so I, of course, decided I was going to sign up for my dad's course. Because I really wanted to finally figure out what he did. So one of my good friends, Ruthie, also signed up. So there were the two of us. And so he had gone out, and he had bought this at a butcher-- he'd gone to a butcher and brought this massive, raw, bloody cow heart in to demonstrate the function of the heart. So the class begins and you see this bloody heart. And automatically, are you horrified to start because you thought it would be something else? Oh, no, no. I was quite riveted. No, very cool-looking, and actually genuinely interested in the topic as well. And so he had sliced open the heart, and he opened it up. And we went through the various functions of the heart. And then he would ask questions. And there are two of us in the class. And even so, I raised my hand every time. And I don't just raise my hand. I raise my hand like, uh, uh, uh. "It's me. I know the answer. I have this. This is the question. This is the question." Yeah. And then he would pause. And Ruth would be sitting there quite quietly, and then he would ask what my question would be. And then I would ask the question. And then he would explain and go into a long, long explanation. And he's a very quiet man. He's a very, very quiet person, not used to speaking. So the explanations would go on for quite some time. And then he would ask another question. And I would again raise my hand-- and not just raise it, but pump it. I would pump my arm. And so the whole class was just me dominating the classroom over Ruthie, my very dear friend who was the soul of discretion throughout-- very subtle, kind of acute reading of the room dynamic, I would say, for an 11-year-old. Stayed right out of it. And that was the class. And after that class, I felt great. I loved it. I felt like I'd had this great class with my dad. That he saw your smart questions, and that he actually answered your questions, and gave you the attention. That's right. And that I finally had some evidence about what it was that he actually did. It was a great moment. And I felt afterwards like I'd really kind of finally connected with my dad. Just the poetry of it, of you in this classroom, this formal setting, with your dad-- and your best friend there for protection, basically-- and a bloody heart cut open, sitting there in between you. No. It's quite the tableau, yeah. But then, a couple of days later, my mother took me aside. And she sort of raised the issue about how important it was to be a quiet person. You don't want to be the loud person. This was the message. You don't want to be the loud person. You want to be the quiet person. And by the time she's saying that, I know exactly what she's telling me. I had offended the sensibilities of my father, who would prefer that I was like Ruthie, the quiet person in the classroom. So here I thought that I was doing the right thing. And then what I learned, after the fact, was that I had been loud and vulgar somehow and that I should have just shut up and been the quiet person. So you must've been completely mortified. I felt like a fool, I think, afterwards in some sense, that I had been so deluded, that I had gotten it so profoundly wrong. And so was it helpful that your mom gave you this information? Or was it not so helpful in retrospect? It was helpful, but not in the sense that it was intended to be helpful. What my mother was telling me was to become quiet. And I just never did. And so that advice was not helpful. But knowing that I should be quiet was helpful. Because I knew that my dad was wrong. And I knew-- I knew-- that my behavior was completely acceptable and, in fact, was a good thing. And that was a moment when I realized, I have to kind of strategize around this relationship in a way that a child shouldn't have to. I've got to be more crafty about this in order to get through this childhood thing. I mean it's funny because the thing you're describing is this moment of a kid understanding that their parents really don't have it together all the time and are doing the wrong thing. And everybody has gone through that moment with their parents at some point. And in a way, that's an amazing thing to have happen at 11. Yeah. And I did finally get to the point where I accepted the fact that I'm never going to be the quiet person. I'm always going to be an enthusiastic person who, if I have a great question, I will pump my arm. And I will continue to offend him for the duration. And then, of course, I took up the trumpet, which is the world's loudest, most vulgar instrument-- at 11, now that I think of it. So very shortly after this, I took up the trumpet. I thought, what is the loudest possible instrument I could choose? So yeah, no, I went right for the trumpet. Elspeth Carruthers, she's executive director for the Neubauer Collegium for Society and Culture at the University of Chicago. Since we first broadcast this story, Elspeth's dad has died. He was 83. Our program was produced today by Amy O'Leary and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Chris Swetala, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help from Alvin Melathe and Matt Tierney. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Paul Bacon, the policeman who I talked to at the beginning of the program, is no longer a policeman. He's written a book about his experience as a cop. It's called Bad Cop, New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All. Information at paulbacon.com. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Special thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who swears that thing he said to me about the way I look in the new shirt I bought-- he swears it's all a misunderstanding. "I didn't mean to say that [BLEEP]. It just came out, I swear to God." I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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